ETC Blog

The biotech industry claims that the global area devoted to GM crops in 2005 was 90 million hectares - or 222 million acres. ETC Group does not endorse or agree with the validity of annual statistics on GM crops compiled by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

We agree with civil society critics who charge that ISAAA’s statistics are inflated and unreliable. However, even using industry-generated statistics, the biotech countdown is revealing. Here are the “vital statistics”:

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In this article the author makes a very enlightening summary of corporate concentration during 2006, and how this affects our lives as simple citizens even though we think it’s something happening far away…
by Silvia Ribeiro
Corporate concentration through global mergers and acquisitions reached a record at the close of 2006. In our daily life this [...]

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Nano-Drug’s Dirty Little Secret
ETC Group’s September 2006 report on nanomedicine, Nanotech Rx, requires some updating. After all, it’s nearly 30 days old. Our report mentions the nano-drug Abraxane, and it acknowledges that approval of the cancer drug was a watershed event for the nanotech industry. But important details are emerging. On October 1 the [...]

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The Economist this week has a Special Report on Synthetic Biology , the new field of building artificial life forms from scratch. As is to be expected from the Economist, this is a fairly upbeat assesment of the technology that fails to mention the growing opposition to Synthetic Biology, signalled a few months ago when almost forty civil society groups, trade unions and scientific associations signed an open letter calling for caution.

Here at ETC we have been busy writing our own special report on Synthetic Biology (which we are calling ‘Extreme Genetic Engineering’ - watch this space!). You can expect it to be a bit more critical than the Economist.

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Ventria, a California biotech company, is growing rice that is genetically engineered to produce two pharmaceutical compounds derived from human genes. It was revealed in May that the company had tested its controversial “pharmed” compounds on 140 patients at a pediatric hospital in Peru. The article below by Silvia Ribeiro appeared in the July 1 edition of Mexico’s “La Jornada.”

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While some ETC Group staff were in Caracas strategizing with partners to strengthen the global opposition to Terminator, others of us were subjected to the slog of the CBD meeting in Granada. And one of us was spending a few days with unlimited access to free chocolate at Swiss Re’s opulent Centre for Global Dialogue near Zurich. Swiss Re, the world’s largest re-insurer (an insurer of insurance companies) is concerned - no surprise - about those risks associated with nanotechnology that may result in financial losses for the company.

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In an article appearing in this month’s issue of Nature Biotechnology, Dr. Henry I. Miller declares that activism against the pharmaceutical industry is driven by Paranoia and overlooks Pharmas systemic ills.

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