ETC Blog

I am still in the Bella Centre, still tracking technology negotiations.  That means I have a magical “secondary pass” unlike thousands of other NGOs who cannot get into the building today. Technology is supposed to be the “easy issue”, on which there will possibly be an agreement, evoked by both the Danish Presidency and the [...]

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So much has happened in the past three days it is has been impossible to blog.  We have been trying to lobby for precaution and assessment on technology, trying to talk to the press about our issues, attending side events, organizing our own workshops, meeting old and new friends and allies and basically working from [...]

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Written for The Ecologist – 20/06/2008 As to global annihilation, I’m stumped. Most of us wouldn’t recognise a strangelet if it casually devoured us in the street There’s a slim chance – about one in 50 million – that nobody will ever read this article. A physics experiment taking place under the French-Swiss border could [...]

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Biofuels fuel global food crisis Toronto Star/star.com July 08, 2008 PAT MOONEY As G8 leaders meet this week in Japan, their ears will still be ringing from the bombshell dropped last week in a leaked World Bank report declaring that biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 per cent, far higher than previously [...]

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‘The cool’ and ‘the concerned’ – that was how Zurich-based ethicist Nicola Biller Andorno today aptly characterised the two tribes attending Synthetic Biology 3.0…The cool, in her lexicon, are the synthusiasts, those who regard making synthetic life forms as…like…hey dude, that’s like, so cool. The concerned, roughly speaking, is made up of people like us [...]

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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 [...]

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On October 10, ETC Group attended the US Food and Drug Administration’s first public meeting on nanotechnology. About 40 people had signed up to make presentations, and we were each given eight minutes to say our piece to the FDA’s newly-formed Nanotechnology Task Force. (You can read the text of ETC Group’s presentation here.) It [...]

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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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Lucy Sharratt – At 9:30 pm in Brazil, the 8th Conference of the Parties confirmed its decision on Terminator. It is now official. We see a moratorium on Terminator that is now strengthened. There is caution, however, as we celebrate since we know that corporations are still developing Terminator, that industry will not stop pursuing [...]

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The protests of Via Campesina and Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra – MST) have been critical to the outcomes of this meeting. The protests continue this morning as 6000 peasant farmers are outside greeting buses of delegates as they come in. The protests have been so important in maintaining momentum and reminding delegates [...]

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