Thursday, March 30th, 2006
by Lucy Sharratt – Today Terminator was discussed again at COP8 – and the moratorium still holds! No country dared to challenge the consensus of last week. Some governments made slight changes to a specific part of the text but this did not relate to the moratorium – it was just enough to make us [...]
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
by Lucy Sharratt – The debate over Terminator came and went in a flash. Well, sort of. The flash followed a week of intensive protest and lobbying – after 8 years of consistent pressure and the most recent pressure of the Ban Terminator Campaign. However, there is another week left to the UN meeting and [...]
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
by Lucy Sharratt – Discussions on Terminator at the UN COP started this afternoon – actually they started this morning as governments kept intervening to make statements on Terminator, even though the discussions were on another agenda item. With a Chair who demonstrated great understanding and facilitation skills yesterday when he recognized and thanked the [...]
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
So today is the day that Terminator is expected to come up in the Working Group and expectation and rumour is running high. Over 150 people are wandering around the conference room wearing distinctive white T-shirts which declare that suicide seeds are homicide seeds , there are posters and stickers, flags and placards – the [...]
Tuesday, March 21st, 2006
As buses of delegates arrived this morning for day 2 of COP8 they were met by hundreds of protesting (and dancing) farmers, peasants, Indigenous People’s and NGO’s twirling flags, giving speeches, chanting and rallying against Terminator Technology – many of them organised through Via Campesina – the global movement of peasants. Banners with images of [...]
Monday, March 20th, 2006
The Eighth Conference Of the Parties (COP8) to the Convention on Biological Diversity opened today, here in Curitiba Brazil, with an indigenous ceremony to Mother Earth, tupthumping speeches and around 3000 delegates frenetically pacing the corridors jostling and negotiating. Last night, on the eve of the COP, those same 3000 delegates were treated to a [...]
Monday, February 6th, 2006
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.
Thursday, January 19th, 2006
Some of us at ETC have just spent the past three days in a drafting group for the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation’s inspiring What Next? project. Hopefully we will write more about What Next? as it gets closer to completion. Briefly the What Next? project its an attempt to stop, reflect and look forward to the [...]
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
Welcome to our ETC Blog – an occassional space for analysis, links and flagging up some of the more interesting stuff that ETC staff are reading, writing and thinking about on a day to day basis.
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(et cet er a) and other things; such as human rights, biodiversity, biopiracy, converging technologies, global governance and corporate concentration. An experimental growing plot for news, views and new ideas.
