Today has been quiet - except for the beeper going off every few hours early this morning. I hate that - especially when they aren't for me.

I began doing the research about the terminator seed technology. It's amazing what I found in the articles I downloaded off the net - one of the holders of patent #5723765 on this technology it calls 'Control of Plant Gene Expression' is the U.S.D.A. The other holder of the patent, Delta and Pine Land Company - the largest cotton company in the world, was bought out by Monsanto (one of the largest pesti-/ fungi - cide manufacturers - including Roundup). Monsanto went on to acquire several other companies in which gave them an 85% share of the US cotton seed markets and 25-35% in the corn.

Right now, only two crops have been engineered with the 'terminator' technology - cotton and tobacco. What this technology does is this: it switches on the plant's reproductive drive just long enough to produce seeds and turns it off just before those seeds are made viable. What you're left with are a bunch of sterile seeds that are, for all intents and purposes, useless. The worst part of all this (or at least one of the worst parts) is the fact that this technology seems to be aimed at the third world countries - the very people who could not be essentially controlled because they have practiced seed collection and plant breeding for thousands of years in order to feed themselves and their neighbors. I found one reference that says that as much as half the world's farmers are too poor to buy commercial seed every year and this percentage feeds 20% of the world's population. Catherine Bertini (Ex. Dir. of the World Food Program) was quoted as saying at the Beijing Women's Conference, "Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize."

What is this world coming to???

The another scary thing about all this is that this technology is patented to apply to all plants of all species...and they don't know if the pollen from the bioengineered plants will 'bleed' into other non-engineered crops and cause severe yield losses. Does this sound like sound farming practices?? It doesn't to me. It sounds like half-assed science done by people who never should have had access to the chemistry set.