Articles

Farmers’ Rights and Food Sovereignty Under Fire

Submitted on 02 October 2015

At a time when just three corporations – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control 55% of the world’s commercial seeds, industrial farming interests in the Brazilian Congress have introduced a bill that aims to overturn the country’s 10-year old ban on Terminator technology – seeds that have been genetically modified to render sterile seeds. The technology is designed to secure corporate profits by eliminating the age-old right of farmers to save and re-plant harvested seeds.

If passed, the bill before the Brazilian Congress – PL 1117/2015 – would violate an international moratorium on the field testing and commercialization of Terminator seeds – unanimously adopted in 2000, and re-affirmed in 2006 by 192 governments at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Curitiba, Brazil.

For nearly two decades, the controversial Terminator technology has been widely condemned by farmers, scientific bodies, governments and social movements/civil society as a threat to food sovereignty, biodiversity and human rights. In May, Pope Francis wrote of the threat posed by “infertile seeds.”