Imagine it's 3am and you hear a
rustling in your backyard garden. You look out to see shadowy figures rooting
around. You wake the next morning in a cold sweat, thinking it was only a bad
dream, to find a letter pushed through your mail slot. It reads: “Dear Occupant:
We suspect that you have been growing Monsanto's Roundup Ready® canola. To avoid legal action,
send us $1000 and tell no one about this, especially not the media. If you do
not send us $1000, we will sue you for $20,000 in damages.”


From Canada to Iraq, Saving Seeds is Under
Attack
The above letter is fiction, but according to Percy Schmeiser -
a Canadian farmer who was sued by Monsanto - this is exactly the type of letter
Monsanto has been sending to farmers, as a means of intimidation. As for the
rustling in your backyard garden, farmers in the prairies call them the Gene
Police. They are former RCMP officers, now working on private contracts for
Monsanto. As Schmeiser puts it, their role it to harrass, intimidate,
investigate, and create a culture of fear.
Why such heavy-handed tactics? It's simple. Monsanto currently
controls 91% of the global GMO seed stock, but they want to control 100% of the
food supply. These issues, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. The
biotechnology of genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) is a stepping stone on the path to nanotechnology. While
biotech manipulates matter at the molecular level, nanotech seeks to control
matter at the atomic level. Proponents argue unprecedented and world-changing
benefits will arise from this new technology, and perhaps that is the case. But
the question we need to ask is this: by whom and for whom is this technology
being developed?
Percy Schmeiser was in Toronto on Friday May 13, 2005 at a
public forum talking about his legal battle with Monsanto, which made its way to
the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004. ACT for the Earth organized the event to
launch a Nano-Justice campaign focussed
on the convergence of GMOs and nanotechnology. ACT for the Earth is calling on
governments and corporations involved in biotech and nanotech to heed the
precautionary principle and uphold the safety of our ecosystems, human health,
and the food supply.
Corporate Control: for Whom the Cell
Tolls
Schmeiser stresses that “there's a lot more advancement in
nanotechnology... than really people realize. The driving force is more
control.” Nanotech covers a broad range of technologies, but one of the
varieties that has many people concerned is the advent of assemblers.

K. Eric
Drexler was one of the first people to seriously look at the social,
economic and ecological consequences of nanotechnology in his book Engines Of Creation: The Coming
Era of Nanotechnology. Drexler calculated that assemblers - self-replicating
nano-machines - could consume the entire surface of the Earth if they got out of
control. More ominously, he anticipated that this dire scenario could happen in
a matter of days.
Nanotechnology is currently at the same stage biotechnology and
GMOs were 10 years ago. And while nanotech is advancing much more rapidly,
so too is the resistance to it. It is marching forward due to large
government subsidies in nanotech initiatives, with no public input. As was the
case with biotech 10 years ago, there is now an urgent need for society to
debate the worth of nanotechnology. It is already clear from the corporate
record on biotech, that such technologies are prone to abuse. According to
Schmeiser, it is only a matter of time until we understand the long-term effects
of biotechnology and nanotechnology on “the environment, indigenous plants,
seeds, and what about human health?”
Schmeiser notes that “if you would ask our [Members of
Parliament] that 90% wouldn't even know what nanotechnology is... I make that
statement based on different meetings that I've gone to where that topic has
come up.” It is time we made nanotech a political issue. If more people knew
what was going on in our names, with our tax dollars, there would be outrage.

Sponsoring Suicide
Seeds and Biopiracy
There's a lot of talk
about sponsorship scandals these days, and rightly so. But there are some
important sponsorship scandals that aren't being talked about. Through the
Canada Pension Plan the Canadian Government is funding military corporations
that are profiting from so called "Missile Defence" and the War in Iraq, such as
Lockheed-Martin, SNC Lavalin, and Halliburton. The Canada Pension Plan is also
funding Monsanto and it's activities to the tune of over $4 million. The Canada
Pension Plan has also embarked on a high profile nanotech "investment"
venture. It is time we all stood up to the backdoor funding of Star Wars,
the War on Iraq, as well as attempts to control our food supply and matter
itself. By demanding
peaceful pensions, we can help to end the "war on terror" as well as the war
on terra.
Order 81 in Iraq, issued by Paul Bremer before the “handover”,
made saving seeds effectively illegal. The purpose of this has been to pave the
way for seed privatization. With the Canadian Seed Sector Review (SSR),
self-described as “an industry led, industry wide assessment of the seed
sector”, anti-seed saving legislation could soon become a reality in Canada as
well, if we don't act quickly. The SSR is, not coincidentally, funded by the
Canadian government. The same government, which has recently taken on the role
of leading
global advocate for terminator seeds. The same government which nearly
prevented Dr.
Tewolde Egziabher, one of the world's leading advocates of biosafety,
from entering Canada by witholding his Visa until the very last moment. While
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which recently engaged in consultations on
the Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR) Act, has said seed saving is not threatened, many
Canadian farmers remain skeptical. So should we
all.
Schmeiser cautions that “when the
terminator gene is installed in the seed, and when the seed is planted, it will
produce a plant where the seed from this plant is not fertile (will not
germinate). The danger of the terminator gene is that in pollination stage it
can cross-pollinate with other plants, especially close cousins, and make these
also sterile.”
Assemblers: a
New Threat, a New Resistance
What we are witnessing is a new
global tapestry of invasion, which threads events in Iraq and Canada into a
common fabric. It is crucial that we pay attention to the technologies and
politics behind the curtain. Seed supplies in both countries are under attack.
There are those who want to patent matter from cells all the way down to basic
molecules, to enhance corporate control, not just of life, but reality itself.
The problem is there is a fertile resistance bent on such radical ambitions as
biosafety and human survival.
The ETC Group
has pointed out that the "Canadian government has proposed that nanotechnology
be discussed at the G8 meeting in July in Scotland". ACT for the Earth will be there with
many others to help put Nano-Justice on the people's agenda. This is one genie
that we can still put back in the bottle.

Dylan Penner
is Executive Director of ACT for the Earth, which organized Percy Schmeiser's
May 13, 2005 speaking engagement in Toronto, Ontario.

Further Reading and
Action
SEED
SECTOR REVIEW: Undermining farmers’ rights to their seedBiodemocracy 2005 ProtestsResisting GMOs in
Africa