Less than a year ago, the Delta and Pine Land Company, a U.S. cotton seed firm, announced it had received a joint patent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on a technique that genetically disables the capacity for plants to produce seeds that will germinate.
Since the announcement, critics have been predicting that the technology will be used to control the country's food supply. Not only that, they say, but in a worst-case scenario, the technology could be used as a weapon to control elements of the population who may resist such concepts as world government.
The terminator technology incorporates a method of biogenetic engineering that turns off the reproductive processes of plants so that the seed produced by the plant is sterile. Farmers who use this seed would not be able to collect seed from their own crop for the following year's planting, and would be forced to buy new seed every season.
So far, the method has only proven effective for tobacco and cotton. However, the patent covers all crops, and Delta is planning to develop the technology for a much broader range of crops after the year 2000.
Michael T. Seigel, SVD, writing for a Rome-based Catholic theologian group, is worried about the economic impact the technology will have on both domestic and Third World farmers if they are forced to purchase new seed annually. In the Third World, he said, "poor farmers grow 15 percent to 20 percent of the world's food, and they directly feed at least 1.4 billion people--100 million in Latin America, 300 million in Africa, and 1 billion in Asia. These farmers continue to produce food in this way, saving the seed from their best plants every year to plant the following season."
"The sole purpose of this 'terminator' technology is market control," he wrote. "It adds nothing of value to the seed. Its sole purpose is to make farmers ever more dependent on the seed companies. In fact, it is a biological form of built-in obsolescence."
Clearly, some have contemplated the kind of power that could be wielded with the total control of a society's food source. Bertrand Russell described how food could be used to control entire populations in his 1953 book, The Impact of Science on Society. He wrote, "A scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government…. This authority should deal out the world's food to the various nations in proportion to their population at the time of the establishment of the authority. If any nation subsequently increased its population, it should not on that account receive any more food."