Svalbard Global Seed Vault and Very Dangerous Liasons

“Doomsday Seed Vault” in the Arctic

Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don’t

by F. William Engdahl

In 2006 when most people in such a situation might think of retiring to a quiet Pacific island, Bill Gates decided to devote his energies to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest ‘transparent’ private foundation as it says, with a whopping $34.6 billion endowment and a legal necessity to spend $1.5 billion a year on charitable projects around the world to maintain its tax free charitable status. A gift from friend and business associate, mega-investor Warren Buffett in 2006, of some $30 billion worth of shares in Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway put the Gates’ foundation into the league where it spends almost the amount of the entire annual budget of the United Nations’ World Health Organization.
So when Bill Gates decides through the Gates Foundation to invest some $30 million of their hard earned money in a project, it is worth looking at.
No project is more interesting at the moment than a curious project in one of the world’s most remote spots, Svalbard. Bill Gates is investing millions in a seed bank on the Barents Sea near the Arctic Ocean, some 1,100 kilometers from the North Pole. Svalbard is a barren piece of rock claimed by Norway and ceded in 1925 by international treaty (see map).
On this God-forsaken island Bill Gates is investing tens of his millions along with the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto Corporation, Syngenta Foundation and the Government of Norway, among others, in what is called the ‘doomsday seed bank.’ Officially the project is named the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, part of the Svalbard island group.
The seed bank is being built inside a mountain on Spitsbergen Island near the small village of Longyearbyen. It’s almost ready for ‘business’ according to their releases. The bank will have dual blast-proof doors with motion sensors, two airlocks, and walls of steel-reinforced concrete one meter thick. It will contain up to three million different varieties of seeds from the entire world, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future,’ according to the Norwegian government. Seeds will be specially wrapped to exclude moisture. There will be no full-time staff, but the vault’s relative inaccessibility will facilitate monitoring any possible human activity.
Did we miss something here? Their press release stated, ‘so that crop diversity can be conserved for the future.’ What future do the seed bank’s sponsors foresee, that would threaten the global availability of current seeds, almost all of which are already well protected in designated seed banks around the world?
Anytime Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Monsanto and Syngenta get together on a common project, it’s worth digging a bit deeper behind the rocks on Spitsbergen. When we do we find some fascinating things.
The first notable point is who is sponsoring the doomsday seed vault. Here joining the Norwegians are, as noted, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; the US agribusiness giant DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest owners of patented genetically-modified (GMO) plant seeds and related agrichemicals; Syngenta, the Swiss-based major GMO seed and agrichemicals company through its Syngenta Foundation; the Rockefeller Foundation, the private group who created the “gene revolution with over $100 million of seed money since the 1970’s; CGIAR, the global network created by the Rockefeller Foundation to promote its ideal of genetic purity through agriculture change.
We can legitimately ask why Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation along with the major genetic engineering agribusiness giants such as DuPont and Syngenta, along with CGIAR are building the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic.
Who uses such a seed bank in the first place? Plant breeders and researchers are the major users of gene banks. Today’s largest plant breeders are Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and Dow Chemical, the global plant-patenting GMO giants. Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called ‘Terminator’ or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits ‘suicide’ after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed.
This clever genetically engineered terminator trait forces farmers to return every year to Monsanto or other GMO seed suppliers to get new seeds for rice, soybeans, corn, wheat whatever major crops they need to feed their population. If broadly introduced around the world, it could within perhaps a decade or so make the world’s majority of food producers new feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed companies such as Monsanto or DuPont or Dow Chemical.
That, of course, could also open the door to have those private companies, perhaps under orders from their host government, Washington, deny seeds to one or another developing country whose politics happened to go against Washington’s. Those who say ‘It can’t happen here’ should look more closely at current global events. The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvest gains real, which they manifestly are not.
These private companies, Monsanto, DuPont, Dow Chemical hardly have an unsullied record in terms of stewardship of human life. They developed and proliferated such innovations as dioxin, PCBs, Agent Orange. They covered up for decades clear evidence of carcinogenic and other severe human health consequences of use of the toxic chemicals. They have buried serious scientific reports that the world’s most widespread herbicide, glyphosate, the essential ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that is tied to purchase of most Monsanto genetically engineered seeds, is toxic when it seeps into drinking water.9 Denmark banned glyphosate in 2003 when it confirmed it has contaminated the country’s groundwater.10
The diversity stored in seed gene banks is the raw material for plant breeding and for a great deal of basic biological research. Several hundred thousand samples are distributed annually for such purposes. The UN’s FAO lists some 1400 seed banks around the world, the largest being held by the United States Government. Other large banks are held by China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Germany and Canada in descending order of size. In addition, CGIAR operates a chain of seed banks in select centers around the world.
CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault will have a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.
Now we come to the heart of the danger and the potential for misuse inherent in the Svalbard project of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation. Can the development of patented seeds for most of the world’s major sustenance crops such as rice, corn, wheat, and feed grains such as soybeans ultimately be used in a horrible form of biological warfare?
The explicit aim of the eugenics lobby funded by wealthy elite families such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman and others since the 1920’s, has embodied what they termed ‘negative eugenics,’ the systematic killing off of undesired bloodlines. Margaret Sanger, a rapid eugenicist, the founder of Planned Parenthood International and an intimate of the Rockefeller family, created something called The Negro Project in 1939, based in Harlem, which as she confided in a letter to a friend, was all about the fact that, as she put it, ‘we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ 11
A small California biotech company, Epicyte, in 2001 announced the development of genetically engineered corn which contained a spermicide which made the semen of men who ate it sterile. At the time Epicyte had a joint venture agreement to spread its technology with DuPont and Syngenta, two of the sponsors of the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault. Epicyte was since acquired by a North Carolina biotech company. Astonishing to learn was that Epicyte had developed its spermicidal GMO corn with research funds from the US Department of Agriculture, the same USDA which, despite worldwide opposition, continued to finance the development of Terminator technology, now held by Monsanto.
In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally liable to step on rusty nails as women.
Because of that curious anomaly, Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO only to women of child-bearing age contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.
It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine. 12
Is it a coincidence that these same organizations, from Norway to the Rockefeller Foundation to the World Bank are also involved in the Svalbard seed bank project? According to Prof. Francis Boyle who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by the US Congress, the Pentagon is ‘now gearing up to fight and win biological warfare’ as part of two Bush national strategy directives adopted, he notes, ‘without public knowledge and review’ in 2002. Boyle adds that in 2001-2004 alone the US Federal Government spent $14.5 billion for civilian bio-warfare-related work, a staggering sum.
Rutgers University biologist Richard Ebright estimates that over 300 scientific institutions and some 12,000 individuals in the USA today have access to pathogens suitable for biowarfare. Alone there are 497 US Government NIH grants for research into infectious diseases with biowarfare potential. Of course this is being justified under the rubric of defending against possible terror attack as so much is today.
Many of the US Government dollars spent on biowarfare research involve genetic engineering. MIT biology professor Jonathan King says that the ‘growing bio-terror programs represent a significant emerging danger to our own population.’ King adds, ‘while such programs are always called defensive, with biological weapons, defensive and offensive programs overlap almost completely.

You owe it to yourself to read this entire article at www.globalresearch.ca

Indigenous Struggle to Protect Biodiversity

AS FALL TEMPERATURES CHANGE on the White Earth Reservation and the
mist lifts off the lakes, the Ojibwe take to the waters. Two people to a canoe, one poles through the thick rice beds, pushing the canoe forward, while the other, sitting toward the front of the boat, uses two long sticks to gently bend the rice and knock the seeds into the canoe. The sounds of manoominike, the wild rice harvest, are the gliding of the boat through the water and across shafts of rice, the soft swish of the rice bending, the raining
of the rice into the canoe. They are soothing sounds, reminding my people of the continuity between the generations. We have been harvesting rice here for centuries.

Each year, my family and I join hundreds of other harvesters who return daily with hundreds of pounds of rice from the region’s lakes and rivers. We call it the Wild Rice Moon, Manoominike Giizis. On White Earth, Leech Lake, Nett Lake, and other Ojibwe reservations in the Great Lakes region, it is a time when people harvest a food to feed their bellies and to sell for zhooniyaash, or cash, to meet basic expenses. But it is also a time to feed the soul.
FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES AWAY, in Woodland, California, a company called
Nor-Cal has received a patent on wild rice. Conceptually, it seems almost impossible—patenting something called wild rice. The Ojibwe now find themselves at the center of an international battle over who owns lifeforms, foods, and medicines that have throughout history been the collective property of indigenous peoples.An estimated 90 percent of the world’s biodiversity lies within the territories of indigenous peoples, whether the Amazon, the Indian subcontinent, or the North Woods. A new form of colonialism, known as biocolonialism, is reaching deep into the heart of these communities.As Stephanie Howard wrote for the Indigenous People’s Council on Biocolonialism, “The flow of genes is primarily from indigenouscommunities and rural communities in ‘developing countries’ to the Northern-based genetics industry. Ninety-seven percent of all patents are held by industrialized countries.”
In 1994, for example, two researchers at the University of Colorado were able to secure a patent on quinoa, much to the surprise of native farmers in the Andean region of Bolivia and Ecuador who had been cultivating an stewarding the grain for thousands of years. The patent gave the university exclusive control over a traditional Bolivian sterile male variety called Apelawa, and also extended to hybrids developed from the breeding of forty-three additional traditional varieties. In 1998, the Bolivian National Quinoa Producers Association, with support from other groups internationally, was able to convince the researchers to drop the patent.
But similar patents were issued on the neem tree, ayahuasca (a medicinal plant of the Amazon), and many other medicinal plants. Some of these were also eventually revoked. In September 1997, RiceTec, a Texas-based
company, even won a controversial patent on the famed basmati rice. When the Indian government filed a complaint with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, RiceTec was forced to give up fifteen of twenty patent claims.
It was within this climate that University of Minnesota plant geneticist Ron Phillips, along with a few colleagues, mapped the wild rice genome in 2000. According to Phillips, this work is considered “important as a
foundation for genetic and crop improvement studies.” The Ojibwe believe that these studies, bearing names such as “Molecular Cytogenetics in Plant Improvement,” could have far-reaching implications. The wild rice gene
map is now filed with GenBank, a database operated by the National Institutes of Health, and its availability essentially sets the stage for genetic modification. Traditional breeding techniques attempt to enhance certain traits of the wild rice and to repress others, but with genetic engineering, it becomes possible to insert DNA from other plants into the wild rice. The Ojibwe are alarmed by this possibility, viewing it as an attack on the essential
nature of the rice itself.
THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, according to our oral histories, the Anishinaabeg—called the Ojibwe or Chippewa by the federal government—followed a shell in the sky from the great waters of the East to the place where the food grows on the water. That food was wild rice, the only grain indigenous to North America, and it has been a central food in ceremony and sustenance for our people ever since. “The[y] gain their livelihood by fishing, hunting, gathering berries and wild rice and making maple sugar, which constitutes their chief means of support,” Indian agents would write, noting that the Ojibwe also relied on wild rice as a source of trade with the white settlers, and later as a source of credit and cash. The rice was so significant to the Ojibwe that the lands with the best wild rice stands—including Big Rice Lake, Rice Lake Refuge, Lake Winnibigoshish, Nett Lake, and other mother lodes of the great grain—were reserved.
Beyond the reservation borders, land was transferred to the U.S. government, but the rice was not. In an 1837 treaty, the Ojibwe ceded nearly 14 acres of Wisconsin and Minnesota but retained “the privilege of hunting,
fishing, and gathering the wild rice upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded.” Federal and Supreme Court cases, including the 1999 Mille Lacs Supreme Court case, have upheld the rights of the Ojibwe to traditional land-use outside the reservations. It was this close bond between a people and a food that University of Minnesota professor Albert Jenks encountered when he came to White Earth and other reservations to study wild rice in the late 1800s. He noted with disdain the Ojibwe harvesting practices. “Wild rice, which had led to their advance thus far, held them back from further progress,” he determined.His perception of the Ojibwe wild rice harvest as a bastion of primitiveness would become the prevailing opinion at the University of Minnesota throughout the twentieth century—indeed, a sort of battle cry for industrializing agriculture.
To read this whole article go to
Ricekeepers
A struggle to protect biodiversity and a Native American way of life
BY WINONA LADUKE
Published in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion magazine

Uranium is not an option

All that Glitters is not Gold

Diet for a Dying Planet

Interview with Vandana Shiva

GELLERMAN: It’s Living on Earth. I’m Bruce Gellerman. In India, the benefits of modern agriculture come with a high price. It’s been reported as many as 150,000 Indian farmers over the past decade have committed suicide – many by drinking the pesticides they put on their crops. According to physicist and social activist Vandana Shiva, the farmers’ despair is due to the weight of overwhelming debt. They can no longer afford the escalating price of chemicals and bio-engineered seeds, like pest-resistant Bt cotton. Shiva says the suicides in India are only part of a global problem that can be traced to the way food is produced.

SHIVA: Chemical agriculture really is a theft from nature. Organic ecological farming is the only way we will be able to address the ecological crisis related to farming, the agrarian crisis emerging from industrial globalized agriculture, and the public health crisis coming from using war chemicals to produce our food.

GELLERMAN: Vandana Shiva is editor of a new book called “Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed.” Living on Earth’s Steve Curwood recently spoke with her about the problems, the politics, and the possibilities of food production.

CURWOOD: How did you first become aware of the relationships between the environment, the poor, and food?

SHIVA: The connections between the environment and agriculture, and food systems, and the issues of poverty really came home to me in the 80s, particularly 1984—and I don’t [know] why George Orwell picked that as the title of one of his books. It was the year we had the worst terrorism and extremism in India. Thirty thousand people were killed in Punjab where the Green Revolution had been implemented—the Green Revolution had even received a Nobel Peace Prize for creating prosperity and through prosperity creating peace. And yet in the 1980s, there was the worst form of violence you could imagine. In December of 1984, we had the worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, which killed 3,000 people in one night, 30,000 people since then, and I was forced to wake up and ask the question: why are we involved in an agriculture that is killing hundreds of thousands, that is so violent, and pretends to be feeding the world? And I started to do scientific research on this. My book “The Violence of the Green Revolution” came out of the research that I was doing at that point for the United Nations. And increasingly, I have realized that if farmers in India are getting into debt and committing suicide, it’s because of these industrially driven agricultural systems that are also destroying the environment. If children are going hungry today and are being denied food, it’s because the money is being spent on buying toxic chemicals and costly seeds rather than being spent on feeding children, clothing them, and sending them to school. So chemical agriculture really is a theft from nature and a theft from the poor.

CURWOOD: In your book Vandana Shiva, you mention that 800 million people in the world who suffer from malnutrition, and the 1.7 billion who suffer from obesity. What is it that the underfed and the overfed have in common?

SHIVA: Both are suffering from consequences of corporate control over the food system, which has reduced food to commodities, manipulated it, got the farmers into debt. The farmers and farmers’ children who are hungry today are the ones who have to sell what they produce in order to pay back credit for buying the chemicals they use to grow the food. The majority of the hungry in the world are rural people today. They could be growing their own food if the food system hadn’t been converted into a market for sales of seeds and agrichemicals. And on the other hand, the obesity epidemic and other related epidemics of diabetes–and in Delhi, childhood diabetes, children with diabetes, has jumped from seven percent to 14 percent in the city of Dehli, as the staple diet of Coca-Cola and chips starts to enter our school system–both are victims. Three billion people on this planet are being denied their right to healthy, safe, nutritious food even though the planet can produce that food, and farmers of the world can produce that food, because agribusiness has turned that food into a place for highest returns on profits.

CURWOOD: Now, anyone who goes grocery shopping here in the U.S. can tell you that organically-produced foods are .. generally more expensive than conventional foods and yet, in your book you write that conventional food is not the key to feeding the poor. Tell me about what you call the ‘myth’ of cheap food?

SHIVA: The myth of cheap food is related first and foremost to the fact that cheap food is a result of our tax money being used to lure the prices of food that has been produced at very high cost financially, and in the process had driven farmers off the land, including the United States—the family farms are being destroyed because of this very artificial low price of food, the monopolies that grow with it, which creates a buyers market as far as farmers are concerned. And then, at every level, a subsidy given for manipulating food more and more to take away its nutrition and food value and to add hazards and risks to it. The entire food system is today serving corporations and not serving people or the planet. We need to reclaim the food system.

CURWOOD: Now, some of the companies will tell you that genetically modified foods help increase food production, making more food available. You’ve been opposed to genetically modified foods since they first came on the market. What do you see wrong with genetically modified crops?

SHIVA: Well, you know the first thing is if they were so productive, Indian farmers, who are using Bt cotton, wouldn’t be the worst victims of farmer suicides. One scientist keeps churning out data about how $27 million additional income–if the farmers were making that additional income, they wouldn’t be ending their lives. The recent Nobel Prize in biology has gone to biologists who have shown that the determinism on which genetic engineering is based doesn’t work. Genes work in very complex interactions. This is why those of us who critique genetic engineering started to critique it as a very crude and primitive technology, based on very wrong assumptions of how life organizes itself. This idea of one gene, one expression doesn’t work. Because of the crudeness of the technology, industry has so far managed to bring us, commercially, only two kinds of traits. One is herbicide-tolerant crops, which means spray more ground up, contaminate your ecosystems and food systems more. And the second is Bt toxin crops, where a toxin called Bt is engineered into the plant and now every cell is making that toxin every moment. It starts to kill nontarget species, the very big study of Cornell on the monarch butterflies is one example, 1,800 sheep in India dying by eating Bt cotton is another example, (inaudible) studies that shows that genetically engineered food fed to mice starts to create huge damage physiologically, immunity systems collapse, the brains shrunk. We need much more research of this kind. Unfortunately the industry censures the research, pretends that everything is fine and starts to target the scientists, who have brought some level of awareness to society of the risks of manipulating life at the genetic level or assessing the consequences adequately.

CURWOOD: In your book you include war as one of the unaccounted for external costs of corporate agriculture. What does war have to do with the food we eat?

SHIVA: Agrichemicals that have come into farming were war chemicals. They’re products of war. When 30,000 people died in Bhopal, it’s because those pesticides were designed to kill people. Herbicides were designed as chemical warfare. 243D was Agent Orange of the Vietnam War. So the tools of agriculture have become the tools of warfare. Secondly, the idea of creating food dependency is also an idea of warfare. It came out of the foreign policy of the United States the very word and phrase ‘use food as a weapon.’ It’s being used against India today in friendship. The interesting thing is that the U.S. and India are very intimate today, but the U.S.-India agreement on agriculture is trying to create dependency of India on the United States. Supplies of food, even though we’re growing 74 million tons. This is warfare by another means.

CURWOOD: You want to build a new paradigm for food. What does that mean exactly?

SHIVA: I think the first element of the paradigm is that food is not a commodity. It’s the very basis of life. Secondly, food production is not industrial activity. It is nurturing the land. It is conserving resources. It is giving livelihoods. It is shaping a culture. And it is much more than bringing corn and soya bean and wheat and cotton to the marketplace. We have to recognize that biodiversity is the real capital of food and farming and linked to it is cultural diversity–that we are richer to the extent we have diversified food cultures in the world. We are poorer as the biodiversity of our farms disappears and the cultural diversity of our food systems disappears.

CURWOOD: So what should the average person do in terms of a response to your call?

SHIVA: I think the average person should recognize that even though they are in cities they are connected to the land. That somewhere, somebody produced the food they’re eating. And we will all be freer, if around every city are rural communities where small farmers are able to produce food of quality, make a living doing that, and there is a more intimate connection between the food people eat and the land it comes from and the producers who have made an effort to bring it. I think every city should have its own food shed. The creation of farmers’ markets is a beginning. But I don’t think we can leave the farmers’ markers to be token symbols. We need to move the money of taxpayers from subsidizing corporations to bring us junk and poison, to bringing farmers’ markets everywhere, to helping small producers everywhere connect to those who are looking for more secure food, more safe food, more tasty food, more quality food. The most important issue is to break the myth that safe, ecological, local, is a luxury only the rich can afford. This planet cannot afford the additional burden of more carbon dioxide, more nitrogen oxide, more toxins in our food. Our farmers cannot afford the economic burden of these useless toxic chemicals. And our bodies cannot afford the bombardment of these chemicals any more.

CURWOOD: Dr. Vandana Shiva is a physicist and environmental activist. Thank you so much.

SHIVA: Thank you, Steve.

GELLERMAN: Vandana Shiva is also the editor of a new book called, “Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed.” She spoke with Living on Earth Executive Producer Steve Curwood.

Monsanto Buys Terminator Technology

U.S. approves take-over of seed company.

Ottawa, June 6, 2007 – On June 1, 2007 the United States Justice Department gave the green light for Monsanto’s $1.5 billion takeover of the world’s largest cotton seed company, Delta Pine Land (D&PL) — the US company that developed and patented the world’s first Terminator seed technology.

Terminator seeds are genetically engineered to be sterile after first harvest and were developed to stop farmers from saving seed.

“As the biggest seed company in the world, Monsanto stands to gain the most by incorporating Terminator technology into all its seeds, thus forcing farmers to buy new seed every year” said Lucy Sharratt, Coordinator of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.

Monsanto will now own Delta & Pine Land’s greenhouse tests of Terminator seeds and rights to its Canadian patent on Terminator granted on October 11 2005. D&PL has long vowed to commercialize Terminator, targeting rice, wheat and soy in particular.

To Take Action email Canadian Biotechnolgy Action Network
info@cban.ca

U.S. approves take-over of seed company

Human Gene in Rice

GM fears as human liver gene is put into rice
By Duncan Gardham

Scientists have begun mixing human genes with rice in an attempt to take genetically modified crops to the next level.

Researchers have inserted into rice a gene from the human liver that produces an enzyme which is good at breaking down harmful chemicals in the human body.

They hope the enzyme, CYP2B6, will do the same to herbicides and pollutants when combined with rice.
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But anti-GM campaigners say using human genes will scare off consumers worried about cannibalism and the idea of scientists playing God.

Sue Mayer of GeneWatch UK said: ‘I don’t think anyone will want to buy this rice.

“People have already expressed disgust about using human genes and already feel that their concerns are being ignored by the bio-tech industry. This will just undermine their confidence even more.”

Standard GM crops are modified with genes from bacteria. They are resistant to only one herbicide which means farmers can spray their fields as often as they like to beat back weeds, but only with one type of chemical.

The aim of mixing rice with human genes is to produce a crop which is resistant to several herbicides, reducing the chances of weeds building up resistance.

Researchers at the National Institute of Agro-biological Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, have found the new crop could be resistant to 13 different herbicides.

Prof Richard Meilan, who has conducted similar research at Purdue University in Indiana, said the rice could also be used to clean land contaminated with industrial pollutants. He used a gene from rabbits for his research but said there was no reason why human genes should not be used instead.

He said talk of “Frankenstein foods” was rubbish and added: “I do not have any ethical issue with using human genes to engineer plants.”

The resistance to GM crops in Europe has been far greater than elsewhere in the world.

Rice yields have been falling worldwide and the race has been on to find ways of increasing yields as well as providing varieties that are virus resistant, low allergen or low protein.

But the anti-GM Institute of Science in Society said the CYP2B6 enzyme could cross back into humans to create new viruses or cancers.

It added: “Pro-GM scientists in the major rice growing countries have been researching and promoting GM rice with scant regard for safety or sustainability.”

Russian Seed Bank needs help

When the U.S. soybean crop fell prey to a parasitic worm 10 years ago, Soviet scientists came to the rescue.
Researchers in the United States had searched in vain for domestic beans that could resist the destructive cyst
nematode. Finally, they turned to the Soviets, who supplied beans with the desired resistance.
Such help may not be possible in the future, however.

The N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry, keeper of one of the world’s largest collections of plant genetic
material and source of the nematode-resistant soybeans, has fallen on hard times. With Russia’s government in
turmoil over reforming the economy, funding for the St. Petersburg-based institute is drying up, while the cost
of labor is soaring. Operating on a shoestring, the institute may soon be unable to sustain its priceless collection
of 380,000 varieties of seeds, warn researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“We can’t let a resource like this just drift off,” says Henry L. Shands, a scientist at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) center in Beltsville, Md. Encouraged by Shands and his colleagues, public and private donors from various countries are now rallying support to ensure the continuity of the largely unique seed stock.

Maintaining the collection is crucial not only because it helps preserve the global diversity of plant species,
says Shands, but also because it represents a huge reservoir of genetic traits that breeders can tap to produce
hardier crop strains with higher yields.

In the United States today, a mere 2 percent of the population grows enough food to meet the nation’s consumption
and export needs. The USDA attributes more than 60 percent of this productivity to breeding. To achieve higher yields,
breeders need access to the thousands of slightly different traits that plants have developed in response to particular
climate, soil, parasite, and other environmental conditions.
Yet access to this wealth of plant traits depends on curators such as those at the Vavilov institute.
These scientists gather crop plants and their wild relatives and keep the plants’ hereditary material, the germ plasm,
viable for future needs.
“Many wild species that have evolved over thousands of years were shoved aside for improved types that contain very
narrow germ plasm,” says James H. Elgin Jr., a geneticist at the ARS in Beltsville. The Vavilov institute, the only
seed repository in the former Soviet Union, has compiled and studied genetic resources since 1894 –longer than any
existing seed bank in the world.

The vast ecological expanse covered by the institute stretches from the Arctic circle to subtropical Central Asia.
It contains plant traits that fit “needs for all degrees of latitude in the U.S.,” explains Shands. “The fact that
they have all this material makes a nice match for our breeders. We need each other as sources for new varieties.
That’s what their and our [germ plasm collections] are all about.”

Some of the institute’s riches have vanished already. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Vavilov network
consisted of 19 experimental stations, six of them located outside Russia. One of these, the Sukhumi station in
Georgia’s contested western province of Abkhazia, was destroyed in this year’s civil war.
Alexey Fogel, an 83-year-old botanist and 50-year veteran of the Sukhumi station, rescued seeds as he fled Abkhazia
through mountain paths in the Caucasus range, says Sergey Alexanian, a spokesman for the Vavilov institute. Fogel,
his son Vladimir, also a scientist at the Sukhumi station, and two other botanists succeeded in evacuating 226 precious
samples of subtropical fruit plants and almost the entire lemon collection to the Russian town of Sochi.
There the samples will be kept permanently, hopes Alexanian, provided the Russian government absorbs the cost. The
institute does not plan to move them to the St. Petersburg collection because the city’s climate is not conducive to
growing and studying subtropical plants. The 2,000 samples left behind in the Sukhumi station are probably spoiled,
Alexanian says.

The other outposts severed from the Vavilov network – those in the now-independent countries of Uzbekistan,
the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan – hold 25 percent of the entire Vavilov collection. Yet they do not
receive funds from Russia or their respective governments, Alexanian adds. Given their precarious situation, “we try
to negotiate the transfer of unique germ plasm stored there and duplicate it in Russia,” he says.
The current cash crunch is not the first crisis to threaten the institute. During the two-year siege of St. Petersburg
in World War II, scientists guarded the seeds from famished townspeople. At least nine botanists starved to death in
the midst of rice, wheat, corn, and peas.
Under Stalin, the institute suffered repression from the Communist regime, which misinterpreted and dismissed
genetics as a science that supports “inborn class differences” among people.