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Terminator and Traitor Technologies  Introduction

Plant breeding in India has largely been the concern of public sector (agricultural universities, agriculture institutes, etc.) for more than a century and in the past, no patents or plant breeders' rights (PBRs) were ever available to protect the cultivars developed through plant breeding.

This was needed to encourage a free flow of seeds for the resource-poor small farmers. Only recently, considerable activity for seeking patents/PBRs has been witnessed in the private sector, particularly in the post-GAAT period.

We discussed in some detail these issues related with utility patents and plant breeders rights for crop varieties. Provision of these IPRs in plant breeding became necessary in the recent past, due to the advent of transgenic plants, which are entering the farmers' fields in a big way, the area occupied by them at the end of 2002 being 58.7 million hectares (~145 m. acres).

These developments necessitated the provision of patents/PBRs to allow fair return of heavy investments .made by private companies. the 1991 Act of International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) also provided option for diluting the provision of the farmers privilege, which earlier allowed them to save seeds from their harvest for replantation.

The rights of corporate plant breeders are thus further strengthened and the rights of farmers to save seeds for re-use are curtailed and will now depend only on the national plant protection laws.

However, enforcement of laws for the protection of these rights of seed companies is considered difficult, particularly in the developing world, where the major part of seed requirement is fulfilled by seeds saved by the farmers.

Further, the national laws (at least in India) may not incorporate in full the provisions of the 1991 Act of UPOV, so that the farmers privilege to re-use the seed harvested from their own fields may be allowed in countries like India. Although desirable, this will be against the interest of private multinational companies like Monsanto.

In view of this, multinational seed companies have been trying to develop new strategies to protect their rights over their own varieties, so that the farmers may not be able to re-use their own seeds even if the national laws permit them to do so.

The technology, later dubbed as 'Terminator Technology', was patented in March 1998 and, provides for one such technology, which will protect the rights of corporate plant breeders.

Later, technologies were also developed, which will allow the expression of a desirable trait only after specific treatment, so' that the farmer will need to buy this treatment (some chemical spray) along with the seed, if he or she wants to use his own harvested seed for replantation.

This ensures adequate return to the owner of the crop variety. This technique was described as 'traitor technology'. The terminator and traitor technologies were subsequently described as v-GURT and t-GURT (GURT = genetic use restriction technology; v = variety; t = trait).

The term 'GURT' was used for the first time in a document prepared in 1998-99, on behalf of Conference of Parties (CoP) of the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), to assess the impact of the use of terminator technology on conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity.

According to many, these technolo­gies (v-GURT and t-GURT) will be used at the expense of biodiversity and against the interest of poor farmers.

The details of these technologies and related issues are discussed.
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