Farmers pay a premium for Monsanto seeds, and to make sure they keep paying, the company requires them to sign an agreement promising not to plant seeds their crops produce. If farmers want the same bountiful harvest next year, they must return to the company for a new load of seeds.
While this arrangement makes sense for Monsanto, it works only if farmers honor it--something that's difficult to police in the U.S. and almost impossible in the developing world. Now, however, Monsanto hopes to enforce biologically what it can't enforce contractually. With the help of clever genes currently in development, future Monsanto crops may be designed with a new feature in mind: sterility. No sooner will the company's plants mature than the seeds they carry will lose the ability to reproduce.
From Monsanto's point of view, the set of new genes--which others have dubbed Terminator--is a perfectly legitimate way to protect their intellectual-property rights. Not everybody agrees. And in the 10 months since the patent for the seed-sterilizing technology was issued, Terminator has become the focus of a grass-roots protest that is spreading through the Internet like, well, wildfire.
Let the new science take hold, opponents warn darkly, and farmers could find themselves coming to Monsanto, seed cup in hand, paying whatever the company demands before they can plant that season's crop. Worse still, some doomsday scenarios suggest, pollen from Terminator plants could drift with the wind like a toxic cloud, cross with ordinary crops or wild plants, and spread from species to species until flora all around the world had been suddenly and irreversibly sterilized.