Today, almost every ear of corn grown from California to Kazakhstan is a hybrid controlled by any one of a handful of very large seed companies. Exactly 90 years after Shull's revelation, one of the biggest and most powerful of those companies, Monsanto, is fighting for control of the most important seed monopoly technology since the hybrid. But unlike 1860, this piece of life control can be patented. Within days, the rest of the world knew TPS as Terminator Technology. Terminator Technology epitomizes what the genetic engineering of crops is all about and gives an insight into the driving forces behind the corporate campaign to control and own life.
Farmers buy the seed once do their own work thereafter.
Patents and Pinkerton detectives have been employed to stop farmers from doing so. Small farming communities of the Third World especially, rely upon their own plant breeding since neither corporate nor public breeders show much interest or aptitude in breeding for their often ficult environments. Old-fashioned hybrids and the Terminator Technology with its terminated seeds force farmers back to the market every season. Terminator also scuttles community conservation of agricultural biodiversity. There's nothing to conserve.