Abstract:
This short quote from the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization¿s Harvesting Nature¿s Diversity report (authored by Hope Shand), draws attention to the intricate entanglement of human and non-human life on this planet, perhaps in particular in agricultural environments. Over the many thousands of years that humans have been involved in agricultural lifeways, countless generations of people and crop plants have co-evolved amongst all of the other members of their broader multi-species agricultural environments. This paper is concerned with these agricultural human/plant relationships, and in particular with the way in which they might be altered by the introduction of `Genetic Use Restriction Technologies¿ (GURTs)¿popularly called `terminator technologies¿¿ which might render agricultural seed infertile after the first generation, thus requiring farmers to re-purchase seed each season.
