ETC Group

In recent years, civil society organizations1 such as the ETC Group (or Action Group on Erosion, [Page 269]Technology and Concentration) have played an increasingly important role in shaping debates on science and technology issues and in stimulating global policy dialogues on the appropriate development of transformative technologies and their socioeconomic implications. With a small complement of staff, this Canadian-based advocacy group has successfully lobbied governments and consulted with international bodies on a global scale. It has focused its attention on topics such as plant genetic resources, biotechnology, intellectual property rights, biopiracy, nanotechnology, geoengi-neering, synthetic biology, and human genomics. The ETC Group is a registered civil society organization in Canada and in The Netherlands, while Friends of the ETC Group is a private, nonprofit organization in the United States.

In the early 1970s, Pat Mooney, Hope Shand, and Cary Fowler founded a precursor organization to the ETC Group known as RAFI (Rural Advancement Foundation International) that was based in Winnipeg, Canada. RAFI was one of the first civil society organizations to pioneer advocacy-based research on the rights of farmers in the developing world, and it played a significant role in lobbying for the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture that came into effect on June 29, 2004. In 2000, RAFI transformed itself into the ETC Group, which has dedicated its advocacy work to support the development and deployment of technologies that could benefit marginalized peoples on global and regional levels but does not undertake grassroots, community, or national work. As such, the ETC Group is strongly oriented toward conservation and the sustainable development of cultural and ecological diversity. To achieve these goals, the ETC Group conducts and freely distributes policy-relevant research, leads educational programming initiatives, and has consultative status on a variety of bodies such as the United Nations Economic and Social Council, United Nations Biodiversity Convention, Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

To understand how this organization evolved over time, it may be useful to characterize their work in the following way. In phase one (between the early 1970s and 2001), this civil society organization focused it energies on agricultural issues and developed a niche for itself in the fields of agricultural biodiversity, food security, and the impacts of emerging biotechnologies on the rural poor. In a second phase (2001–2008), the ETC Group shifted its emphasis to questions of technological convergence and focused on nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineer-ing, and human genomics.

In the first phase of its development, the ETC Group managed to colonize areas that were relatively underexamined by civil society organizations. For example, in 1981, this organization explored how the development of herbicide-tolerant plant varieties could pose threats to food security. The ETC Group coordinated civil society organizations from around the world to explore these issues by showing how pesticide companies were purchasing seed companies on a global scale and how they were simultaneously developing genetically modified plants that were tailor-made to work with proprietary brands of pesticides. In 1998, the ETC Group discovered that several large biotechnology companies were developing patented sterile seed technology that could also have implications for food security and have negative impacts on small-scale farmers in the developing world who have practiced seed saving techniques for generations. Through the work of this organization, this so-called terminator technology was stalled in its bid to reach the commercialization stage. The ETC Group also played a key role in drawing attention to intellectual property rights issues and is credited with coining the term biopiracy, which refers to the unfair capture of indigenous knowledge (usually genetic and genomic resources from local plants) by multinational corporations for the purposes of commercial exploitation.

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