While the terminator technology prevents farmers from saving seeds, the traitor technology enables companies to insert and externally manipulate vital genetic sequences within crops and possibly livestock, the Rural Advancement Foundation International (Rafi), based in Ottawa, said.Rafi which uncovered the terminator patent by Monsanto a year ago said that "disturbing new dimensions to the traitor control technology have appeared in more than two dozen patent claims from 12 institutes. These patents pose a huge challenge to community and national food security."

According to Rafi, traitor technology offers the opportunity to load a number of commercial characteristics onto a plant variety which the company can choose to either activate or de-activate at or after the point of sale dependingon the farmers' ability to pay or the seller's market interest.

"This turns traitor into a launching pad or platform technology upon which proprietary traits are placed. Depending on what traits the farmers can afford, external chemical sprays or soakings could activate the purchased qualities in the platform seed," the report said.

The "gene giants" want to tie their traitor seed to their proprietary chemicals so that one is useless without the other, it said. The report said many of the new terminator type patents look far beyond control of seed germination to the control of a wide range of secondary traits such as productivity or process-ability of the grains. The traits can be activated by spraying the crop with chemicals the company will sell.

It says some companies are also patenting `apomictic' genes that can be used to produce hybrid seeds which can be saved by farmers.

"If they can successfully combine the benefits of apomixis (the ability to mass produce low cost clones) with theterminator's suicide sequence -- it will mean farmers cannot save seeds from the apomixis varieties."

"If successfully commercialised, the development of sterile apomictic hybrids threatens to further reduce genetic diversity in agriculture and increase crop vulnerability for farm communities," says the report.

According to Rafi, "newly discovered patented traits will be linked to traitor and terminator technologies not for agronomic reasons but for company profits."