I know that you all have sat through a few hours of testimony from people, and I'm sure that you have heard a variety of things, and have done some research yourself on the issue about technology and what it's about. So I'm not necessarily going to talk about that as much.

But I am going to talk about several things. One of the biggest issues for me concerning biotechnology is a so-called terminator seed. Monsanto company has developed a seed, as you probably already know, that after growing for one year, the seeds that are produced on certain plants are sterile and cannot be replanted. Well in this country a lot of farmers in some areas buy seeds every year. Other farmers do not buy seeds every year. They rely specifically on collecting seeds from the plants from the previous year and replanting those seeds.

Now this form of seed cultivation is practiced all over the world in a lot of developing countries, and a lot of countries that practice agriculture, (inaudible) in this country. It's more local agriculture. It's more sustenance agriculture for local villages, towns, and so forth.

Now unfortunately, these people that have gone to plant seeds in hopes of cultivating seeds in the next year and replanting them again, are buying seeds that Monsanto has sold to the third world countries and are no longer able to replant their seeds because they are finding that they are sterile.

So my concern here is that not only are companies taking and rearranging genes from species that normally would not be combined in nature, but they are selling seeds to third world people that no longer reproduce from year to year.

I just feel that this is going to have drastic, drastic effects on agriculture. They are no longer -- people in other countries and in this country as well, they are no longer able to cultivate their seeds and plant.

This not only raises economic questions about the ability to buy seeds from year to year, but it also raises ecological and biological issues as well. I think that as the years go by, you'll see that these plants which have the terminator seeds genetically engineered into them will cross-pollinate and will cause problems, in other words plants outside the farms these people are farming using terminator genes will become exactly that. Terminator plants.

The pollen will spread from the farms to plants outside the farms, and pretty soon native plants in a given area outside these people's farms will no longer be able to continually pollinate.

So in closing I would like to say that I really wish that USDA and everybody here today would take that into serious consideration when you're considering World Trade Organization and sending of seeds to other countries.