FRIENDS OF ACTION GROUP ON EROSION TECHNOLOGY AND CONCENTRATION
441 Avon St, Oakland, CA 946181023 www.friendsofetc.org

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Organizations Filed Purposes: The mission of Friends of ETC Group is to protect biodiversity and to advance the creation of a just and sustainable food security and sustainable livelihood system for the benefit of rural areas and societies.

The Organization works toward its goals largely through educational activities and by supporting the work of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), a charitable organization headquartered in Canada, and by supporting the work of other organizations aligned with its charitable and educational aims. In FY18/19, the Organization continued its double focus that is, advocacy and education related to sustainable, smallholder food production on the one hand; and, on the other hand, educating the public and policymakers about new technologies with potentially dramatic and large-scale social, economic and environmental effects (for example, synthetic biology, gene drives, geoengineering and big data applications in agriculture and other life sciences). This past year, the Organization has expanded efforts to expose and oppose the development and deployment of Gene Drives, particularly in health, agriculture and conservation. This work has augmented the ongoing work to track the expansion of Synthetic Biology-derived products that are reaching consumers in the absence of adequate regulation and protection for both consumers and small-scale farmers.The Organization has built on the success of that work with continued public support with a grant from the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, Marin Community Foundation, many individual donors and others. These grants, and others, continue to help support ETC Groups work maintaining a public database to track commercial products that have been produced using synthetic biology techniques; those products are intended to compete with and potentially supplant natural products already on the market, most of which are grown and harvested by small farmers and rural workers. The Organization continued to support partners in making strategic interventions to also address Geoengineering in international governance fora, including the United Nations Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. In the past fiscal year there has been an increased effort to support narrative shift in public understanding of critical issues in emerging, converging and extremely high-leverage technologies to ensure that they include consideration of social justice, equity, and biodiversity. This was accomplished through new reports, convenings and workshops and webinars. The Organization continues to support and value partners throughout the world, and is directly contributing to the North America Working Group on Geoengineering, a collaboration of a half-dozen non-profit organizations as well as participating in an international coalition committed to democratic governance and public participation in all decisions pertaining to the potential deployment of geoengineering experiments of any kind. The Organization also supported the production of several new publications on corporate concentration in the food system and the potential impacts of particular technologies on biodiversity and agroecology. The organizations with which the Organization and ETC Group have collaborated for more than a decade in Mexico members of the Maize Network continued their education and engagement activities throughout the fiscal year. With the support of the Organization, CECCAM, a Maize Network member and not-for-profit organization based in Mexico, continue their education and convening work of small farmers and civil society to defend food sovereignty and peasant livelihoods. The Organization continues to provide partnership, technical support and financial support to ETC Group in order to expand participatory technology assessment. With targeted grant funds from the Marin Community Foundation, and 11th Hour Foundation, ETC Group, with its international partners, advanced its project on a Technology Assessment Platform (TAP) in Latin America and continues to develop processes in Africa and Asia Pacific regions. The Organization also supported the participation of civil society experts on technology to participate in UN expert groups on technology assessment.

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