|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
1. TRIPs and the problem of biopiracy New Delhi, 3 April 1998. Hundreds of angry Indian farmers rallied in the
streets of the capital to denounce a US patent on basmati rice. Exasperated
after several years of protest against American patents on the use of
turmeric, neem and other indigenous resources, Indian farmers are up in arms
about a US monopoly claim on their own rice. "We have not done enough to
protect our own treasures of this country," said Jaya Jetlie, general
secretary of Hind Mazdoor Kisan Panchayat, an agricultural labour
organization present at the rally. "If we lose our [rice] exports and
lose whatever tradition and wealth we have, we will soon become a country where
every pebble and every stone is owned by somebody else," she told
reporters.2 Scant weeks later, the streets of Bangkok looked hauntingly similar.
Hundreds of farmers were camped outside the Prime Ministers' office demanding
resolution of their problems in the countryside. Among their grievances:
American companies are claiming intellectual property control – patents,
trademarks and plant breeders' rights -- over Thailand's jasmine rice. Five
million farm families in Northeast Thailand depend on jasmine and US
companies are monopolising it. "Jasmine rice belongs to Thai farmers, to
Thai communities, since it has been nurtured in Isan, the Northeast, since
our great grandparents," said Mr. Lai Lerngram, an organic farmer from
Surin. "No one, but no one, could claim ownership or monopoly rights in
relation to Jasmine rice."3
Thailand's Deputy Agriculture Minister Newin Chidchob quickly announced his
government's resolve to fight "US efforts to imitate or undermine"
jasmine rice by lodging a formal protest at the World Trade Organization.
"The US has long campaigned against imitation of products. I would like
to know how it will treat this case because the violator is a US company,''
Newin boasted.4 In both cases — basmati and jasmine — the prime accused is RiceTec, a firm
based in Texas. Biopiracy, or the stealing of genetic material and knowledge from
communities in the gene-rich developing countries, is an exploding issue in
Asia. Industrialised countries want exploitation and ownership rights over
the biodiversity of the South. In a sense, this goes back to the colonial
era, when countries like England and the Netherlands took control of crop
resources in Asia to build up their trade empires around cotton, sugar, tea,
rubber, pepper, and the like. Biopiracy is a new name for this old process.
Liberalization of trade through fora like GATT or APEC is driven by pressure
from industrialised countries, which aim to dominate world markets. Winning
monopoly control over Asia's biodiversity and indigenous knowledge through
intellectual property laws is crucial to their strategy today. The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
(TRIPs) was signed at the end of the GATT Uruguay Round in 1994 and came into
force in 1995. It is administered by GATT's successor, the World Trade
Organization. TRIPs was strongly resisted by the South, as it forces all WTO
member states to extend intellectual property rights to plant varieties, the
basis of food security and health care. Until now, Asian countries have
prohibited patents on life forms because corporate monopolies touching
peoples' basic needs are dangerous. Also, many Asian cultures are based on a
holistic view of and respect for life, which Western technologies and
property systems fundamentally disregard.
Nearly all Asian countries are committed to the WTO TRIPs treaty.7 This
means that by the year 2000, Asian governments have to make intellectual
property titles on seeds completely legal. This will favor transnational corporations
who want to control agriculture and the world's food system through genetic
engineering. Despite the current economic crisis in the region, TNCs are hot
to penetrate Asian agriculture even more, especially the newly opened Chinese
market. Patents will make crop research lucrative for them and give them
market control over biotechnology. But what does this mean for the more than
one billion small farmers in Asia? Will TRIPs promote sustainable development
or will it entrench foreign domination as the road to 'development'? This
paper situates the implications of TRIPs primarily in terms of Asia's most
important plant: rice. 2. Rice biodiversity: a heritage spoiled Rice is synonymous with food security in most parts of Asia. The region
produces over 90% of the world's number one grain, on a harvested area of
nearly 150 million hectares. In aggregate terms, rice accounts for up to half
of Asia's farm incomes and makes up nearly 80% of people's daily calories. In
many Asian societies, rice is the basis of breakfast, lunch, snacks and
dinner – for those able to eat that often in a day. Rice goes back thousands and thousands of years in Asia's agricultural
history. Over this time, farmers developed and conserved an enormous amount of
genetic diversity in rice. Some scientists estimate that rural communities
have generated over 140,000 rice varieties. Almost 80,000 of them are
presently stored in the genebank of the International Rice Research Institute
(Los Baños, Philippines), the largest collection of rice in the world. These
different varieties have, since time immemorial, allowed farmers and
consumers to meet their needs. Some grow well during droughts, others can
withstand certain pests. Certain rice varieties produce long and slender
grains, others short and round ones. Aromatic, sticky, slow cooking,
medicinal – the types of rices Asian communities have developed are
impressive indeed. Much of this diversity, and the communities' knowledge ingrained in it,
has disappeared over the past thirty years, however. Under the guise of
feeding the world, the Green Revolution has been a vast campaign to bring
Asia's peasantry into the grips of the world trade system. Suddenly, packages
of uniform technologies – fertilizer, high-yielding seeds, pesticides,
mechanization, irrigation, credit and marketing schemes – displaced the
ecological wealth, the skills and the self-esteem of many local farmers. All
in the name of modernization. The Green Revolution has raised rice grain yields in some irrigated areas
– which account for less than half of Asia's ricelands today — but at the
significant cost of environmental, health and economic problems for both
farmers and consumers. Rice farmers are among the poorest in many countries.
Soil fertility and yields are declining throughout the region. Communities
are being forced into the uplands to eke out a living on fragile ecosystems.
And of course, pesticide use has soared. In fact, most of these problems stem
directly from the loss of biodiversity and farmer control over productive
resources. Take the brown planthopper, a devastating pest in rice fields. The
rise of this disease-carrier corresponds almost exactly with the spread of
just a few high-yielding varieties (HYVs) in most countries of Asia. This was
clear in the 1970s in Indonesia and Taiwan. It has become painfully clear
again in countries newly converted to HYVs like Thailand and Viet Nam.
According to a spokesman from the Ministry of Agriculture in Hanoi, "The
Green Revolution in Vietnam has led to monocultures of preferred and
constantly used varieties, which in turn has led to pests and diseases. In
addition, the increased use of chemicals has unbalanced the natural ecology
and has led to an infertile soil."8
This blanket of uniformity – a genetic monopoly – is gripping Asian
farmers' field today. In Thailand and Burma, almost 40% of the total rice area
is planted to only five varieties. In Pakistan, the top five varieties occupy
80% of the total area. In Cambodia, the lone IR66 – from IRRI — accounts for
84% of the country’s dry season crop!9 For
farmers, and for food security, this is excessively dangerous. It forces us
to depend on toxic chemicals, and soon genetic engineers, to help defend the
region's paramount crop from the inherent weaknesses of biological
uniformity. It is against this background that peoples' organisations, NGOs and
attuned scientists have been trying to develop sustainable alternatives for
Asian agriculture. A broad and dynamic movement is under way to help farmers
regain control and improve their farming systems without the chemicals,
economic dependency or environmental destruction characteristic of industrial
agriculture. Sustainable agriculture aims to provide much better systems
yields on a long term basis and restore opportunities to farmers and their families.
After much headway in the past two decades, however, this whole movement is
now seriously threatened by WTO TRIPs. Genetic engineering and the imposition
of intellectual property rights on life will directly undermine the space to
pursue these kinds of alternatives.
3. Enter biotechnology The private sector is taking an interest in controlling rice from the
starting point of the seed. Until now, industry's involvement in the rice
sector focused on chemical inputs, machinery, transport and trade. Seeds were
not so interesting. Asian farmers plant-back their rice harvest for about 80%
of their needs – and most are poor farmers who could not afford to purchase
seeds every year if they had to. This is all changing rapidly now. Private corporations are starting to invest in biotechnology research on
rice because there is money to be made. For one thing, thirty years of IRRI's
Green Revolution have created an ecological debacle in Asia. Now,
environment-friendly rice production is all the rage. Genetic engineering
allows chemical companies themselves to counterbalance any market losses that
the organic farming trend could bring about. If they can collect royalties on
seeds and license fees on genetic technologies to insert new traits in crops,
any dip in chemical sales will be effectively offset. A few mega-trends in
rice genetic research illustrate the corporate logic penetrating this sector: Herbicide tolerant rice: Several companies are racing to
develop herbicide tolerant rice. Herbicide use has grown recently in Asia
because of direct seeding strategies promoted by IRRI. Corporations are now
inserting genes in rice to make the plant withstand the chemicals. Their
advertising says farmers will use less herbicides but in fact the companies
want farmers to use more. American Cyanamid is cooperating with universities,
public and private seed companies to develop rice varieties, sold as IMI™
Rice Seed, tolerant to its proprietary imidazolinone herbicides. AgrEvo is
working on Liberty Link™ Rice which will have to be used with the company's
Liberty™ herbicide. Roundup-Ready™ Rice, from Monsanto, will be resistant to
glyphosate. The japonica version is expected to be on the market in temperate
countries like Japan, China and the US by 2002, and plans to insert the gene
in indica rice for cultivation in the tropics of South and Southeast Asia are
underway. Bt rice: Another trend is Bt rice, containing a
insect-killing toxin from the soil microbe Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt rice
produces its own pesticide: an insect such as the yellow stem borer bites the
plant and dies. However, insects are quickly developing their own resistance
to the toxin and consumers are at risk of allergic and other reactions from
eating Bt rice. Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis, after its merger with Sandoz) has
been working through IRRI and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to
see its proprietary gene for resistance to Bt deployed widely in Asia's rice
fields. IRRI will be field-testing Bt rice soon and then passing it on to
national programmes in Asia. The Belgian-based Plant Genetic Systems (now
owned by AgrEvo) has also worked with IRRI to collect thousands of strains of
Asian Bt for insertion in rice, including over 7,500 native Filipino strains.
PGS won a controversial US patent claiming "all transgenic plants
containing Bt gene." IRRI will be crucial to the release of Bt rice in
Asia. Hybrid rice: A third very important trend is the development
of F1 hybrids. Rice seeds can normally be saved at harvest time and sown
again for the next cropping season. Companies want to stop this so that
farmers are obliged to purchase new seeds from them every year. The
corporations investing in hybrid rice in Asia include Cargill, Hybrid Rice
International and East-West Seed Company. Different technologies are under
development to ensure this, many of them coming from IRRI. A radical approach
was patented last March in the US and dubbed "Terminator
Technology". Developed by Delta Land and Pine with the help of the US
Department of Agriculture, it involves a gene that simply prevents seeds from
germinating. The patent claims the gene's use in any plant -- including rice. All of these research trends are hotly contested by proponents of
sustainable agriculture because, contrary to propaganda, they will increase
farmers' dependency on chemicals and other external inputs, cause new health
problems and further disrupt the ecological balance. Hybrid rice is
especially threatening to the farm sector. In fact, the economic
justification for most of this research is hard to find. Bt rice is mainly
aimed at preventing stem borer damage, which hardly affects 5% of the Asia's
rice harvest and can be controlled ecologically on the farm.10
Herbicide tolerance is designed to facilitate herbicide sales. And hybrid
rice will certainly increase seed sales but not necessarily farmers' incomes.
The yield boost is currently around 15-20% but the price boost makes it
inaccessible to the poor.
4. TRIPs and biopiracy The biotechnology lobby, led by the US government, has been using trade
negotiations to win strong protection for their markets and technologies
worldwide. Despite talk about 'free trade', intellectual monopolies are a
form of protectionism. Companies complain that without legal ownership of
their so-called innovations, they have no incentive to invest in agricultural
research in Asia. However, their arguments are upside down. IPR allows
Northern companies to get ownership over seeds and knowledge developed by the
South, to which they add comparatively little and call it 'new'. Genetic
engineering in rice is no more than adding a few genes to a plant which has
ten thousand of them! If anyone's rights need protection, it is those of the
farmers and communities who develop the knowledge and genetic diversity
exploited by formally trained scientists. The rice economies and cultures of
Asia are deeply threatened by IPR regimes as imposed by TRIPs. Already, IRRI
has served as a subtle transit mechanism for the industrialized countries to
access Asia's rice biodiversity for their own benefit – with no return to
Asian farmers. If TRIPs is implemented according to schedule, the current
trickle of patents on rice will turn into a flood. And the benefits will not
go to the poor in the South.
There are already some 160 biotech patents on rice in the world. Most of
them are held by transnational companies in the US and Japan. The top 13 rice
patent holders have just over half the biotech patents covering Asia's staple
food. The most patented trait to be found is pest resistance (10%) followed
by herbicide tolerance, fungal resistance and starch content (each 8%).
The table hides from view a very
deceptive reality. Numerous technologies and specific genes are being
patented for their use in all crops, without naming rice but potentially
affecting rice research and markets. For example, AgrEvo is the owner of a
patent on all transgenic crops containing Bt. Japan Tobacco has rights to an
Agracetus patent on all forms of transgenic rice. Delta Land and Pine's
sterility gene patent is claimed in any crop, including rice.14 These
broad patents are very controversial because they give the corporations the
right to stop anyone from using their technology in a sweeping manner. That
right will not be exercised lightly in Asia. The TRIPS Agreement will legalize
and universalize this trend. It obliges all developing countries to extend
their patent laws to life forms or set up sui generis (special) regimes
for the same. As it stands now, plant varieties have to be subject to
monopoly rights by the year 2000, under threat of WTO-sanctioned trade
retaliation. Asian countries are responding very cautiously and unhappily.15 Many
governments are trying to come to terms with the sui generis option
and how they could implement it. The corporate sector is lobbying hard to
make plant variety protection laws the ready-made answer. These laws, designed
for industrial agriculture in the North, promote genetic uniformity and
restrict farmers' rights. The consequences of either system
– patent or sui generis – is bleak. Farmers will have to pay royalties on
seeds protected by IPR and they can't understand why TNCs should get rights
to their seeds, anyway, after doing just a little genetic tinkering. National
scientists are also worried. Managing intellectual property is expensive and
conflictual, and patenting life poses important ethical dilemmas in Asian
societies.16
The academe knows that IPR detracts research away from peoples' needs to
focus on patentable outcomes instead. And foreigners already control over 70%
of the patents in Asia anyway.17 No amount of safety nets will
make biopiracy's bitter pill easier to swallow. TNCs always retain the upper
hand in negotiations. The only way to protect Asian rice farmers from this
growing threat is to prohibit any form of IPR on biodiversity. After all,
biodiversity is a collective heritage and the Convention on Biodiversity
enshrines it as national sovereignty. Selling off the rights to it will
undermine the goal of sustainable development in Asia.
5. Peoples' movements on rice:
what you can do There are many ways to strengthen
the campaign against patents on life and to support more sustainable
approaches to agricultural research and food security in Southeast Asia:
For contacts and further
information, please get in touch with one of the contributors to this paper.
Notes: 1 This paper is a common initiative of the following
NGOs, POs and individuals from Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand: Assisi
Foundation, BIOTHAI, CEC, GRAIN, Greens Philippines, Hayuma, MAPISAN,
MASIPAG, PAN Indonesia, PDG, SIBAT, TREE and Univ. of the Philippines
colleagues Dr Romy Quijano & Dr Oscar Zamora. 2 Quoted in Masako Iijima, "India Minister Says
To Contest U.S. Basmati Patent", Reuters, New Delhi, 3 April
1998. 3 Quoted in BIOTHAI, "Thai Peoples' Movements
Mobilize To Protect Jasmine Rice", BIOTHAI Information Release,
Bangkok, 26 April 1998. 4 Quoted in Pennapa Hongthong, "Rice Copycat
Faces Wrath of Thailand", The Nation, Bangkok, 1 May 1998. 5 See Gaia/GRAIN, "Ten Reasons to Say No to
UPOV", Global Trade and Biodiversity in Conflict, No. 2, May
1998. 6 Convention on Biological Diversity, Fourth
Conference of the Parties, Bratislava, 4-15 May 1998. 7 China, Taiwan, Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam are not
yet members of WTO and do not have to implement TRIPS. 8 Nguyen Ngoc Hai, "Organic agriculture in
developing countries need modern technologies," Biotechnology and
Development Monitor, Amsterdam, March 1998. 9 Data culled from IRRI's Social Sciences Division
data sets and IRRI Hotline April 1998. 10 "World Demand for Rice to Surge", Asian
Seed, June 1997, Asia and Pacific Seed Association, Bangkok, p. 5. 11 International Rice Research Institute, IRRI Rice
Facts, January 1997. 12 GRAIN and RAFI, "CGIAR: Agricultural Research
for Whom?", The Ecologist, November/December 1996, p. 261. 13 Second Conference of the Parties, Convention on
Biological Diversity, Jakarta, November 1995. 14 Derwent Biotechnology Abstracts and RAFI News
Release, 13 March 1998. 15 For a review of national responses to TRIPs in
developing countries, please see Annex 1 of Signposts to sui generis
rights, BIOTHAI/GRAIN, February 1998, pp 97-150, available from the
BIOTHAI office in Bangkok. 16 See IPR Sourcebook Philippines,
UPLB-CA/MODE, Manila, 1994. 17 World Intellectual Property Organization,
IP/STAT/1994/B, Geneva, November 1996. NO
PATENTS ON RICE! NO PATENTS ON LIFE! May
1998 Rice is life in Southeast and
other parts of Asia. It has been the cornerstone of our food, our languages,
our cultures – in short, our life -- for thousands of years. Over the
centuries, farming communities throughout the region have developed, nurtured
and conserved over a hundred thousand distinct varieties of rice to suit
different tastes and needs. The Green Revolution spearheaded
by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the 1960s resulted the
loss of this diversity from farmers’ fields and the spread of wholly
unsustainable farming systems which require high energy inputs such as
pesticides, fertilizers, so-called 'high-yielding' seeds, irrigation systems
and supervised credit schemes. In this process, farmers lost control of their
own seeds, their own knowledge and their own self-confidence. Today, people
are struggling throughout the region to rebuild more sustainable agriculture
systems hinged on farmers’ control of genetic resources and local knowledge. In the past, the whole cycle of
the rice economy was under the control of farmers themselves, from production
through distribution. Today, global corporations are taking over the rice
sector. With the expansion of industrial farming, global corporations – and
their local subsidiaries -- established their predominance in the rice sector
through research programs, interference in policy-making, and their exports
of farm machinery, pesticides and fertilizers. Now, through the use of
genetic engineering, they are increasing their control over our rice
cultures. The kinds of rice that we are promised through this technology
threaten the environment and public health. For example, herbicide tolerant
rice will lead to increased pesticide use. Rice incorporating Bacillus
thuringiensis genes will disrupt ecological balances. Both of these are
unsafe for consumers and will lead to allergic reactions, increased
antibiotic resistance and other health hazards. New hybrids – such as those
based on the so-called 'Terminator Technology' – will force farmers to buy
rice seed every planting season from transnational corporations. The extension of the patent
system through the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights (TRIPS) gives global corporations the 'right' to claim
monopoly ownership over rice – and life – itself. Companies in the
industrialized world have already started to claim intellectual property
rights (IPR) on rice. A derivative of IR-8, IRRI’s 'miracle rice', was
monopolised through IPR in the United States already in the 1980s. Recently,
RiceTec, a company in Texas, has taken out a patent on basmati rice. This is
biopiracy against India and Pakistan. The same company and many others in the
US are now marketing what they label as Jasmine rice. This is not only
intellectual and cultural theft, it also directly threatens farm communities
in Southeast Asia. Jasmine rice comes from Thailand, where it is grown today
by over five million resource-poor farmers who are trying to develop
ecological alternatives for Jasmine rice production and marketing. We have to strengthen local
groups to assert farmers' and community rights to counter these trends in the
region. For this reason, we make the following demands:
If
you wish to add your name to the signatories of this appeal, kindly send you
name and address to MASIPAG, 3346 Aguila St., Rhoda's Subd., Los Baños,
Laguna 4030, PHILIPPINES. Tel (63-49) 536-5549 or 536-4205. Fax (63-49)
536-5526. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||