1.Engineering crops, distorting trade - Suman Sahai
2.Patently unfair: Rice in a private grip - Devinder Sharma

EXTRACTS: When technological change has the potential to put the livelihood or other interests of hundreds of millions of people at risk, it must be regulated differently from other products in a free market. While promoting innovation is a valuable goal for modern economies, such innovation would be self-defeating if it resulted in social or economic upheaval. This is precisely the risk now posed by genetically engineered crops. (item 1)

[Although more than 97 per cent of the world's rice is grown in Asia, the] biological inheritance of the world's major food crop is now in the hands of a Swiss multinational. If Syngenta's application for global patents is accepted, the Asian countries will lose all control... of the staple grain. (item 2)
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1.PATENTS AND LIVELIHOODS
Engineering crops, distorting trade
Suman Sahai
India Together, 24 Sep 2006
http://www.indiatogether.org/2006/sep/agr-getech.htm

When technological change has the potential to put the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people at risk, it must be regulated differently from other products in a free market. Blindly promoting innovation, as is now being done with genetically engineered crops, is self-defeating, writes Suman Sahai.

24 September 2006 - Many crops of developing countries have a global value because of the special chemical compounds they contain like aromatic or other oils. In recent years, however, biotechnology and agribusiness companies have found ways of obtaining some of these valuable compounds through genetically engineered (GE) crops. As a result, genetic engineering is providing alternative ways for developed societies to procure commodities that have traditionally been supplied by developing countries. Naturally, the shift in trading patterns threatens the economic base of farmers who have traditionally grown the crops from which these products were made.

The production of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) from corn, a major GE crop bred for industrial applications like this, has undermined sugar prices and distorted sugar markets for cane sugar producers of developing countries like India. Coconut is another victim of genetic engineering. Coconut provides high value oil used for edible and for industrial purposes. The main advantage of this oil is the high lauric acid that it contains. The US alone imports upwards of US$ 350 million worth of coconut and palm oil annually. Now genetic engineering is creating GE canola to produce the same special high lauric acid oil as coconut. This research will have highly negative economic implications for farmers in coconut producing regions.

Technology alone is not responsible; these changes are made possible by massive agricultural subsidies in the developed world for corporate farming. These are a source of grave distortion in international agricultural trade, accelerating the changes created by new technologies.

Calgene has produced a high lauric acid rapeseed by using genes from the California Bay tree. This rapeseed will ultimately displace the coconut and palm kernel oil and deprive Asian farmers of revenues. The argument that coconut farmers could nevertheless derive some income from other coconut products is weak - there are great difficulties that developing country farmers confront in finding new markets for their crops. The loss of the coconut oil income, the farmers' principal revenue opportunity in certain regions, will inflict severe economic hardship.

Intellectual Property Rights

Access to GE technology is largely impeded by the stringent IPRs that surround it. Most of the basic technologies of genetic engineering are patented and the larger companies own these patents. These companies are reluctant to license many technologies to developing country organisations at an affordable cost. Patent laws do not require them to do so, so they are not obliged to grant any licenses if they prefer to control the technology themselves. Patent holders often refuse to license patents for key technologies to scientists and even to public sector institutions. Also, companies often seek patents not necessarily to conduct research themselves but to prevent research in areas that would threaten their monopolies. It is of concern that public research institutions are also getting into the patenting of plant technologies and research tools, further restricting access to genetic material and research data that are needed to cross complement research efforts.

Patents with an excessively broad claim are becoming increasingly problematic. They violate the ethical intent of patent law, which is to balance private gain with public good, while leaving the way open for further innovation. Excessively broad claims like the one granted to Monsanto on 'all types of genetic transformation in all varieties of soybean' (European Patent Number 301,749), are contrary to the original intention of patent law. They are monopoly instruments restricting useful research and therefore diminishing social welfare

Pressure back on using GURT technology

The use of Gene Use Restricting Technology (GURT), popularly known as the 'terminator' technology', is being discussed again. The US under the Indo-US deal on agriculture is also putting pressure to change the IPR regime and labeling and other provisions for GE crops. GURT is in fact banned in India under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act, 2001, but there is a lot of pressure globally including at the Biosafety Protocol meeting in Curitiba this year.

It has historically been well understood that farmers own not just the crops they harvest in one season, but the seeds needed to continue their occupation as well. But with the arrival of GURT, this understanding is put at risk. The technology - which allows farmers to grow only one crop from the seeds they purchase, but does not allow the farmer to save viable seed from his crop for the next sowing - was kept in cold storage after widespread outrage at its anti-farmer focus but it is back on the corporate agenda and awaiting adoption. GURT is an example of how genetic engineering has been used not to improve a crop or bring benefits to farmers but solely to enhance the control of the seed company over the variety they have bred.

In the GURT technology two gene systems have been brought together to produce seeds with an in built mechanism that aborts development of the embryo so that germination can not take place and the seed is rendered sterile. The self -destructing seeds are actually hybrids produced by hybridising two transgenic plants, each containing one of the two gene systems. To control the induction sterility, a chemical switch has been built in. Soaking the seeds in a chemical like tetracycline can activate this switch. Once the tetracycline soaks into the seed tissue, it switches on one of the gene systems, which sets in motion the chemical process, which will abort the embryo. So in practice, the seed company can produce as much of the seed as they want and just before selling it to the farmer, they can treat the seeds with tetracycline to switch on the sterility inducing gene system.

When technological change has the potential to put the livelihood or other interests of hundreds of millions of people at risk, it must be regulated differently from other products in a free market. While promoting innovation is a valuable goal for modern economies, such innovation would be self-defeating if it resulted in social or economic upheaval. This is precisely the risk now posed by genetically engineered crops.

Dr. Suman Sahai is President of Gene Campaign, based in Delhi.
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2.Patently unfair: Rice in a private grip
By Devinder Sharma New Nation (Bangladesh), 2 Oct 2006 http://nation.ittefaq.com/artman/publish/article_31232.shtml

The journey of rice, beginning with the emergence of wild rice some 130 million years ago, transcending through the Himalayas, passing through southern China, hopping to Japan, travelling to Africa, traded to Middle East and the Mediterranean, shipped to Mexico and America, has finally ended at the banks of river Rhine in Basel, Switzerland.

Swiss biotech giant Syngenta, based at Basel in Switzerland, has tightened its monopoly control over rice. Seeking global patents over thousands of gene in rice (a single grain of rice contains 37, 544 genes, roughly one-fourth more than the genes in a human body), the multinational giant is all set to "own" rice, the world's most important staple food crop.

Interestingly, Syngenta and another seed multinational, Pioneer Hi-Bred, were earlier agitated when the European Patent Office (EPO) on May 6, 2003 upheld the European Patent No. 301,749, granted in March 1994, which provided Monsanto exclusive monopoly over all forms of genetically engineered soybean varieties and seeds -- irrespective of the genes used or the transformation technique employed. In other words, Syngenta's objection to Monsanto's claim over soybean was only to ensure that the proprietary control over food crops remains with them.

It was therefore expected. Only the trade negotiator's who have been relentlessly winding and unwinding the complex maze around intellectual proprietary at the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) negotiations, and the international scientific community, had refused to see the signs on the wall. With the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) clearly and steadily backing the biotechnology industry's agenda of private control of the world's food supply, and with the government's of major rice producing countries of Asia refusing to wake up to the emerging threats, Syngenta has been allowed scrumptiously to take control.

Delivering a keynote at the inaugural ceremony of the International Year of the Rice 2004 at Basel in Switzerland, which for reasons understandable was jointly organised by the Swiss government, this writer had warned against the strengthening of the private control over rice: "The celebration of the year 2004 as the international year of the rice is a toast to acknowledge the emergence of Switzerland on the world's rice map". Incidentally, Switzerland does not grow any rice.

A year later, Syngenta spilled the beans. In August 2005, in a communication to four NGOs -- Berne Declaration (Switzerland), Swissaid (Switzerland), the German NGO "No Patents on Life" and Greenpeace -- Adrian Dubock, head of Biotechnology ventures in Syngenta, stated: "Syngenta's original commercial interest (discontinued for now, but not necessarily for ever) was for sales in the industrialised countries of nutritionally enhanced crops, included, but not limited to rice." Accordingly, the patent on the GE rice will not be dropped because "Our shareholders wouldn't thank us if we had forgone that possibility." Yet the company claims there are no commercial interests in this technology at the moment.

The civil society groups had asked Syngenta to drop some of its rice patent claims. The proprietary claims are also aimed at other important food crops like wheat, corn, sorghum, rye, banana, fruits and vegetables besides others. The company claims that most of the gene sequences that it has 'invented' are identical in other crops and therefore the patent needs to extend to those crops also. In all, Syngenta has filed for mega-patents on 15 groups of gene sequences covering thousands of genes, peptides, transgenic plants and seeds, method of genetic engineering etc. One of the patent application, for patent 1 through 6, belongs to the 'same patent family' (application # 60/300, 112) and runs into 12,529 pages.

Syngenta claims it invented more than 30,000 gene sequences of rice. Syngenta in collaboration with Myriad Genetics Inc of USA had beaten Monsanto in the game of mapping the genetic structure of rice by sequencing more than 99.5 per cent of the rice genome. Top executives of Syngenta had then told the New York Times that while the companies would not seek to patent the entire genome, they would try to patent individual valuable genes. They categorically stated that Syngenta and Myriad were well on their way to finding many of those.

True to its words, Syngenta finally filed for global patents before the European Patent Office, US Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Rights Organisation (WIPO). Thanks to the untiring efforts of four civil society organisations, which have been on a hot trail of the patenting follies, the world would have never known the patently unfair designs of the private companies. While the company does acknowledge that the scope of many of these patents will be reduced as the examination of patents proceeds, but the mere fact that the scientific community and the Asian governments have turned into a mute spectator is worrying enough.

Syngenta's efforts to seek control over rice have severe implications for the future of rice research and its resulting impact on food security and hunger. For countries like India and Japan, one of the seats of origin of rice, it is an ominous sign. In other words, biological inheritance of the world's major food crop is now in the hands of a Swiss multinational. If Syngenta's application for global patents is accepted, the Asian countries will lose all control that comes through 'sovereign' control over genetic resources (as defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992) of the staple grain.

Staple food for more than half the world's population, rice is part of the Asian culture, rice is the unstated religion of Asia, and in essence rice is the life of Asia. It is in Asia still that more than 97 per cent of the world's rice is grown. Nearly 91 per cent of world's rice is produced in Asia, and 92 per cent is eaten in Asia. Rice is the principal food of three of the world's four most populous nations: People's Republic of China, India and Indonesia. For more than 2.5 billion people in these three countries alone - rice is what they grow up with. For centuries, rice has been the sociology, tradition and lifeline for the majority world.

Syngenta has already made it clear that the patents will restrict access to the genomic map and expects proprietary control over any research carried out with the information. By denying access to these genes of commercial value, the company will in reality block public sector science in the developing countries. At the same time, it raises serious questions over the validity of the sui generis legislations that a number of developing countries are formulating to protect the rights of the researchers and farmers. This writer has time and again warned that the sui generis laws being framed under the trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) regime is merely a strategy to allow developing countries a breathing time while the seed multinationals tighten their private control over public property.

(In essence, it is the beginning of a scientific apartheid against all Third World countries.)

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