WHAT'S HAPPENING AT GREEN ACRES

CLIMATE CHANGE: Opportunity For Biopirates?
By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 2 (IPS) - Genetically modified (GM) crops that can withstand environmental stress may be one answer to climate change but a powerful lobby is building up against the patenting of technologies involved, especially when they are derivatives of traditional farmers’ innovations.

"Climate resistant traits that the agricultural biotechnology giants have been patenting have been evolved through centuries of farmers’ breeding," says Vandana Shiva, the New Delhi-based, internationally acclaimed food security campaigner.

Shiva told IPS that the gene giants were piling "one disaster upon another" by looking at climate change as a business opportunity.

"On the basis of this new form of biopiracy, the biotech industry is positioning itself as the climate saviour and making governments and the public believe that, but for them, there will be no climate resilient seeds," Shiva said. "By making broad claims on all crops and all traits, the industry is closing future options for adaptation to climate change," she added.

Shiva named four companies - BASF Bayer of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and the U.S.-based Monsanto and Du Pont as leaders in the game of trying to corner "climate-ready" genes that are known to help crops withstand floods, droughts, saltwater ingress, warmer temperatures higher ultraviolet radiation and other projected effects of climate change.

In 2001 Shiva’s activist ‘Navdanya’ group successfully challenged ownership of traits claimed by the U.S. corporation RiceTec for its variety of long-grain, aromatic basmati rice. After it was proved that RiceTec’s variety contained genetic material developed from farmers’ varieties, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office struck down the claims.

Similarly, Navdanya, along with Greenpeace and the Bharat Krishak Samaj (BKS), an Indian farmers’ group, challenged and got revoked, in October 2004, patents taken out on the Indian ‘Nap Hal’ variety of wheat by Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed corporation.

A Monsanto advertisement reads: "9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. Now what?" It then goes on to portray that GM crops are the answer, although many developing countries have rejected genetically engineered seeds and crops in favour of traditional farming that depends on saving seeds after each harvest rather than buying engineered seeds from corporations.

Last month Navdanya released a list of hundreds of climate resistant crops saved by communities in several Indian states but on which patents have been taken out by the gene giants.

The idea of publishing the list, part of report called ‘Biopiracy of Climate Resistant Crops’, was to prod India’s policy-makers to include farmers’ innovations and participatory breeding options in India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change which focuses on biotechnology.

Shiva sees hope in the fact that governments, starting with those of the G77 countries and China, are waking up to the importance of excluding climate-friendly technologies from patenting at the Jun. 1-12 negotiations on climate change in Bonn.

China and the G77 proposed that "all necessary steps be immediately taken in all relevant for a to mandatorily exclude patenting climate-friendly technologies held by Annex II countries which can be used to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

Annex II of the Convention contains a list of 24 developed countries with financial obligations. The "no patents" proposal is one of several ambitious proposals put forward by developing countries to address the intellectual property barrier to the transfer of and access to environmentally-sound technologies (ESTs) for climate mitigation and adaptation.

These proposals were submitted on "Enhanced action on development and transfer of technology", one of the five building blocks of the Bali Action Plan (BAP) adopted by Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2007.

Developed countries, in particular Japan, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and the US have been insisting on strong intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes, even opposing the use of compulsory licensing, which is allowed under the TRIPS Agreement.

The Philippines has proposed that: "All necessary steps shall be taken immediately in all relevant fora to mandatorily exclude from patenting environmentally sound technologies which can be used to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

Bolivia has proposed that Parties should "take all steps necessary in all for a to mandatorily exclude form patenting in developing countries environmentally sound technologies to adapt to or mitigate climate change including those developed through funding by governments or international agencies’’ and ‘’to revoke in developing countries all existing patents on essential/urgent environmentally sound technologies to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

The Bolivian proposal also speaks of immediately creating and providing ‘’new and additional financing that is adequate, predictable and sustainable for joint technology excellence centres in developing countries, to enable entities in these countries to do research and development especially on adaptation as well as mitigation technologies’’.

Last year the Ottawa-based ETC Group, an activist organisation that champions the cause of subsistence farmers, released a report showing that the biotech majors were leveraging climate change as a way to break into seed markets.

ETC had warned in its report, "Patenting the 'Climate Genes' . . . and Capturing the Climate Agenda," of the dangers to public-sector breeding through corporate consolidation of the seed market and documented in it about 530 applications for climate-related plant genes.

At the Bonn negotiations the concern of the chair was evident in its proposal for the establishment of a committee, an advisory panel, or designate body to "proactively address patents and related IPR issues to ensure that both increased innovation and increased access to both for mitigation and adaptation technologies"