They have been grown for hundreds or thousands of years by resource-poor peasants often just able to scratch a living out of their subsistence farming. But today they are targeted by western laboratories, agronomists, biologists, food- and pharmaceutical companies, eager to develop new products for their spoilt customers, products that are based on the traditional knowledge of indigenous people.
500 years ago the Spanish conquerors of South America found strange crops they had never seen before. There were white, yellow or purple roots, which tasted like a mix of celery, cabbage and chestnut, beans that blew up like popcorn, cucumbers of yellow or purple color and sweet as honeydew melons, in trees grew creamy fruits looking like tomatoes but of the size of a water melon which combined the tastes of papaya, banana and pineapple. In all about 70 different cereals, vegetables and arable crops were cultivated on terraced fields in the mountains of the Andes. But since they were cultivated by the “heathen” Incas the pious Spaniards considered these plants the devil’s temptations and destroyed them.
Some 20 years ago the American „National Research Council“ explored this agricultural wonderland of the Andes and rediscovered “the lost field fruits of the Incas”, as the study called them. “For 500 years the world has overlooked this fantastic richness of foodstuffs”, said Noel Vietmeyer of the research center. “Some of them are immediately ready for mass production.”
Encouraged by this success Hugh Popenoe of the International Agriculture Program of the University of Florida expected the biotechnology to find ways “that will make it more profitable, to rummage through nature’s pantry.”
After all our planet offers at least 20 000 edible plants of which 3000 at some time in history were on the menu of mankind. But “only of about a hundred we enjoyed all possibilities”, said Vietmeyer. “And basically it’s only 20 of them that feed the whole planet.”
Americans and Europeans every once in a while complain about copyright infringements on Hollywood movies, computer programs or downloaded music, and regularly threaten with one of their big sticks, the Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIP) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). But they themselves have no scruples to claim and misappropriate even the last remaining resources of the developing countries that they haven’t touched until now.
Just as in old times when Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace or Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn collected samples of plants, insects and animals without even thinking to ask the locals for permission, today multinational companies are busy patenting all kinds of plants they can find even in the remotest corners of the Earth. Bio prospecting is all the rage in the Western scientific and business world: after the gold rush, the gene rush.
1997 US Patent No. 5,304,718 granted the two Colorado State University professors Duane Johnson and Sarah Ward the exclusive monopoly control over the “Apelawa”, one of many traditional varieties of the quinoa, called by the Aymara and Quechua indigenous people of Peru and Bolivia the “Mother of all Corn”, which is extremely rich in proteins.
In April 1999 the US patent office granted a patent filed by Colorado-based Pod-ners LLC who claim to have invented a yellow bean. In fact, Pod-ners admitted that the original beans were purchased in a pack of mixed beans in Mexico. By growing and self-pollinating only the yellow beans for three generations, the patent for the “Enola” bean that “produces distinctly yellow coloured seed” was submitted.
According to the “National Research Council’s” study the “nuñas”, the bean’s counterpart of the popcorn, “open in boiling oil like butterflies with colourful patterns of red, white or black dots.” They taste like roasted peanuts, perfectly suited as snack food. With such sweet promises of profit in mind, Appropriate Engineering and Technology took out another US patent on this popbean.
Spectacular was the career of the Indian neem tree. For 2000 years in India neem twigs have been chewed on to clean teeth, neem leaf juice applied on skin to treat disorders, neem tea drunk as a tonic, and neem leaves placed in the home to ward off bugs. Since times long gone doctors use various parts of the neem tree to cure high blood pressure, diabetes, hepatitis, and an herbal vaginal tablet has proven to be effective in immobilizing sperm. Farmers use it as an herbicide. Pamela Paterson, an American scientist, wrote: “Even in Western medicine, the list of reported medicinal benefits in published studies is extensive.” In a table of “Medicinal Applications of Neem” she listed “abortifacient, antibacterial, anti-carcinogenic, anti-clotting, anti-fertility, antifungal, anti-hepatic, anti-hyperglycemic, anti-inflammatory, anti-implantation, anti-leprosy, anti-malarial, antimicrobial, anti-mutagenic, anti-rheumatic, antiseptic, anti-tuberculosis, antiulcer, antiviral, anti-worm, blood detoxifier, diuretic, eye diseases, immunomodulatory, pimples, skin diseases, spermical.”
In 1985 an American Wood-trader was granted a US patent for a neem extract called Margosan-O which he sold to the chemical giant W.R. Grace & Co. This operation opened the floodgates. Only in the first ten years (between 1985 and 1995) no less than 37 patents on neem products were granted in the United States and in Europe. Even a neem toothpaste was on sale.
Another case is rice. The people in India developed over 5000 years more than 200 000 varieties of rice. Some grow well during droughts, others can withstand pests. Some have long and slender grains, others are slow cooking or medicinal. Some are sticky, some are light. Basmati rice is known for its unique aroma and flavor, which is why Basmati translates into “queen of aroma”. There are 27 documented varieties of Basmati rice grown in India.
In December 1997 the Texan company RiceTec of Prince Hans-Adam von Liechtenstein was granted the US Patent No. 5,663,484 on basmati rice. RiceTec began to sell a “new variety” of Basmati that was derived from farmer’s varieties. After an international outcry and a short diplomatic row between New Delhi and Washington, RiceTec gave up its patent. There are many more applications for patents on rice by various companies.
RiceTec had falsely claimed a derivation as an invention or a novelty. A patent can only be issued if it meets the three criteria of novelty, non-obviousness and utility. Novelty implies that the innovation must be new, must not be part of existing knowledge. Non-obvious implies that someone familiar in the art should not be able to achieve the same step.
The seeds for example of rice are put into the gene bank of the Rice Research Institute which is controlled by the International Agricultural Research Centers under the Consultative group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). Groups like the CGIAR facilitate biopiracy, as they are funded by donor countries who give foreign aid investment for research. These donor countries (e.g. USA, Canada, UK, Australia) receive billions of dollars in annual returns from crops obtained through the centers.
International law acknowledges the national right of every country on its flora. Countries like India, Mexico or Indonesia try to defend their rights. There is even an agreement between the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation and groups like the CGIAR stating that seeds from such gene banks should not be patentable. But once a scientist has done breeding work, material can be patented. Usually it takes years until a case of bioparicy is decided in an international court. More often than not, the validity of an issued patent has run out before a decision in the court is made.
Time and again the governments of the concerned developing countries tried to propose negotiations about international agreements on bio-security and to protect the biological diversity. Until today the United States as a matter of routine rejected every one of these attempts, and accused the initiators of such efforts to obstruct the international free trade, and threatened to sanction them.
Indonesia too had her rows with various institutions of the United States. In 2007, at the height of the bird flu scare, Indonesia stopped sending WHO laboratories samples of the H5N1 bird flu virus from new outbreaks. The labs analyze and gene-sequence the samples, looking for new variations that might herald the much-feared mutation of the virus into a human-to-human transmissible form. But data from the samples is also used by pharmaceutical companies to develop new vaccines. Former Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari’s suspicions about the possibility of Indonesia being excluded from the commercial success of these new vaccines based on samples from her country are all too justified. At nearly every WTO summit whenever they try to negotiate a permission to produce patent medicines locally and cheaper, the representatives of the developing countries are met with a rebuff from the so-called industrialized countries who would not give up on their profits.
With the backing of their government it is of no wonder that US companies now also try to patent human DNA data. 1993 the US Department of Commerce and Trade received an application to grant a patent on the T-cell of a Guaymi woman from Panama. She was infected by the rare human HTLV virus which is considered to be of use in fighting cancer. After international protests the application was cancelled. The Namru-2 laboratory, which shares its research activities with commercial pharmaceutical companies in North America, between 1992 and 1995 collected blood samples in Papua. According to the Institute of Medicine, in 2001, this US Navy run lab, which is widely considered to be too secretive, collected about 300,000 virus samples in different parts of Indonesia. By today this number is bound to be much higher. At the time the US National Institute of Health failed to patent the DNA of a man of the Hagahai in Papua New Guinea. Still, the applications to grant patents on the genes of indigenous people have multiplied since then, and today everybody can openly buy blood cells of Indians of the Amazon in the Internet.