ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN-INDIA: Indians Warn Europe Of Bio-piracy Dangers

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dipankar De Sarkar

LONDON, May 9 1998 (IPS) - An Indian delegation, in Europe to express Third World concerns about a planned European Union directive on life patents, now fears the directive might be allowed to slip through on account of European politicians’ “apathy”.

“We were surprised to discover that amendments to the directive had been referred to the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee. This is not a legal issue — it is a substantive issue,” said Dr Biplab Dasgupta, a senior member of the Indian Parl iament and an economist.

“The members of European Parliament that we met seemed tired of discussing the issue,” he added. “I am concerned that the Directive will go through because of their apathy.”

The directive is up for a vote at the European Parliament In Strasbourg on May 12, and Dasgupta and Indian lawyer Indira Jaisingh’s visit on the invitation of two European nongovernmental organisations is part of a last-ditch effort by NGOs to lobby agai nst its passing.

The NGOs that brought the private Indian delegation over — the London-based Gaia Foundation and the Dutch Coalition Against Patents on Life — feel a European directive on life patents will spell disaster to developing countries, particularly their farm ers.

If passed, the directive will for the first time include patents on life forms under European patent laws, in line with the extensive freedom to patent ahead of commercial exploitation already allowed in the United States.

For developing countries, this may give a free hand to Western multinationals to come and patent a variety of indigenous plants and seeds. Meanwhile public health issues are raised in the Northern countries, as the granting of patents on life forms have encouraged many manufacturers to sell genetically-modified foodstuffs that some allege are not wholly proven to be without medical risk.

~However “politicians and officials in Europe seem far more concerned about losing out to American and Japanese agri- businesses than the long term effect of such patents on developing countries,” Dasgupta told IPS in London.

India — one of 12 ‘mega-diversity’ countries that are home to most of the world’s biological resources — has seen some of that diversity targeted by a large number of so-called ‘life patents’ brought out by multinational companies selling agricultural

and pharmaceutical products.

The move, which began with India joining the World Trade Organisation a few years ago, led to the controversial issuing of a patent on a Basmati rice strain, granted by the U.S. Patent Office to an American rice company, Rice Tec, in September 1997.

The long-grain aromatic rice is native to the Indian sub- continent and is a major item of export, fetching 313 million dollars in hard currency for India alone last year.

However, Indian lawyers and scientists are said to be drawing up a challenge to the patent after successfully contesting a U.S. pharmaceutical patent last year on turmeric — a tropical Asian plant whose aromatic root Is used both as an antiseptic and a condiment.

According to Jaisingh, an Indian Supreme Court lawyer, the European directive can be a significant factor in the struggle by developing countries to preserve their biological wealth and heritage. “We want Europe to be neutral in the battle between devel oping countries and the United States,” Jaisingh said. “What is at stake is our very right to life and livelihood.”

The proposed patents directive has a long and troubled history. First introduced In 1989 and thrown out in 1995, the first reading of the present version ended up with 35 amendments attached to it in July 1997.

However, the European Commission and the European Council of Economic Ministers accepted all the amendments bar just one — the one against bio-piracy or life patents, according to campaigners.

“The European Life Patent Directive is a deliberate and shameless attempt to disregard the concerns of the European public and it contravenes the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),” says the Gaia Foundation.

“The directive as it is now, wholly aligns with the U.S. position — basically allowing patents on anything that lives,” it adds. The way the directive contravenes the CBD, seen by many as among the most democratic of international forums on this matte r, is through its definition of the term ‘invention.’

Gaia says the directive will “legalise bio-piracy” because its definition of invention has been stretched to allow the patenting of ‘discovery’. Such a move could mean, for instance, that a multinational corporation which ‘discovers’ a strain of Basmat i rice, which may have been grown for centuries by farmers in South Asia, could then pretend to have ‘invented’ an ‘improved version’ exactly as Rice Tec has done In the Indian case, campaigners say.

Based on the so-called ‘invention’– a process of refining and improving that local farmers have been doing each season for each season for centuries — the company can then seek a patent, which the developing source-country must then challenge.

“Basmati is a clear demonstration of how corporations are extending their private rights into the collective domain, appropriating both indigenous traditional knowledge and genetic materials” Gaia says.

The directive seeks to extend the requirements of the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement which presently allows patents on plants and animals to be excluded.

NGOs fear that if Europe aligns with the United States, this position could change in the year 2000, when TRIPS is due to be reviewed. Then, they fear, the world will be forced by industrial countries to allow corporations to take out patents on the crop s and medicines of the remaining bio-diversity rich lands of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Aligning European law with TRIPS also contravenes the CBD, the NGOs claim, and this according to many campaigners is where the real battle lies.

The CBD is described by the Gaia foundation as “one of the most democratic international agreements, reflecting the progress made by humanity working together on a global plan to conserve biological diversity, traditional knowledge and technologies as w all as to share equally the benefits accruing from them.

The fundamental differences between TRIPS and the CBD, whose signatories meet in Bratislava, Slovakia, this week, include the fact that while the CBD recognises states’ sovereignty over their biological resources, TRIPS tries to introduce private individ ual rights over the same.

“All members states of the CBD and TRIPS agreements face an inescapable problem. Both treaties are legally binding for signatories, but their obligations pull countries in completely different directions,” said a spokesperson for the London-based Genet ic Resources Action International (GRAIN).

If the European directive goes through in its current form it will mean in effect that the TRIPS provision will take precedence over the CBD for European governments signed up to both.

“This will create a very dangerous situation in global terms,” said Rod Harpinson of the UK Genetics Forum. “The biodiversity of poor countries has always been under a massive threat by corporations and institutions such as gene banks from rich Northe rn countries. This directive will legalise that theft.”

Dasgupta, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — a large opposition group that rules in the provinces of West Bengal and Kerala — said he and his party will mobilise public opinion In India against the bio-piracy issue.

“We are not going to keep quiet on this. We will take it up politically with the All India Kisan Sabha (Farmers’ Association) and organise massive protests throughout the country.

“Basmati is just one aspect of this thing — if the European patent law goes through without changes, all developing countries’ trade will suffer. Patents mean only exclusion.”