DEVEOPMENT-ASIA: Big Business Erodes Farmers’ Rights -Activists

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 31 2002 (IPS) - Thai environmentalists are closely watching attempts by agribusiness companies to wield more influence in the local production and distribution of rice seeds, a move that they say could undermine the livelihood of the country’s rice farmers in the future.

The activists received another reminder of such attempts Tuesday, when the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP Group), Thailand’s largest agribusiness venture, went public with its plans to triple by next year the amount of rice seeds it supplies the country’s farmers.

Currently, the CP Group supplies about 15,000 tonnes of the seeds needed for rice production.

“We have to be vigilant about the consequences of such a move,” says Witoon Lianchamroon, director of the Bangkok-based BioThai, an environment and community rights activist group. “We need to make sure that greater private sector involvement does not lead to an assault on the rights of Thai farmers.”

What worries Witoon is the prospect of “CP Group replacing the government” as the major distributor of rice seeds.

The Thai government now supplies an estimated 60 percent of rice seeds to the farmers. This agreement ensures that farmers can continue to save the seeds they need for future harvests, as they have traditionally done.

The Thai farmers’ rights are secure if this arrangement is maintained, notes Witoon, but adds that it could all end if “the government permits agribusiness companies to gain a monopoly on the production and distribution of rice seeds, thus marginalising the farmers”.

The concern among the BioThai activists comes at a time when other activists across Asia, campaigning for the environment and on farmers’ rights, are raising the alarm about the livelihood of the region’s farmers being threatened by agribusiness giants.

“Corporate agriculture has succeeded in wiping out the rights and controls farmers traditionally had over their crops in the West. It is now setting its sight on the farming communities in Asia,” says Suman Sahai, president of the New Delhi-based Gene Campaign, a group working with rural people.

“We have to respond,” she asserts. “Farmers have to be protected from agrochemical giants coming to the developing world and patenting agriculture products that undermine the traditional rights of our farmers and their communities.”

Already, transnational companies have made moves to control agricultural research, like new varieties of rice seeds, in Asia, says Renee Vellve, researcher at the genetic erosion monitoring group GRAIN in the Philippines. “It will have a negative impact on public research of new rice varieties in the region.”

Available records buttress such fears. By September 2000, for instance, 609 patents on rice genes had been granted to rice breeders working for multinational companies, like Monsanto, DuPont, Aventis and Syngenta. The United States is home to some 45 percent of these rice gene patents, which include the 95 patents held by DuPont and 36, by Monsanto.

“The multinationals are aware of the economic potential Asian rice fields offer,” says Sahai, who points to how 60 to 80 percent of people in Asian countries are in the agricultural sector, as opposed to a mere two percent in the industrialised countries.

More than 90 percent of the world’s rice is consumed in Asia. The region is home to the six countries that account for 70 percent of the world’s rice trade, some 16.5 million tonnes of the grain out of the global total of 23.2 million tonnes. They include China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, Burma and Thailand.

Thailand was the world’s leading rice exporter last year, shipping some 6.5 million tonnes of rice. Those exports included nearly two million tonnes of the long-grain aromatic jasmine rice, a grain developed by farming communities in Thailand’s north-east.

For farmers’ rights activists, the presence of Thai jasmine rice or ‘basmati’, the famed Indian rice variety, is proof that farming communities are anchored in “intelligent and hard work” and traditional knowledge in producing a variety of rice seeds.

“Nature did not produce that rice,” asserts Sahai. “It is the work of farming communities and that right needs to be protected.”

But farmers’ rights to continue their traditional practices are being undermined by pressure from industrialised countries to get developing countries to fall in line with the criteria of the Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV), adds Vellve

The UPOV, which came out in Europe in the early 1960s, was meant to serve the interest of corporate sector breeders and industrial agriculture, she says. It protects the rights of seed breeders, including patent rights for new seeds they develop.

“The industrialised countries are pushing hard to get UPOV adopted by the developing countries under the WTO (World Trade Organisation) rules,” Vellve points out. “The UPOV is completely favourable to the rice breeders and offers hardly any protective measures to the rice farmers.”

That view was shared by farmers’ rights advocates and environmentalists from 10 Asian countries, who gathered here last week to discuss strategies to help the Asian rice farmer.

Discussions about ways of lobbying national legislatures to enact laws, like a farmers’ rights act, dominated the two-day meeting. An Indian law, the Plant Variety Protection and Farmers’ Rights act 2001, was held up as one model for Asian countries to follow.

This act puts farmers’ rights on par with plant breeders’ rights. “The new law now recognises the farmer not just as a cultivator but also as a conservor of the agricultural gene pool and a breeder who has bred several successful varieties,” states a report by Gene Campaign’s Sahai.

The Indian law protects farmers from having the rice seeds they develop in their communities “scavenged by formal sector breeders”. It permits the farmer to “sell seed in the way he has always done, with restrictions that this seed cannot be branded with the breeder’s registered name”.

Experts at the workshop also reviewed Thailand’s Plant Varieties Protection Act of 1999, a law that has special provisions that protect both farmers’ and community rights over local domestic plant varieties, such as jasmine rice.

It also states that revenues gained from research and development of plant varieties will be channelled to the local communities that supplied the seed varieties.

“Under this act the farmers also have the right to save seeds for future harvests,” affirms Witoon. “The strength of this law will be tested with agribusiness companies trying to play a greater role in supplying seeds to farmers.”