INFORMATION ABOUT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS No.3

Each spring, seeds push through the furrowed earth like ships bearing the cargo of millenia. What they carry within is both an antique and a promise, the treasure trove of the earth's genetic diversity. Today, these awesome vessels of power are threatened by a new form of piracy, one which can destroy diversity itself in the blind rush to capture its fruits.

For centuries, seeds moved freely across the continents on the wind, in birds' bellies, in traders' caravans, conquerors' pockets, and imigrants' knapsacks. They were available to all, the sole property of none, the common heritage of the planet earth.

The common misunderstanding about the world's seeds is that they were naturally occurring. But behind every food crop seed there was a long line of farmers who literally created them through a process the Mende people of Sierra Leone call "hungoo," meaning innovation or invention. Just as the yucca moth and the yucca cactus have evolved together, so have the world's people and its grains.

Early on, the forerunners of agribusinesses transplanted bananas and sugarcane from Asia and coffee from Africa to Latin America and produced them in heavily policed plantations for export to European countries. The French outlawed the export of indigo seed from Antigua and the Dutch destroyed all of the nutmeg and clove trees in the Molucca Islands after they had established their own plantations. By separating the seed from its cultural root, the colonizers changed it forever from the living symbol of a community's history into a commodity.

The United States is known as the breadbasket of the world-yet of the food and industrial crops so abundantly harvested each fall, only one, the sunflower, is native to this continent. All 15 U.S. food crops worth $1 billion or more depend on genetic material from other countries: corn, potatoes, tomatoes and cotton from Latin America; rice and sugar cane from Indochina; soybeans and oranges from China; wheat, barley, grapes and apples from West Central Asia.

In the early 1960 s, the United States passed a law granting plant breeders the rights to patent seeds, thus preventing others from selling the same variety. Having made billions of dollars on seeds developed by farmers in other lands, seed companies are now taking the final step to ensure a neverending source of revenue. They are trying to force all countries to recognize patents on seeds through a set of trade accords called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. If they succeed, farmers will be forced to pay royalties to companies who hold patents on the genetic material they or their ancestors helped to shape.

This new form of genetic piracy has an interesting name, "intellectual property rights," which are defined as the rights to protection of innovation. Intellectual property rights would only be recognized when they generated profit, which occurs when a worker pulls a gene out of a seed in a Boston laboratory, but not when a Mende farmer saves some seeds and rejects others. Intellectual property rights are also only respected when the innovation is capable of industrial application. Pioneer Hi-Bred can be protected when it mass produces seed varieties, but the Indian farmer who collects and saves seeds for next year's planting cannot.

This means that innovation that took place in communities over centuries, or even inovation in plant varieties that takes place in the present in a communal fashion, is not eligible for protection. As more power is concentrated in the hands to the corporate gene manipulators, the genetic diversity that has been tended by farmers in millions of fields around the world is lost.

On October 2, 1993, 500,000 Indian farmers demonstrated against passage of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and vowed to protect their right to produce and protect their own seeds. They created a charter of farmers' rights, especially the right to conserve, reproduce, and modify seed and plant material. They speak for the rest of the farmers of the world who want to continue their partnership of hungoo with the vegetable kingdom. Resistance to the piracy of the earth's diversity could ensure that for future generations, seeds will continue to be the fruit of our common heritage and not the exclusive property of the gene splicers.

This is a condensed version of an article originally published in The Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre 20th Annual May Day Parade Commerative Booklet, May 1994, Minneapolis, MN.

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