unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/24/89)
Sustainable Development In Jeopardy!
WHAT THE PLANT BREEDERS' RIGHTS ACT
REALLY MEANS
by Ron Elliott for GROW
Bill C-15, currently before the
parliament of Canada, threatens the health of
the public, endangers the environment, and
may cost Canadians dearly for a form of
industrial development they don't want.
Euphemistically titled The Plant Breeders'
Rights Act, the bill cuts to the core of
Canada's implicit development strategy --
particularly as far as agriculture and the
powerful new science of biotechnology are
concerned.
PBR: A EUPHEMISM FOR LIFE-PATENTING
With the passage of The Plant
Breeders' Rights Act (PBR), Canada will for
the first time allow the patenting of genetic
material; i.e., the blueprint of life itself.
alized countries that recognize plant
patents. The central thrust of The Plant
Breeders' Rights Act is to create "rights"
that would be virtual patents -- giving plant
breeders exclusive rights to market the plant
varieties they develop, for a period of
eighteen years.
In countries where plant patents have
been recognized, the concept of "product of
nature" has been steadily eroded. The Plant
Patent Act in the U.S. has led to the
patenting of livestock and pets, and in 1988
a patent was issued on a genetically-altered
mouse. Canadian economist and theologian
Brewster Kneen, warns that once the principle
of life-patenting is accepted, there are no
limits to how far it can go. Patented
people are not out of the question! "Human
characteristics could be patented and
licensed for production just the way a
McDonald's hamburger could be. Do you prefer
curly leaves (hair) or straight, long stems
(legs) or short?"
Brewster Kneen argues that life-
patenting turns all of nature into
"commodities" waiting to be "discovered" and
patented. He suggests that "The Creator God,
then, will have to argue the [opposing] case
in patent court."
CONTROL IN THE WRONG HANDS
The government maintains that PBR is
necessary in order to stimulate research into
new plant varieties. There is no question
that such research is necessary: the
revolutionary science of biotechnology, or
genetic engineering, affords real
possibilities for improving the productivity
of farmland, and pest-resistance, and
nutritional quality of food crops. The
question, however , is who should control
this research?
PBR is meant to encourage private
research as opposed to publically funded
research. GROW maintains that this is to put
control in precisely the wrong hands.
The plant patents will be taken out by
multinational seed companies -- many of which
are in turn owned by chemical companies.
In 1988 the Economist reported that
chemical companies "have spent $10 Billion or
so in as many years buying up seed companies
worldwide...." The world's 10 largest seed
companies are Pioneer Hi-Bred, Sandoz,
Dekalb-Pfizer, Upjohn, Limagrain, Shell Oil,
ICI, Ciba-Geigy, Orson and Cargill. Seven
of these 10 companies are also
involved in selling fungicides,
herbicides, insecticides and chemical
fertilizers.
AN ENVIRONMENTAL TIME-BOMB
It is naive to suppose that these
companies will develop seed varieties that
will promote environmentally-sound
agriculture. They are in the business of
selling agricultural chemicals, and it is in
their best financial interests to promote
"high-tech", capital-intensive (expensive)
agricultural practices. More than 50% of all
seed research conducted by private enterprise
at the present time, is devoted to developing
crop varieties that are tolerant to high
concentrations of fertilizers, pesticides,
and so on, rather than crop varieties that
are themselves hardy and pest-resistant.
At a time when more and more concerns
are being raised about the presence of toxic
chemicals in the food chain, PBR emerges as a
kind of environmental time-bomb. The bill
will encourage the escalating use of
chemicals in agriculture, with as yet unknown
effects on human health.
Intensive, high-input farming (using
many chemicals) is increasingly being linked
to widespread land degradation and ecological
catastrophe. The intensive farming of cotton
in the Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan area of
the U.S.S.R., is now being blamed for
reducing much of the Aral Sea to "a small
briny swamp in the middle of a salt and
chemical desert" -- causing "deadly dust-
clouds [that] destroy crops and poison the
land for hundreds of miles." Infant
mortality in the region is four times the
Soviet average, and instances of hepatitis,
typhoid, throat cancer, jaundice and gastro-
intestinal diseases have sky-rocketed. (The
Financial Post, August 7, 1989.)
MORE BURDENS ON THE FAMILY FARM
PBR will also increase the costs of
farming in Canada -- putting yet more strain
on the family farm.
The Act contains a concession that
farmers will be able to use the seeds from a
previous year's crop, without paying
additional royalties. But the price of seeds
will still no doubt rise.
A Canadian government article down-
plays the threat of increased costs to the
farmer, noting that seed costs account for
less than 10% of the cost of crop production.
But this ignores the fact that the farmer
will be using more and more chemicals.
The family farm is already in danger
of extinction in much of Canada. PBR will
make it even more difficult for farmers to
make ends meet. This means cutting corners
in terms of taking care of the land and
paying attention to the welfare of animals.
In the long run, it means a more corporate
style of farming: huge tracts exploited for
short-term gain by many machines and few
people.
VICTIMIZING THE THIRD WORLD
If the Canadian family farm is
threatened by PBR, the Third World farmer is
placed in an even worse situation.
The crops developed by the
multinational seed companies are best-suited,
if at all, to the industrialized nations,
where there are large tracts of land with
relatively fewer people to work them. In
most developing countries the situation is
much different: there are more people
needing to make a living from farming that
there is arable land. Corporate farming,
increasing reliance on a single crop
(monoculture) and the increased costs of
high-tech agriculture -- all encouraged by
the concentration of power over agriculture
in the hands of chemical and other
multinational companies -- are literally
driving people off the land in the Third
World. They are migrating to already
overcrowded cities, where they often can find
neither work or shelter.
PBR is also grossly unfair to Third
World Countries. Breeders' rights will be
issued only on newly developed seeds and
propagules. But most of the food crops we
have today, were developed from varieties
that were already genetically altered,
through selective breeding by farmers in the
Third World. Why are these varieties not to
be considered "inventions", and their
developers allowed to collect royalties on
them? In addition, virtually all of today's
major food crops were developed from genetic
resources that were freely donated by
developing countries.
As author and agricultural economist
Pat Mooney has said, "It doesn't thrill Third
World countries a whole lot to think that
their genetic diversity they've given to us
is now subject to patent." PBR is an
extension and a paradigm of the classic
North-South economic relationship, that sees
raw materials flow cheaply to the North, only
to be sold back to the South as expensive,
"manufactured" goods.
THREAT OF FOOD SCARCITY
Perhaps the greatest danger of PBR, is
that it encourages crop uniformity, and with
it the threat of food insecurity.
Because of the increasing dominance of
multinational seed companies in agriculture,
the world is becoming dependent on fewer and
fewer crop varieties. The danger inherent in
this is that at any given time a single crop
can be wiped out by disease, or a pest that
has developed a tolerance to the pesticides
currently in use. Increasing dependence
on fewer crop varieties is equivalent
to greater susceptibility to
widespread crop failure and,
consequently, famine. In his book
Altered Harvest, author Jack Doyle makes the
case that corporate control over agriculture
concentrated in ever-fewer hands, courts
global disaster.
Such a scenario is all the more
plausible, because high-tech farming requires
a constant development of new crop varieties.
Yet at the same time that we are encouraging
high-tech farming around the world. we are
losing the "gene banks" on which future
varieties depend. The bulk of the world's
genetic resources are located in threatened,
tropical ecosystems of Third World countries
-- such as the rainforests that are being
razed for development by debt-ridden
countries.
BACKPEDALLING ON SUSTAINABLE
DEVELOPMENT
In letting the direction of new seed
research be determined by market forces we
will be giving up our control over its
environmental and long-term impacts. Such a
move is in direct opposition to the concept
of sustainable development put forth by the
World Commission on Environment and
Development (the "Brundtland Commission"),
which our government has endorsed.
The concept of sustainable development
has been enthusiastically supported by
Canadians. It is defined in Our Common
Future, the final report of the Brundtland
Commission, as development that meets
the needs of future generations,
without jeopardizing the ability of
future generations to meet their own
needs. A radical re-directing of
government, industrial and trade practices is
said to be urgently required, in order to
avoid global, environmental catastrophe and
increasing starvation.
Specifically about the international
seed business, the Brundtland Commission
states that "research and development,
production, and marketing need to be highly
guided so as not to make the world even more
dependent on a few crop varieties -- or on
the product of a few multinationals." What
the government proposes with The Plant
Breeders' Rights Act and its privatization
policies, is the exact opposite of careful
control.
If the Canadian government is to
genuinely support sustainable development,
and the millions of Canadians who have
indicated environmental protection as one
of their top priorities, it must back away
from PBR and the dangerous relinquishing of
control over biotechnology and agriculture
that it represents.
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW
GROW believes that, especially given cut-
backs to Agriculture Canada (there was a loss
of 7.2% of its research positions between
1976 and 1986) private research will largely
replace public research. This is very
unlikely to work to the advantage of the
Canadian market -- since most research will
be conducted by foreign nationals in their
home countries, and Canada, with its extreme
mix of climates and geographies represents
only 5% of the total world market for seeds.
The Plant Breeders' Rights Act could
literally be passed any day. The time to
write to your MP or your local newspaper, to
organize your church membership or other
group in opposition, or to protest the bill
in any other way you can think of, is now.
The future hangs in the balance.
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* Origin: AlterNet, Node2 (Opus 1:163/113)
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