Stolen Harvest Part 3

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STOLEN HARVEST

THE HIJACKING OF THE GLOBAL FOOD SUPPLY

VANDANA SHIVA

SOUTH END PRESS           2000

PART 1II

 

Chapter 2: Soy Imperialism and the Destruction of Local Food Cultures

Chapter 3: The Stolen Harvest under the Sea

Chapter 4: Mad Cows and Sacred Cows

Chapter 5: The Stolen Harvest of Seed

For more than 10,000 years, farmers have worked with nature to evolve thousands of crop varieties to suit diverse climates and cultures. Indian farmers have evolved thousands of varieties of rice. Andean farmers have bred more than 3,000 varieties of potatoes. In Papua New Guinea, more than 5,000 varieties of sweet potatoes are cultivated.

This tremendous diversity has been the basis of our food supply, but today it is under threat from genetic erosion and genetic piracy. Monocultures and monopolies are destroying the rich harvest of seed given to us over millennia by nature and farming cultures.

From the 250,000 to 300,000 species of plants alive today, at least 10,000 to 50,000 are edible. Seven thousand species have been farmed and used for food. Just 30 species provide 90% of world calorie intake, and only four species – rice, maize, wheat, and soybean – provide most of the calories and proteins consumed by the world’s population through global trade.

  • As global markets replace local markets, monocultures replace diversity.

In 1996, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) organized the Leipzig Conference on Plant Genetic Resources, which identified the introduction of new crop varieties as the single most important cause of this massive loss of species diversity and native seeds. But diversity is under assault not just by monocultures but also by monopolies.

Monocultures and monopolies

Industrial agriculture promotes the use of monocultures because of its need for centralized control over the production and distribution of food. In this way, monocultures and corporate monopolies reinforce each other. Today, three processes are intensifying monopoly control over seed, the first link in the food chain: economic concentration, patents and intellectual property rights, and genetic engineering.

Monsanto, which was earlier recognized primarily through its association with Agent Orange, today controls a large section of the seed industry. Between 1995 and 1998, Monsanto spent over $8 billion buying seed companies. Monsanto holds a controlling interest in Calgene, a California-based plant biotechnology firm that launched the “Flavr-Savr” tomato. In 1996, it bought the biotechnology assets of Agrecetus, a subsidiary of W.R. Grace, for $150 million. In 1997, it purchased Asgrow from Seminis for $267 million.

In November 1997, Monsanto acquired Holden Seeds at 30 times its market value. Between 25% and 30% of the U.S. corn acreage is estimated to be planted with Holden seeds. In May 1998, Monsanto announced a $2.3 billion takeover of Dekalb, the United States second-largest corn company, making Monsanto the dominant player in the corn market.

For $1.8 billion, Monsanto purchased Delta and Pine Land, giving Monsanto an overwhelming 85% share of the U.S. cottonseed market and a dominant global position in the cotton farming industry. Monsanto also now owns the joint U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-Delta and Pine Land patent for what’s been called “terminator technology,” a method of creating sterile seeds.

In July 1998, Monsanto bought Unilever’s European wheat-breeding business for $525 million. This acquisition is part of its push to monopolize the production and sale of genetically engineered wheat. Monsanto has also bought a large stake in India’s largest seed company, MAHYCO, at 24 times the market value, and has formed a Monsanto-MAHYCO joint venture. According to Monsanto’s Jack Kennedy, the company plans to “penetrate the Indian agricultural sector in a big way. MAHYCO is a good vehicle.” For $1.4 billion, Monsanto bought Cargill’s international seed operations in Central and Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

  • Dominating the seed, pesticide, food, pharmaceutical, and veterinary products industries along with Monsanto are Novartis, which was formed via a merger of Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, and Aventis, which was formed with the merger of Astra/Zeneca and DuPont.
  • DuPont has fully acquired Pioneer Hi-bred, the world’s largest seed company, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, “effectively divides most of the U.S. seed industry between DuPont and Monsanto.

 

The terminator logic: engineering total control

In March 1998, the USDA and the Delta and Pine Land Company announced the joint-development and patent on a new agricultural bio-technology benignly called “Control of Plant Gene Expression.” The new patent permits its owners and licensees to create sterile seeds by selectively programming the plant’s DNA to kill its own embryos. The patent, which has been applied for in at least 78 countries, applies to plants and seeds of all species. The USDA, a government agency, receives a 5% profit from the sales of these seeds, which it considers a built-in “gene police.”

  • If farmers save seeds of these plants at harvest for future crops, the next generation of plants will not grow.
  • The system will force farmers to buy new seeds from seed companies every year.
  • RAFI and other groups have dubbed the method “terminator technology,” claiming that it threatens farmers’ independence and the food security of over 1 billion poor farmers in Third World countries.
  • Given nature’s incredible adaptability and the fact that the technology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that the terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment is a serious one.
  • The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.
  • Third World governments and farmers have rejected these “gene control” technologies. The Indian government has stated that it will not allow the terminator technology to enter India.

As a result of international outrage, Monsanto announced in October 1999 that it would abandon plans to commercialize terminator technology. However, Monsanto will continue to develop other hazardous technologies, including those to control seed.

Seed piracy

Seed and crops have been celebrated as sources of life’s renewal and as the embodiment of fertility. In Asia, rice has been an important source of both nourishment and cultural identity.

  • Before the Green Revolution introduced monocultures that destroyed species diversity, more than 200,000 varieties of rice were grown in India.
  • Every year India grows 650,000 tons of Basmati rice, covering 10% to 15% of the total land area under rice cultivation in India.

A recent patent threatens to pirate farmers’ innovation and monopolizes this trade. On September 2, 1997, the Texas-based RiceTec, Inc was granted patent number 5663484 on Basmati rice lines and grains. RiceTec got patent rights on Bamati rice and grains while already trading rice in its brand names such as Kasmati, Texmati, and Jasmati. The patent will allow RiceTec to sell internationally what it claims to be a new variety of Basmati, developed under the name of Bamati.===

  • RiceTec’s patented Basmati variety was derived from Indian Basmati crossed with semi-dwarf varieties including indica varieties.
  • These varieties are farmers’ varieties bred over centuries on the Indian subcontinent.
  • RiceTec’s method of crossing different varieties to mix traits – in this case, the Basmati characteristics from Basmati and the semi-dwarf characteristics – is not novel. It is a very commonplace method of breeding.
  • The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued RiceTec a broad patent, calling RiceTec’s Basmati and its breeding “novel,” producing a rice with “characteristics similar or superior to those of good quality Basmati rice.”
  • The RiceTec patent treats derivation as creation and piracy as invention. The U.S. Patent Office has protected not invention but biopiracy.
  • The costs to Indian agriculture would be huge. The livelihoods of 250,000 farmers growing Basmati in India and Pakistan would be jeopardized. Market monopolies would exclude the original innovators from their rightful access to local, national, and global markets.

The piracy of Basmati is just one example of how corporations are claiming “intellectual property rights” to the biodiversity and indigenous innovations of the Third World, robbing the poor of the last resources that allow them to survive outside the global marketplace. Other examples include patents on pepper, ginger, mustard, neem, and turmeric.

The theft of Kanak

WTO and the promotion of biopiracy

Biopiracy is promoted by U.S. laws and World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements that globalize Western-style “intellectual property rights.” There are certain distortions in U.S. law that facilitate the patenting process for companies. One such distortion is the interpretation of “prior art.” It permits patents to be filed on discoveries made in the United States, whether or not identical ones already exist and are in use in other parts of the world. Unless this part of U.S. patent law (Section 102) is amended, new examples of biopiracy will continue to occur.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) on trade-related intellectual-property rights (TRIPS) calls for a system of uniform patent laws by 1999, discounting the differences in ethics and value systems of Third World nations, where life is sacred and exempt from patenting.

  • TRIPS has been at the heart of people’s resistance to the WTO. When protests and parliamentary debates resulted in the Indian government not implementing TRIPS, the U.S. government initiated a WTO dispute against India.
  • In 1998, the WTO ruled that India’s failure to amend its patent law was illegal according to GATT.
  • India is being held guilty under the WTO “constitution,” because the Indian people, the Indian Parliament, and the Indian government have acted democratically in accordance with the rights and duties bestowed on them by their national constitution.

 

Patents and police states

Intellectual-property rights and patents reorganize relationships between the human species and other species, and within the human community. Instead of the culture of the seed’s reciprocity, mutuality, permanence, and exhaustless fertility, corporations are redefining the culture of the seed to be about piracy, predation, the termination of fertility, and the engineering of sterility.

  • Seed legislation forces farmers to use only “registered” varieties. Since farmers’ varieties are not registered, and individual small farmers cannot afford the costs of registration, they are slowly pushed into dependence on the seed industry.
  • In the United States, direct farmer-to-farmer exchange is illegal, as established by a case filed by the Asgrow Seed Company, now owned by Monsanto, against Dennis and Becky Winterboers.
  • In 1998, Monsanto hired Pinkerton detectives to harass more than 1,800 farmers and seed dealers across the United States, with 475 potentially criminal “seed piracy” cases already under investigation.
  • The most dramatic case of criminalization is that of Percy Schmeiser of Saskatchewan, Canada. In a landmark case, Monsanto is suing Schmeiser for saving seeds, despite the fact that he did not buy Monsanto seeds. Rather, his fields were invaded by Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola. Pollen from Roundup ready crops is blowing all over the Canadian prairie and is invading farms such as Schmeiser’s. But instead of paying Schmeiser for biological pollution, Monsanto is suing him for “theft” of its property.
  • Monsanto also sponsors a toll free “tip line” to help farmers blow the whistle on their neighbors. According to RAFI’s Hope Shand, “Our rural communities are being turned into corporate police states, and farmers are being turned into criminals.”

 

Chapter 6: Genetic Engineering and Food Security

Chapter 7: Reclaiming Food Democracy

Afterword

Index

About the Author

About South End Press

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