Biodiversity

Control of seeds

Brewster Kneen

    How a society regards its seeds, whether they are  respected or abused, ‘owned’ or freely shared, is an     important expression of its culture and politics.  

Vandana Shiva, Peace Review, 12:4 (2000), 501-508

Western intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes have emerged as major
instruments of North–South inequality. Not only do they block technology
transfer, they facilitate piracy of the indigenous knowledge and biodiversity of
Third World countries. They could, if not revised and reviewed, make northern
countries into the monopoly owners of knowledge, including knowledge that has
evolved cumulatively and collectively in indigenous cultures, selling it at high cost
to already impoverished and indebted countries of the South, pushing them
further into poverty and debt. Since the majority of the people in the South
depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods and survival, the hijack of their
resources and knowledge through IPRs is the hijack of their lives and livelihoods.

Nik Heynen and Paul Robbins, CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2005)

Too often, notions of neoliberalism are fetishized so that it comes to appear as a
single, monolithic and undifferentiated process that is somehow distinct from capital-
ism, rather than as a diverse and interlinked set of practices that reflects a heightened,
evolved and more destructive form of capitalism. As opposed to an ontological
category with its own set of definitions and meanings, we stress the need to consider
neoliberalization as a process instead of neoliberalism as a “thing.”
Perhaps most problematic – and certainly contributing to the triumph of narrow
capitalist interests – is the way neoliberal ideology has been presented as an inevitable
and natural state. With certainty and conviction, neoliberal apologists have convinced
friends and foes alike that neoliberalization is fated, inescapable, and evolutionary.3
The invocation of a “politics of inevitability” make this political project especially
interesting in its encounter with the nonhuman world, as both “neoliberalism” and
“nature” have both too often been treated as static, inert, and as things unto
themselves.

Karen Bakker
Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

The 1989 privatization of the water supply sector in England and Wales is a much-cited model of market environmentalism — the introduction of market institutions to natural resource management as a means of reconciling goals of efficiency and environmental conservation.
Yet, more than a decade after privatization, the application of market mechanisms to water supply management is much more limited than had been expected.

Drawing on recent geographical research on commodities, this article analyzes the reasons for this retrenchment of the market environmentalist project. I make three related claims: resource commodification is a contested, partial, and transient process; commodification is distinct from privatization; and fresh water is a particularly uncooperative commodity.

JEREMY F. DEBEER
University of Ottawa - Faculty of Law
Journal of World Intellectual Property, Vol. 8, No. 1, p. 5, 2005
by permission

Abstract:
This essay shows how to reconcile competing intellectual, common and "classic" property rights, using plants and agricultural biotechnology as an exemplar. As intellectual property (IP) has become philosophically fashionable, other important property rights have been neglected. This is evidenced in copyright law by debates over private copying and decryption technologies. It is apparent in the realm of biotechnology and human body samples. And it is epitomized in the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser concerning patented plant genes and farmers' seed saving rights.

SEEDLING, Oct 2005 www.grain.org

Software and seeds: lessons in community sharing

Roberto Verzola
In many countries, control over information has become a big issue. An underlying aspect of this control has been the use – or threat of use – of force to establish control. The aim is often to prevent information from being freely exchanged, creating an artificial scarcity that keeps information prices high. The fight to protect such freedoms is being fought out in many different arenas. Roberto Verzola explores the synergies, similarities and differences between those trying to protect the freedom of innovators in the worlds of software and seeds.

Access to information raises a whole suite of questions about democracy, public participation, confidentiality, competition, and, indeed, intellectual property rights. More fundamentally, however, access to information goes to the question of whether information should be privately held and controlled or part of the public domain. Responses to this issue are not necessarily going to be the same in all contexts but this paper begins an examination of the conflict between public and private through an analysis of the regulation of biotechnology in Canada.

The thinking behind the paper was not one of presenting another case where privatization is winning at the expense of the public so the analysis may be disappointing from this perspective. Nonetheless, I think the paper can certainly be a starting point for these sorts of discussions – discussions that only become more important with attempts to extend data exclusivity requirements in the intellectual property chapters of international trade agreements and to expand the scope of copyright protection as is currently being attempted through Bill C-60 in Canada.

Environmental/Ecosystem Services

SEEDLING, April 2005, GRAIN
http://grain.org/seedling/?id=332

No, air, don’t sell yourself …
I don’t know who you are, but
one thing do I ask of you,
don’t sell yourself.
No, Air,
Don’t sell yourself,
Don’t let them channel you,
Don’t let them run you through tubes,
Don’t let them box you
Nor compress you,
Don’t let them make you into pills,
Don’t let them bottle you,
Take care! ...
--- Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Air”

Some 50 years ago, the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, wrote these lines in his “Ode to the Air.” At that time, everyone took these ideas as metaphor: another example of the poet’s imagination and genius. Today, in 2005, those fears imagined by Neruda have a real foundation that grows daily. The air surrounds us, allows us to breathe, messes our hair and flows freely. But along with water, the weather, the oceans and the rain, the air has become viewed as an “environmental service”, another class of merchandise available for market transactions and for which all of us must pay, like it or not.

MA Thesis, Université du Québec À Montréal, Feb. 2005

Changes to seed systems carry major implications for agriculture practices and the food system, as well as the environment. While the Canadian seed system is in the midst of a profound transformation, these
changes have not been the subject of much study and analysis. In this study, a history of the seed system is described in which change to the system is viewed within the larger processes of the industrialisation of agriculture and the restructuring of the global agri-food order. The history of the Canadian seed system is divided into three successive seed regimes: an initial seed regime where decisions over seeds were

Rene Van Acker, “Research Of the Public, By the Public and For the Public”

Manitoba Alternatives, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2004
Rene Van Acker is Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Plant Science, University of Manitoba

Truly public research provides tremendous social and economic benefits. In our time, one of the most spectacular examples of public research effort was the publicly funded effort by the United States government to put a man on the moon. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for man-kind.” The memorable, if not scripted words of Neil Armstrong reflected the remarkable scientific and technological advancement that was represented by man traveling to and walking on the moon in 1969. Because the moon shot was the culmination of innovations resulting from public science research funding on a grand scale, Armstrong should have expanded on his sound bite by adding “..and another tremendously valuable effort by public scientists funded by public research and development grants. ” The spin-off’s from the U.S. moon shot and space race were big. They include, for example, all current IT technologies. So publicly funded research is beneficial; what’s the problem? In Canada, the problem is that publicly funded research is being distracted and undermined by a shift in government research funding programs towards industry research matching funds. This policy direction creates a public research funding climate in Canada in which there is less opportunity for true innovation in science and less opportunity for public science to service the broad and long-term needs of the nation rather than the narrow and short-term desires of corporations.