Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

112 Hope Not Hype
The huge proportion of private innovation largely limits the range of biotechnology
products that will become available. These limitations will persist if the industrialized
countries continue to push for IPR frameworks that are too simplistic and inappropriate.
Western-style IPRs for biodiversity (including TK about biodiversity) associated with local
or indigenous societies are inadequate…In the Western tradition, they recognize individuals
rather than groups of individuals. In indigenous societies, the development of landraces cannot
be attributed to specific individuals. They are often the result of selection [by] generation
after generation of farmers. Furthermore, landraces or ethnobotanical knowledge are often
exchanged among farmers or indigenous people, primarily from the same extended family of
the same or different villages. In addition, farmers sometimes actively promote hybridization
between landraces and modern cultivars. Thus, there is no specific act of invention in the
development of landraces that can be traced to documented events as in Western inventions
(Gepts, 2004, p. 1303).
Present frameworks provide too much coverage compared to the intellectual property
being claimed (Heinemann, 2002; Williamson, 2002).
There are also suggestions that redesigning patent laws to narrow the type and scope of patent
coverage ought to make more technologies accessible to public institutions. The thinking
behind these suggestions is that applying a stronger standard for rejecting patent applications
for inventions that are ‘obvious’ should deter the patenting of minor inventions. In addition,
a law that requires an invention to be genuinely useful in theory should reduce the number of
patent applications being submitted. At present, it is possible in some countries to submit
patent applications for abstract concepts that potentially protect large areas of research and
thereby exclude innovation by others (WHO, 2005, p. 43).
The Assessment agreed with other expert groups that IPR frameworks were in need
of significant reform.
As the rush to patent DNA sequences progresses, there is legitimate concern that a
few large companies will own too much of the world’s crop and domestic animal germplasm
for the public sector and individual farmer to continue to make progress in research for
sustainability and social equity goals. In one sense, it might seem reassuring that the large
companies are pursuing the identification of genes related to adapting plants to stresses
caused by climate change (Appendix Two), for example, because it implies an interest in
applying modern biotechnology to traits relevant to yield. However, since these kinds of
genes are involved in many aspects of plant physiology and reproduction, it amounts to
capture of plant germplasm (Weis, 2008).
These mega firms are now competing in a new race: the race of plant genomics, which would
allow them rapid access to genetic information on the qualitative or agronomic traits of
cultivated plants; and allow them to secure their research and development through patents
(Pingali and Traxler, 2002, pp. 227-228).