Hope Not Hype - Third World Network

118 Hope Not Hype
Conclusions
The change in IPR frameworks in the latter half of the 20th century in the developed
countries set in motion a type of revolution in agriculture. That revolution has extended
private control of the fundamental sources of food and nutrition on this planet. It is sobering
to realize that only 30 crops supply 95% of the calories and protein, and only 14
“domesticated mammalian and bird species provide 90 per cent of human food supply
from animals” (FAO, 2006). This number is slightly larger, but still surprisingly small,
when analyzed on a country basis. “Analysis of food energy supplies on a country by
country basis shows that 90% of the per caput food plant supplies of all nation states are
provided by only 103 plant crops” (FAO, 1997, p. 15). The “six most widely grown crops
in the world are wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, barley and sorghum. Production of these
crops accounts for over 40% of global cropland area, 55% of non-meat calories and over
70% of animal feed” (Lobell and Field, 2007, p. 1). By no coincidence, the crops that are
most quickly being appropriated by the IPR of the private sector are represented in this
list.
The change in IPR has been a combination of changing some longstanding intellectual
property instruments and the extension of patents to germplasm. The freedom to do research
and to innovate on plants, animals and microbes is taken away by the extension of patent
and patent-like instruments to this level. The concurrent commercialization of the publicly
funded research sector accelerates the pace at which the world’s germplasm is being
described, catalogued and removed from the knowledge commons.
Through the patenting of their inventions, public-sector research institutions could transfer
rights over a technology to established commercial partners or to new entrepreneurial startups,
which could then finance further development of the technology. In plant molecular biology
the result has been a proliferation of patenting by both private and public-sector institutions.
The proliferation of [IPR] among multiple owners in agricultural biotechnology appears to
have affected the rate and direction of innovation, a result of the so-called intellectual
“anticommons” as has been observed in biomedical research (Graff et al., 2003, p. 989).
Meanwhile, IPR instruments undermine the stability of local agroecosystems by
inhibiting the development of local markets based on a cash or barter system. The
concentration of IPR-holding entities in the developed world moves the products of
traditional knowledge, plants and animals bred and optimized for generations or maintained
consciously or unconsciously through in situ conservation, out of the local conditions, and
thus undermines local control and the integrity of the AKST itself, which may not transfer
with the product or may be lost in the more focused activities of the IPR holders.
The Assessment was not naïve to the benefits of IPR instruments. However, they
evolved through a different iterative process in the developed world, where actors were
more evenly matched during the process. Imposition of IPR instruments in their modern
form – notably a form that is optimized to wealth generation in developed countries – on
societies and economic and legal systems in the developing world is not a formula for
poverty reduction and growth of AKST, at least not at the proportion of control they are
being given by the maldistribution of large corporate control of innovation.