THE world鈥檚 poorest farmers should be paid royalties for all the plants they
have given to profit-making companies over the years, one of the architects of
the Green Revolution told the plant diversity conference.
International bodies such as the World Trade Organization don鈥檛 do enough to
give traditional farmers a cut of the huge profits made by the global seeds
business, Indian plant geneticist Monkombu Swaminathan told the conference. As
custodians of most of the world鈥檚 plant genetic resources, these farmers have
given a wealth of plant varieties to seed companies and plant breeders, he said.
鈥淭he time has come to end the sad irony of the poverty of the conservers in
contrast to the prosperity of those utilising the fruits of their
办苍辞飞濒别诲驳别.鈥�
There are plans in the pipeline to compensate farmers鈥攂ut not in the
direct way Swaminathan proposes. After six years of negotiations, some 160
nations at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization are close to agreeing on the
first legally binding rules about plant genes, says Geoff Hawtin,
director-general of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome.
The agreement will guarantee plant breeders and researchers access to the seeds
of major crops. In return they will pay royalties to the governments of the
countries the seeds came from, who in turn will compensate the farming
communities that nurtured them. How they do it will be left up to the
governments, says Hawtin.
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Other researchers are sceptical that these promises will achieve anything.
鈥淭here are to date no concrete proposals on giving practical meaning and content
to the concept of farmers鈥� rights,鈥� says the geneticist Gian Scarascia Mugnozza,
who is chairman of Italy鈥檚 National Academy of Sciences.
Swaminathan believes that farmers should have direct rights to patent
royalties, especially now that biotechnology has made new plant varieties more
lucrative than ever.
The WTO鈥檚 Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights provisions (TRIPS)
reward plant breeders who innovate and invest, but they give nothing to the
farmers 鈥渨ho have conserved the basic raw material used by the breeders鈥�, says
Swaminathan. If TRIPS is not overhauled, he says, farmers will abandon their
traditional conservation methods, and the 鈥渇eedstock鈥� of the seed industry will
be lost.
Royalties should be paid retrospectively, says Swaminathan, whose development
of new rice varieties 30 years ago did much to kick-start the boom in the seed
industry. Breeders should be made to 鈥渄isclose the full pedigrees of their
varieties鈥�, so that farmers can be compensated for past acts of biopiracy.
Thanks to modern molecular techniques, says Swaminathan, it is as easy to trace
the traits extracted from plant genes back to the farming communities that
produced them as it is to trace the holder of a winning lottery ticket.