GENEVA: Global food security is under threat from “bio-pirates” who take plants from developing countries, change them slightly then patent the new varieties, according to anti-poverty groups and activists.

“Today’s pirates are cheating the poor and are now emerging as a threat to people’s right to food,” ActionAid, an international development agency campaigning against the causes of poverty, said its recent “Crops and Robbers” report.

“The ability of farmers to put food on the table to feed their families is being undermined by patents and the patent system which is agreed and supported by mainly western countries,” said Zoe Elford, an ActionAid campaigner on food rights.

Groups like ActionAid accuse companies of stealing the natural resources of developing countries. They say putting intellectual property rights (IPR) on crops creates unfair profit potential.

“It’s unacceptable for a corporation to take the genetic resources that farmers have developed and conserved, do some tweaking and then claim a private monopoly on the material,” said Renee Vellve at GRAIN, a non-governmental body which promotes biodiversity.

The increasing use of genetic modification only exacerbates the problem, says Lorenzo Consoli, GMO advisor at Greenpeace.

He says rich companies find themselves in a “win-win” situation: They have the copyright on the seed, they sell seed to the farmers — usually every year because they forbid the farmers to store it — and invariably the farmers are obliged to use the pesticides produced and sold by the very same firm.

“Genetically modified crops have been conceived by the companies with a view to getting control of the world’s food supply,” said Consoli, who has deep fears about the potential environmental, socio-economic and bio-diversity damage.

“Taking resources or imposing a new agricultural system on the south while all the time the money is going back to the western corporations...is damaging bio-diversity and food security,” agreed ActionAid’s Elford.

The anger of these groups is directed mainly at the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) controversial 1994 pact on trade-related property issues, TRIPS, which they say flies in the face of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), concluded in 1992 at the United Nations’ Rio Earth Summit.

TRIPS allows those who develop or innovate a product to get patent protection for up to 20 years, whereas the convention recognizes national sovereignty over all genetic resources and argues that access to, and sharing of, benefits from the commercialization of these resources is vital to maintain the world’s biodiversity.

TRIPS, however, offers no guarantee that the owner will share the benefits and be able to exploit the patent, they say. The issue is a hot topic at the WTO’s ministerial conference in Qatar, but food security has been overshadowed by the pharmaceutical strand of the intellectual property debate.

Delegates from more than 140 member states reached a tentative agreement late on Monday on a pact that would ease the way for poor countries to skirt patent laws on drugs, giving them access to cheaper medicines. “This is recognition that TRIPS is a big problem for health and it is still a big problem for food security,” said Alex Wijeratna, food rights campaign coordinator at ActionAid. “What we are scared of is that food security problems with TRIPS are being overlooked or traded away when the problem has clearly not gone away.” he said. —Reuters