BROOKLIN (Canada): The battle over who should control the planet’s biological resources is heating up. While activists and developing nations insist on more local control, the world’s trade body wants all countries to adopt a US-style patent system.

NGOs say they will demand that governments at the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development sign on to their “Treaty Initiative to Share the Genetic Commons”, which proposes to halt patenting of life forms and the creation of monopolies over seeds, food and medicine.

“All genetic material should be free and available to everyone,” says Alexia Robinson of the US-based Foundation on Economic Trends. “The global gene pool is a shared legacy and, therefore, a collective responsibility.”

The treaty does not prevent a company from patenting a final product that relies on genetic material, says Robinson. “But simply finding a gene in a plant or animal that has a certain trait should not be patentable.”

The Genetic Commons treaty was sparked by the patenting of the neem tree by a US multinational company and that country’s department of agriculture in the early 1990s. The company, W R Grace, obtained US and European patents to use the tree’s oil as an anti-fungicide, but the neem had already been used in south Asia for centuries for medicinal and agricultural purposes.

Enormous grassroots opposition and a five-year legal battle led to the revoking of the patent in Europe but despite the Indian government’s opposition, the US patent remains - as do nearly 100 other neem patents in that country.

Indian activist Vandana Shiva says US patent law allows companies to pirate the uses and genetic heritage of plants or animals in other countries, patent them, and protect them as ”intellectual property”. Thousands of patents have already been filed this way, a process Shiva terms “biopiracy” and ”biocolonialism”.

“Our initiative improves upon other international agreements dealing with this issue in one very fundamental aspect. We oppose the extension of intellectual property rights to any living thing as well as the components of the living things,” says Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology.

But the World Trade Organization (WTO) thinks other countries should adopt US rules on patents, says Chela Vazquez of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. That way US firms could file their patents in those nations and gain full protection.

The WTO’s deadline for governments to make those changes is 2005, adds Vazquez. “Countries that don’t comply won’t be able to trade with other WTO/FTAA members,” she says.

The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) acknowledges countries have sovereign rights over their natural resources. But in some cases, countries and local communities have “sold” or “leased” their indigenous intellectual property, a move Vazquez considers shortsighted and fraught with difficulties. It creates divisions within local communities, prevents access to communal property such as seed and commodifies communities’ heritage says Vazquez.

At September’s World Summit, the coalition will propose a new set of rules, including the need to legally certify possession of biological material and to get informed consent from traditional users of the material before negotiating mutually agreeable terms for transfer. —Dawn/InterPress Service.