The preceding decade saw western seed companies prowling around in the subcontinent, India in particular, to look for an opportunity to grab intellectual property rights of Basmati and Neem.
When they failed to do so in India, they did it elsewhere. The latest fascination for gene-grab is a wheat variety used for making 'chapati'. And the one to obtain a patent on it from Europe is the world's largest genetically modified seed company -Monsanto.
The grant of patent has caused an uproar in India and leading NGOs have rushed to the Supreme Court to seek central government's immediate intervention to stop the bid which they say is "an act of biopiracy" and can threaten the country's long-term food security.
The patent, awarded by European Patent Office (EPO), Berlin, gives the US multinational exclusive ownership over Nap Hal, a strain of wheat whose gene sequence makes it particularly suited to producing crisp breads. The activists say that the patent amounts to "illegal monopolization of important genetic plant resources" and could, in the long run, block cultivation of all related varieties in India.
If Monsanto's bid succeeds, as it appears, it could equally affect Pakistani farmers' interests because it is the same wheat variety from which 'chapati' is prepared in this country, too.
However, none in Pakistan - the government, farmers and the NGOs - have yet taken notice of the development and its implications. Monsanto has so far been aggressively lobbying Islamabad for getting approval of its controversial Bt cotton for large-scale cultivation and marketing, but has met some resistance.
The fact remains that Nap Hal's qualities are the result of the efforts of several generations of farmers in Indo-Pakistan subcontinent who spent years cross-breeding crops. Monsanto is simply interested to make monopoly profits from a wheat variety which has a vast market and on which lives of millions depend.
The central government has meanwhile assured the Supreme Court of India that it will contest the patent bid and file objections in the European Patent Office soon. The court asked the government on February 13 to take appropriate measures in this connection after hearing a public interest petition filed by an NGO headed by Vandana Shiva, a well-known radical scientist and activist.
She referred to a government statement in the Parliament that the patent rights secured by Monsanto on a variety of wheat will be used in Europe only and that Nap Hal variety of wheat was not covered under the patent, nor the Indian farmers were to be affected.
Such kind of a statement, she said, showed that New Delhi was not aware of the implications of the patent and that it was not serious in contesting the patent bid.
The last date for filing objections was February 21 which has already passed. The patent was granted in May, 2003. Hence, Indian government has not yet become a party to the case at the EPO where the challengers so far are Greenpeace, Shiva's NGO called Research Foundation for Science and Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) and Bharat Krishak Samaj. There is little hope of the Indian government intervening to prevent the 'chapati' being patented by Monsanto.
Davinder Sharma, a leading journalist and activist, is of the view that New Delhi simply cannot afford the legal fees to contest Monsanto's patent for it has a bitter experience of having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight unsuccessfully a US decision to grant a Texan company a patent on Basmati rice in 1997.
That case became a cause celebre for the anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s, and was only settled when the patent was watered down. The Indian ministry of commerce formally informed the central government last year that it is left with little money to spend on such cases any more.
The patent idea was not originally conceived by the American multinational. It actually inherited a patent application when it bought the cereals division of the Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever in 1998, and the patent has been granted to the new owner. Unilever had acquired Nap Hal seeds from a publicly funded British plant gene bank. Its scientists identified the wheat's combination of genes and patented them as an "invention". Under European law patents cannot be issued on plants that are normally cultivated, but there are loopholes in the legislation which made the new patent possible.
According to Greenpeace, India, Monsanto produced a new wheat variety by crossing a commonly grown soft wheat variety 'Galahad' with a 'Sicco' line containing the Indian 'Nap Hal' variety. It christened the new variety Galahad 7 and patented it.
The company has stated in its patent application that samples of Nap Hal are freely available from several public germplasm collections. "For example, it is available under Accession No 1362 from the AFRC Institute of Plant Science Research, Norwich, UK. As Nap Hal is a land race, it is genetically mixed and it is therefore necessary to purify the sample to homogeneity by selection," it has added.
The NGOs in India fear the people might end up paying royalties to Monsanto for making or selling chapatis. Although Monsanto says it will use the patent to market bread only in 13 European countries, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, one can't rule out the day when it comes to India and starts charging people for using the wheat whose patent it possesses.
By grabbing Nap Hal strain, the company appears to be pushing the boundaries of what can be called an invention. Most of the scientists, farmers and activists consider it simply an act of stealing an indigenous variety.
Actually, western patent systems were originally designed for import monopolies and not for screening all knowledge systems to exclude the existing innovations and establish 'prior art' in other cultures. Then, their culture also suffers from, what Vandana Shiva calls, the 'Columban blunder' of the right to plunder by treating other people, their rights and their knowledge as non-existent.
The West treats biodiversity knowledge as empty of prior creativity and prior rights and hence available for 'ownership' through claims of 'invention'. In 1997, the Texas-based company RiceTec was granted a patent on Basmati rice in the United States.
It includes twenty claims within it and covers the genetic lines of the basmati and genes from the varieties developed by Indian farmers. If enforced in India, the farmers will not be able to grow these varieties developed by them and their forefathers without paying royalty to Ricetec.
Similarly, 'Neem' has been used for diverse purposes over centuries in the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent. But now it has more than 90 patents on it owned by American, Japanese and German companies.
There came a turning point on May 10, 2000 when European Patent Office struck down a neem patent jointly owned by the US government and W.R.Grace, an American company, describing it "piracy of existing knowledge and lacking in inventiveness".
The Indians, says Stan Cox, an American research scientist, writing in "Counter punch", are rightly outraged at Monsanto's determination to claim as its own any future wheat variety that carries Nap Hal's genetic legacy. Nap Hal's genetic flaw is no "invention."
It is a discovery, first made by the US department of agriculture, and should remain freely available to any scientist, says Cox who had been associated with US department of agriculture. The Chapati patent is typical of the practice of the European Patent Office, which is now more and more disregarding legal limits in patenting forms of life.
The wheat exhibiting the special baking qualities is the result of the labours of cultivators and farmers in India who originally grew these plants for their own regional requirements, growing them to bake traditional Indian bread (chapatis).
As it is natural for these farmers to freely swap seeds, it comes as no surprise that this wheat seed has been stored in various international gene banks outside India for many years.
Thus, samples of the seed can be found in the collections held by the US agricultural administration as well as in Japan and Europe.The Unilever and Monsanto also have access to these seed banks.
They took the wheat to their laboratories, where they searched for the genes responsible for the special baking qualities. And, according to Greenpeace, they were able to find the gene sequences which they had been looking for in the plant.
In this connection, they were aided by the research results of various scientists as the corresponding gene regions had been undergoing examination for quite some time. It is this natural combination of genes which has now been patented by Monsanto as an "invention".