NEW DELHI: Food security activists who campaigned ceaselessly to enact into law India’s farmer-friendly Plant Varieties Protection Act, passed last year, are aghast at the government’s attempt to reverse the gains achieved by that law.
They say the government is taking a step backward by acceding to the international Union for Protection of Plant Varieties (UPOV), which critics say promotes the interest of seed transnational corporations (TNCs) in the developed world.
Yet India’s Plant Varieties Protection (PVP) Act, passed by Parliament, and the government’s accession to UPOV by bureaucratic fiat are mutually incompatible, argues Suman Sahai of the New Delhi-based non-governmental organization, Gene Campaign.
“India can either be a member of the UPOV or implement its Plant Varieties Protection Act. It cannot do both at the same time,” said Sahai, whose organization works for the protection of genetic resources and farmers interests.
He says that the proper way for India to join UPOV would have been to have this discussed thoroughly in Parliament, rather than “sneaking” it past with an announcement of its approval by the Cabinet.
Gene Campaign is internationally known for its proposal to set up the Convention of Farmers and Breeders (CoFaB) as an alternative to the UPOV, which protects breeders interests and which critics say runs against farmers interests, especially those in developing countries.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Human Development Report for 1999 described CoFaB as a “strong and coordinated international proposal which offers developing countries a far better alternative to European legislation, by focusing on the need to protect rights, food and nutritional security goals of their people.”
Other India-based NGOs that have consistently opposed UPOV, which was set up by a lobby of plant breeders in western countries, include the Research Foundation for Scie-nce Technology and Environ-ment and the Forum for Food Security and Biotechnology.
Devinder Sharma, head of the Forum says TNCs are driven by the need to recoup the billions they spend on developing plant varieties. Thus, he says, they need the monopoly rights offered by UPOV, which works by denying farmers the control they have traditionally enjoyed over their own, often superior and biodiverse seed varieties.
Sharma says this has led to a loss of seed varieties. It has also led, he says, to unsustainable farming practices and to farmers in India supporting inappropriate and sometimes dangerous research. An example of this kind of research is the technology behind the “terminator seed,” which self-destructs after a single crop to ensure that the farmer continues to buy branded seed from the big western firms.
The campaigners say the fact that India is becoming a signatory to UPOV — even before the ink on the PVP Act had dried — indicates that the country, a major independent agricultural entity, has finally succumbed to powerful seed TNCs in developed countries.
But these fears are unfounded, says a spokesman in India’s agriculture ministry. India, he adds, would be joining the UPOV on its own terms since it already has domestic laws enacted prior to its membership.
But this does not convince critics like Sahai, who point out that the Parliament, which is currently not in session, is being kept in the dark on this new development. He adds that unnecessary haste was displayed in India’s joining UPOV, even when it is under no compulsion under the WTO and Trade-Related Intel-lectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime to sign up to UPOV.—Dawn/Inter-Press Services.