The battle in India between millennia-old beliefs about nature versus the WTO, IMF and the rest of the global government has been raging for decades. And this week, farmers and ordinary citizens won a major victory. While Monsanto insists they can own and patent life forms like plants and animals, the Indian Patent Office just broke with the globalists and forcefully said no. This week’s ruling by India’s Intellectual Property Appellate Board against Monsanto’s claim to be able to patent plants may be new, but the argument is old. Since the first days of European expansion into North America, westerners bumped into a culture that didn’t understand the European concept of owning nature. “A man can’t own the Earth, the wind, the water or Mother Nature,” Native Americans argued. But their argument lost with great bloodshed and death. Today, modern farmers in India are fighting the same battle all over again. For thousands of years, Indian farmers have used ingenious methods, handed down from generation to generation, to outsmart nature’s obstacles. They created salt-resistant seeds for seasons when the oceans flood the country’s farmland. They developed cold-resistant seeds for years when it’s too cold to grow regular crops. And they did it all naturally, using nothing but Mother Nature’s help. Enter the World Trade Organization. At the behest of multi-national corporations like Monsanto, the global government passed laws that took ownership of naturally altered seeds away from the global public domain and handed them over to corporations. And in 2003, the WTO forced India to revise its patent laws to allow for corporate ownership of entire plant and animal species. But India hesitated. Creating a compromise that didn’t make either side happy, the country refused to allow patents on animals, but left the door open for corporate ownership of plants. In rejecting Monsanto’s patent claims this week, the second most populous country in the world has set the stage for a major battle over the ability to own and patent life forms. While this particular patent rejection only focused on Monsanto’s application for patent protection on climate-resistant seeds, the Indian Patent office Appeals Board rejected it saying the corporation merely discovered a new property within a known substance that didn’t constitute an invention.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 14:27:51 +0000
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