North--South Conflicts in Intellectual Property Rights.

• Author: Shiva, Vandana

Patents on life were globalized by a decision made during the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement for Trade and Tariffs (GATT)to include IPRs (intellectual property rights) in trade treaties, and to include life in IPR regimes. The Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) was drafted and pushed by industry. As James Enyart of Monsanto has stated, "Besides selling our concepts at home, we went to Geneva where [we] present [our] document to the staff of the GATT Secretariat. We also took the opportunity to present it to the Geneva based representatives of a large number of countries." What I have described to you is absolutely unprecedented in GATT. Industry has identified a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal and sold it to our own and other governments. The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, diagnosticians and prescribing physicians.

The TRIPs agreement of GATT, by allowing for monopolistic control of life forms, has serious ramifications for biodiversity conservation and the environment. Article 27.3(b) of the TRIPs agreement states:

Parties may exclude from patentability plants and animals other than microorganisms, and essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals other than non-biological and microbiological processes. However, parties shall provide for the protection of plant varieties either by patents or by an effective sui generis system or by any combination thereof. This provision shall be reviewed four years after the entry into force of the Agreement establishing the WTO.

While most Third World countries wanted TRIPs changed to prevent patents on life and biopiracy, the US is upholding the patenting of life forms and indigenous knowledge.

In granting the first patent on life in 1980, the US Supreme Court interpreted life as "manufacture or composition of matter." This started the slide down the slippery slope of patenting seeds, cows, sheep, human cells and micro-organisms. The US is proud of having started a perverse trend based on flawed scientific assumptions that ignore the self-organizing, dynamic, interactive nature of life forms, defining them as a mere "composition of matter."

The US is committed to patents on life in order to defend its biotechnology industry. Having opened the flood gates, the US patent office started to grant patents not just to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), but to processes and products...