Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close---Episode 34

   PROTECTING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY MONOPOLIES 

   Many of the WTO provisions have have been put forward as necessary to ensure the efficient functioning of competitive markets. Yet the WTO does nothing to limit the ability of transnational corporations to use their economic power to drive competition out of the market by unfair means : absorb competitors through mergers and acquisitions ; or form strategic alliances with competitors to share technology, production facilities, and markets. Indeed, one of the few areas in which the WTO calls for strengthening government regulations and standards is in its agreement on intellectual property rights  : patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Here the WTO calls for strong government intervention to protect corporate monopoly rights to information and technology. 
   Particularly ominous is the effort to use the WTO to privatize the rights to genetic materials, including seeds and natural medicinals, through patenting. U.S. companies have aggressively pursued patent protection for seeds and genetic materials in the United States, convincing the U.S. government to extend patent protection to all genetically engineered organisms, from microorganisms to plants and animals, excluding only genetically engineered humans. By patenting the processes by which genes are inserted into a species of seeds, a few companies have effectively obtained monopoly rights over genetic research on an entire species and on any useful products of that research. These companies have been pressing hard to turn such patents into worldwide monopolies under the WTO. In 1992, Agracetus, Inc., a subsidiary of W. R. Grace, was granted a U.S. patent on all genetically engineered or "transgenetic" cotton varieties and had applications pending for similar patents in other countries accounting for 60 percent of the world's cotton crop, including India, China, Brazil, and the European Union. In March 1994, it received a European patent on all transgenetic soybeans and had a similar patent pending in the United States.
         Through the ages, farmers have saved seed from one harvest to plant their next crop. Under existing U.S. patent law, a farmer who saves and replants the offspring of a patented seed violates patent law. The corporate move to create global monopolies over seeds and other life-forms through patents has been the subject of mass demonstrations by farmers in India, who realized that under the GATT--WTO agreements, they could be prohibited from growing their own seed stocks without paying a royalty to a transnational corporation.
   The industry view of what is right and proper with regard to people's rights to their means of subsistence has been clearly expressed by Hans Lenders, secretary general of the industry association of corporate seed houses and breeders :

     Even though it has been a tradition in most countries that a farmer can save seed from his own crop, it is under the changing circumstances not equitable that a farmer can use this seed and grow a commercial crop out of it without payment of a royalty. . . The seed industry will have to fight harder for a better kind of protection. 

   Vandana Shiva, a leader of the Southern opposition to the patenting of life-forms, says, "This is just another way of stating that global monopoly over agriculture and food systems should be handed over as a right to multinational corporations." What we are seeing is a blatant effort by a few corporations to establish monopoly control over the common heritage of the planet.