Global food security is under threat from "bio-pirates" who take plants from developing countries, change them slightly then patent the new varieties, according to anti-poverty groups and activists.
"Today's pirates are cheating the poor and are now emerging as a threat to people's right to food," ActionAid, an international development agency campaigning against the causes of poverty, said its recent Crops and Robbers report.
"The ability of farmers to put food on the table to feed their families is being undermined by patents and the patent system which is agreed and supported by mainly Western countries," said Zoe Elford, an ActionAid campaigner on food rights.
Groups like ActionAid accuse companies of stealing the natural resources of developing countries. They say putting intellectual property rights (IPR) on crops creates unfair profit potential.
"It's unacceptable for a corporation to take the genetic resources that farmers have developed and conserved, do some tweaking and then claim a private monopoly on the material," said Renee Vellve at GRAIN, a non-governmental body which promotes biodiversity.
The increasing use of genetic modification only exacerbates the problem, says Lorenzo Consoli, GMO advisor at Greenpeace.
He says rich companies find themselves in a "win-win-win" situation: They have the copyright on the seed, they sell seed to the farmers -- usually every year because they forbid the farmers to store it -- and invariably the farmers are obliged to use the pesticides produced and sold by the very same firm.
"Genetically modified crops have been conceived by the companies with a view to getting control of the world's food supply," said Consoli, who has deep fears about the potential environmental, socio-economic and bio-diversity damage.
"Taking resources or imposing a new agricultural system on the south while all the time the money is going back to the western corporations ... is damaging bio-diversity and food security," agreed ActionAid's Elford.
Bad trips
The anger of these groups is directed mainly at the WTO's controversial 1994 pact on trade-related property issues, TRIPS, which they say flies in the face of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), concluded in 1992 at the United Nations' Rio Earth Summit.
TRIPS allows those who develop or innovate a product to get patent protection for up to 20 years, whereas the convention recognizes national sovereignty over all genetic resources and argues that access to, and sharing of, benefits from the commercialization of these resources is vital to maintain the world's biodiversity.
TRIPS, however, offers no guarantee that the owner will share the benefits and be able to exploit the patent, they say.
The issue is a hot topic at the WTO's ministerial conference in Qatar, but food security has been overshadowed by the pharmaceutical strand of the intellectual property debate.
Delegates from more than 140 member states reached a tentative agreement late on Monday on a pact that would ease the way for poor countries to skirt patent laws on drugs, giving them access to cheaper medicines.
"This is recognition that TRIPS is a big problem for health and it is still a big problem for food security," said Alex Wijeratna, food rights campaign coordinator at ActionAid.
"What we are scared of is that food security problems with TRIPS are being overlooked or traded away when the problem has clearly not gone away," he said.
GRAIN's Vellve said developing countries felt "anger and resentment" about how their positions on this issue were not reflected in the draft texts for discussion at the Qatar meeting.
"In terms of TRIPS and its many implications for food security, the WTO has completely ignored the proposals from developing countries which have repeatedly argued -- for over two years now -- that the WTO must clarify that life forms, such as crop seeds and livestock breeds, are not patentable," she said.
"If this issue is absent from the debates in Qatar, it is simply because those who stand to gain from such patents -- the industrialized countries -- don't want to discuss it."
Patents needed for research
Companies, however, argue that patents are in fact an efficient way of encouraging new technologies to conserve dwindling natural resources and promote world food security.
Willy de Greef, head of regulatory affairs for Syngenta Seeds, says taking away patents would stop firms from carrying out valuable research.
"You do not make 10, 15, 20 years of investment if you don't have some expectation that you can protect the results of that work and pay back that investment," he said.
And the profit motive was not necessarily in conflict with the needs of developing nations, de Greef said.
"A company that works in agriculture has a long-term vested interest in a sustainable -- in both in environmental and social terms -- and successful farming system," he said.
"It is in our interests that farmers see a long-term place for themselves within a sustainable agricultural system. We sell to these people, they are our customers. It is in our interests to ensure their future is secure."
Thu-Lang Tran Wasescha, a councillor in the IP division at the WTO, says TRIPS attempts to strike a balance between the interests of society at large on one side and the inventors and creators on the other.
"It's a constant effort to keep the balance," she said. "It's like a pendulum. You have to correct it constantly in favor of either the owner or the consumer.
"If the interest of one party is allowed to prevail too much, there are in-built safeguards within TRIPS. The real problems are not caused by intellectual property itself but because people don't use these safeguards properly," she said.
"TRIPS intervenes only when there is a request for protection, because there is something new and useful -- whether that is because of manual manipulation or very sophisticated technology such as GMO," she said.
Advocates who back intellectual property rights say a completely free system would simply result in everyone stealing everyone else's ideas and there would be no development.
"Poor countries also need a safety net," said one Geneva source who declined to be named.
"If everything was free, rich countries would continue to be rich and poor countries would continue to be poor. We have to give poor countries the choice too."
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