Meanwhile, in 2001, taking advantage of the USPTO’s slow response, Proctor sued 16 small seed companies in Colorado for patent-infringement.
Only in December 2003 did the USPTO announce its first “non-final” rejection of the patent. Proctor appealed, and the USPTO issues its final rejection of the patent in April 2005. But that was not the end of the Enola bean issue. Proctor requested that the patent examination be continued, submitting additional patent claims and even changing his lawyers several times (allowing more bureaucratic delay). In total, the patent was rejected and appealed four times within a decade, until the US Court of Appeals rejected it for the fifth time this summer.
For more than a decade, a single patent owner disrupted the bean market in the US and Mexico. Importers stopped importing not only the yellow bean, but also other Mexican beans, fearing lawsuits. Although the patent was eventually rescinded, the Enola case shows how the intellectual property system facilitates the monopolization of public and collective resources, favoring those who can pay expensive lawyers’ fees.
The Enola patent was wrong from the outset, yet it remained enforceable for half its life, despite the active efforts of international institutions, governments and civil-society organizations.
It may be tempting to dismiss the Enola patent as an aberration, but there are hundreds of examples of such biopiracy. Mexican beans, South Asian basmati rice, Bolivian quinoa, Amazonian ayahuasca, Indian chickpeas, Peruvian nuña beans, Andean maca — all have been subject to predatory intellectual property claims.
The Enola controversy is a stark illustration of the danger of patenting life, and the power of patents to block agricultural imports, disrupt or destroy developing countries’ export markets, hijack staple food crops that are the cultural heritage of millennia, plunder collective knowledge and threaten food security.
The Enola case demonstrates that being right is not enough: small farmers, indigenous people and the poor can’t out-last a decade of lawsuits and monopoly. Undoubtedly, international institutions and countries in the global South have far more urgent goals than to spend resources suing greedy companies. It is high time to question the very existence of an intellectual property system that privileges monopoly ownership over the common good.
Silvia Ribeiro and Kathy Jo Wetter are researchers with Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration.COPYRIGHT: PROJECT SYNDICATE
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