91av

IN THE well-fed surroundings of a Swiss lakeside resort late last month,
Mammon reared its ugly head—and the result could be millions more starving
in the Third World.

With the world’s media fixated on the hot air coming from The Hague, events
passed unnoticed. But what happened in Switzerland may lead to one of the
world’s most precious public possessions being sold off piecemeal to the highest
bidder. Half a million crop varieties, the genetic foundation of world food
production, could be asset-stripped from their guardians—the publicly
owned international seed banks that brought the world the Green Revolution and
saved billions from starvation.

At Neuchâtel, near Bern, international talks intended to keep the
world’s plant resources in common ownership collapsed. Unless they can be
revived within the next few months, both the seeds and the scientists who tend
them look likely to fall into private hands—the latest victims of the
globalisation of property rights unleashed by the World Trade Organization
(WTO), egged on by the US and its allies.

The debacle could sow the seed of famines to come, says one long-time
observer of the negotiations, Patrick Mulvaney of the Intermediate Technology
Development Group, a British-based development charity. “This is a real
disaster. The bedrock of world food security is now in jeopardy,” he says.

The meeting was intended to be the culmination of six years of negotiations
to produce an International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture. It promised a historic compromise between the plant breeders of the
industrialised world and farmers from developing countries who have nurtured
their traditional strains of crop plants over the generations.

It is these crop varieties that contain most of the genetic raw materials
from which breeders work. The deal would have guaranteed scientists free access
to the seed varieties, while ensuring that a levy on any resulting commercial
breeds gave the farmers some financial return. Supporters of the deal hoped it
would also slow the catastrophic disappearance of plant varieties, now estimated
to be running at around 2 per cent a year, probably twice the rate at which
rainforest species are disappearing.

But four nations vetoed the agreement: the US, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. If this group looks familiar, it’s because these same countries last
month led the opposition at The Hague to Europe’s plans for curtailing
greenhouse emissions.

Food production survives as one of the few major industries not based on a
rigid system of patents. Innovation has traditionally taken place on farms and
in public research centres rather than private labs. A system of open access to
the world’s plant resources has persisted, thanks to a global network of 16
international agricultural research centres, funded by the World Bank,
governments and charities, which have stored and bred seeds for the common
good.

Today, the centres hold more than half a million plant varieties. Their
collections provided the genetic feedstock for the high-yield varieties of
staple foods such as rice, wheat and maize that have kept the world fed while
its population has doubled in the past 35 years. They hold out the promise of
new varieties to cope with global warming and the unremitting threats from
evolving pests and diseases.

The open-access system has relied on a voluntary agreement among national
governments—excluding, predictably, the US and a few others. Now this
consensus is breaking down. The failure of the Neuchâtel talks to create a
permanent, legally binding system involving all countries threatens to be the
final blow. Soon, cooperation could be replaced by a system of rigid proprietary
control of the world’s food crops as countries seek to claim ownership of their
native seed varieties. Private companies are also scenting big bucks.

The research centres, starved of funds, would have to sell off the “common
heritage”. Already some cash-strapped research centres are scaling down plant
collections to save money, says Theo van Hintum of the Dutch government’s Centre
for Genetic Resources in Wageningen, the Netherlands, which recently cut its
collection of cabbage varieties from 273 to 54
(91av, 24 June, p 18).
Keeping hundreds of varieties alive usually means continuously farming
them, and is a costly business.

The first assault on the open-access system came from some plant-breeding
companies who felt that their right to patent key resources should be paramount.
That desire is redoubled now that biotechnology offers the prospect of turning
the genes of humble plants in seed banks across the world into billion-dollar
magic bullets.

A second assault has come from some developing countries, who see their
genetic resources being plundered by Western corporations. These countries,
notably the rainforest nations of Brazil, Colombia and Malaysia, “have come to
see vast fortunes locked up in biodiversity”, says Clive Stannard, assistant
secretary of the UN’s Commission for Genetic Resources in Food and Agriculture.
They want to claim sovereign rights and to sell their biological resources to
the highest bidder.

Ironically, a conservation law has encouraged this view. The 1992 Convention
on Biological Diversity holds that countries with rich biological resources will
conserve them better if they can make money out of them. Almost as soon as it
was agreed, “governments from the Andes to the Horn of Africa began closing
their borders, halting national and international seed exchanges”, says Silvio
Ribeiro of the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), the only
non-government body allowed into last month’s talks. Since then, he says, “the
bottom has fallen out of scientific exchange of the very stuff that keeps food
on the table”.

Back in 1993, as the biodiversity convention became law, the UN’s Food and
Agriculture Organization decided to begin talks on replacing the existing
voluntary agreement with a legally binding framework on open access to plant
varieties. Its aim was to ensure that ownership of major international food
crops such as wheat, rice and potatoes, plus key crops from poor countries, such
as cassava and yams, remained in the public sector.

At talks in Tehran in August, a deal appeared to take shape. Biotechnology
companies and plant breeders, who had previously stonewalled the process, joined
with negotiators from the industrialised countries to back the plan. They agreed
that in return for continued access to seeds they would help to fund seed
conservation by stumping up a small percentage of royalties from products
created using publicly owned seeds. Governments agreed to contribute to the
annual $350 million seeds conservation-fund by channelling money through
bodies such as the World Bank.

The developing countries made concessions too, by agreeing to concede
sovereignty over their food plants. As the leader of the African group at the
negotiations, Tewolde Debre Egziabher from Ethiopia, put it: “The understanding
is crucial for us because it will ensure that nobody can register intellectual
property rights on our farmers’ crop varieties. It will facilitate continued
access to crop varieties the world over.”

It seemed like a great day for pragmatic cooperation. But once the meeting
was over, trade officials started saying that the planned levy on products might
conflict with the WTO’s rules on free trade. In Neuchâtel, negotiators
desperate for a deal brought in WTO lawyers in the hope that they would explain
the rules. But the lawyers merely said that there are no rules until a disputed
case is heard before the WTO courts.

The US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, rather than the WTO, were largely
seen as responsible for the backtracking on the Tehran deal and the collapse of
the talks. According to Mulvaney, “I think governments such as the US are hiding
behind the WTO. Most legal advice is that the Undertaking would not infringe the
trade rules.” An exasperated European delegate is reported to have muttered:
“Those people think a plant is some kind of industrial manufacturing facility.
They haven’t any idea about the impact they are having on food security.”

A week later the chairman of the negotiations, Venezuelan ambassador Fernando
Gerbasi, pleaded at the FAO in Rome for political leaders to overrule trade
officials and broker a deal. Talks are set to resume in February. But already
the atmosphere among the seed research centres is profoundly depressed. “It’s
anybody’s guess what will happen,” says Ruth Raymond of the Rome-based
International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, one of the hubs of the research
network. “We might be asked to send all the seeds back to their country of
origin. But for most of them there is no single country of origin. The task
would be impossible.”

Jan Borring, a Norwegian negotiator, foresees seed wars between the providers
of genetic resources and industries using these resources to create new
products. The research centres would end their days locked in endless legal
disputes, rather than doing science. The network of public research centres
“will gradually shut down”, forecasts Ribeiro. “Consumers in the North will
notice food prices going up. People in the South will face malnutrition.”

One further result, says Mulvaney, is likely to be a dramatic reduction in
the biodiversity of vital crops as research centres close and private companies
rationalise their assets. One straw in the wind came earlier this year, when the
world’s largest vegetable seed company, Seminis, removed some 2000 seed
varieties from its catalogue, a quarter of the total, as part of a “global
restructuring and optimisation plan”.

“The upshot of failure in the talks would be enormous,” says Stannard. “World
food security would be seriously damaged.” And, with world grain harvests
falling for the past two years, the wolves are already at the door.