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Big firms dig in to Asian rice
bowl
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW
DELHI - Control over rice, Asia's staple food, is
steadily passing into the hands of transnational
corporations that are based far away in Europe and the
United States and that use unfair patents and genetic
modification, food-security experts have warned.
As the world marks the International Year of
Rice, agribusiness giants led by Du Pont in the United
States are working overtime to select rice genes they
reckon would be commercially useful from among the
estimated complement of 50,000 genes.
The
scramble for monopoly control over rice genes began two
years ago after the Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta
and Myriad Genetics Inc in the United States announced
the sequencing of 99.5 percent of rice DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid). Internationally known
food-security expert Devinder Sharma says that since
then some 900 genes, representing a variety of traits
such as resistance to droughts, pests, pesticides and
salinity and higher yield and nutritional
characteristics, have already been patented by various
multinationals. Du Pont, he says, tops this list.
"In the next three years, as a result of the
mapping of the rice genome by Syngenta, a majority of
the rice patents [will] be in the lap of a handful of
multinational agribusiness corporations," Sharma
predicted.
He says what has made the "daylight
robbery of genetic wealth" possible is the "connivance
of top scientists, international organizations and
policymakers". They ignore the rights of Asia's farmers
who toiled for generations to produce 140,000 rice
varieties, critics add.
"The Rockefeller
Foundation, the Convention on Biodiversity, the World
Intellectual Property Organization and even the Food and
Agricultural Organization and the United Nations
Development Fund failed to stand up against these
private companies," Sharma said.
But the worst
betrayal, as Sharma sees it, is by the Consultative
Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR),
which controls the world's biggest rice germplasm
collection. "The CGIAR not only welcomed the patenting
but has even accepted Syngenta on its board, ensuring
free access to the world's biggest rice germplasm
collections," he said.
Syngenta is better known
for the patents it took out in 2000 on genetically
modified "golden rice". This had been touted as having
enough extra vitamin A to prevent blindness caused by
dietary deficiency in developing countries - but was
roundly denounced as a hoax by leading food-security
activists such as Vandana Shiva.
Shiva's charges
were endorsed by an embarrassed Rockefeller Foundation,
which funded the development of genetically modified
rice but was forced to admit that the so-called golden
rice was no solution to mass vitamin A deficiency as
claimed by Syngenta.
The negative publicity over
golden rice proved costly for Syngenta. By 2002 it was
forced to pull out of a hugely controversial
commercial-collaboration deal it managed to enter into
with the famed rice repository at the Indira Gandhi
Agricultural University (IGAU) at Raipur in central
India in 2002. Syngenta had come within a whisker of
gaining commercial rights to some 19,000 strains of
local rice put together by IGAU scientists.
India's premier rice variety, basmati,
has not been so lucky. In 2001, the Indian government
lost a battle at the US Patents Office to prevent the
Texas-based company RiceTec from selling pirated hybrids
of the country's prized aromatic grain, often referred
to as the champagne of rices. According to Suman Sahai,
convenor of the voluntary agency Gene Campaign, there is
concrete evidence that RiceTec used genetic material
from a CGIAR gene bank, where India had deposited the
material in trust, to produce its copycat hybrid
version.
"The source of RiceTec's basmati
is undoubtedly the gene bank at Fort Collins in the US,
which acquired samples from the CGIAR gene bank at the
International Rice Research Institute [IRRI] at Los
Banos in the Philippines," Sahai said.
IRRI has
also been accused of passing on the germplasm of
Thailand's equally famed jasmine rice to US researchers.
Despite protests from Indian and Thai farmers,
RiceTec was allowed to market its Kasmati and Texmati
hybrids and market them as "superior to basmati".
RiceTec ignored protests from Indian and Thai farmers
over the marketing of its "Jasmati" brand, which it
describes in advertisements as "The American Jasmine
Rice".
Three-quarters of the rice now grown in
the United States is based on germplasm provided by the
IRRI, experts say.
Similarly, the Swiss food
giant Nestle has been granted European process patents
for parboiled rice that has been made and eaten for
centuries in India. Nestle's process copies the
traditional method of parboiling rice by steaming and
drying the grains before milling to improve taste and
texture and facilitate storage.
After the "Green
Revolution" technologies of the 1970s ensured the
disappearance of thousands of valuable varieties from
Asian rice paddies, an even more sinister threat to
Asian rice genes is being posed by possible genetic
contamination from genetically modified (GM) rice.
Gene Campaign and the Friends of the Earth in
Europe are now jointly opposing a proposal by the
Germany-based transnational Bayer Crop Science AG to
import herbicide-tolerant GM rice especially grown in
developing countries to be used as cattle feed in
Europe.
"Bayer doesn't intend to grow this GM
rice in Europe and threaten rice already being
cultivated in member states like Italy, Spain, Greece,
Portugal and France," Gene Campaign's Sahai said.
Alarmed that India and other Asian rice-growing
countries could be induced by Bayer to produce GM crops
for the EU market, Gene Campaign is seeking a moratorium
on the cultivation of GM crops in centers of origin and
diversity because of the threat of genetic contamination
through cross-pollination.
Research in China has
demonstrated that transgene escape from cultivated rice
to wild rice does occur. Studies in Latin America have
shown that herbicide-tolerant gene transfer can easily
take place.
"What is not realized is that if the
genetic integrity of Indian rice is not maintained, it
could end up threatening global food security itself,"
said Sahai. All rice is classified into two broad
varieties - Japonica, which originated in Japan, and
Indica, which originated in India.
Sahai said it
was intriguing why Bayer has insisted on importing GM
rice when it is still cheaper in Asia to produce
ordinary varieties that do not attract royalties.
"Surely the cows are not particular that they get the GM
variety," she added.
(Inter Press Service)
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