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Rights toward agricultural biodiversity: Over the past years, trade has gradually become a dominant, and much contested, organising principle of international relations and domestic economies. Even the most remote rural areas of countries like Namibia, Bolivia or Indonesia are being impacted by the ever-increasing reach of global trade policies. Agriculture, and the fight over appropriate food systems, is and will continue to be a major issue here. Essentially, a battle is under way between two models of 'development', with very different agendas in terms of rights, responsibilities, goals and power. The strengthening and further building of locally adapted production and market systems to support sustainable food economies is pitted against the penetration and deregulation of corporate pursuits in every corner of the planet. In that context, intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes -- which clash with community rights -- are being imposed around the world as the central instrument to open and control markets and to push new technologies. Rather than being fundamentally questioned, they are now a core component of biodiversity debates and agreements, dressed as tools to reward innovators, share benefits and support conservation. In this process, traditional varieties and indigenous peoples' knowledge -- tweaked a bit to pass as someone else's 'invention' -- become commodities for a few people to trade and divide profits over. At the same time, IPRs are being further strengthened, in favour of those who own them, at a faster pace than ever before. Things we took for granted not long ago -- like swapping seeds or photocopying books -- are now criminal offences. For many farming communities and indigenous peoples, the issue and the challenge is quite the other way around. They want local control over biodiversity, to ensure its sustainable and productive use for their needs and cultures. While governments are busy privatising genetic resources by allocating exclusive monopoly rights over genes and genetic functions, local people on the ground are organising to defend community rights and their own notions of biodiversity as a shared and collective responsibility, a heritage that cannot suddenly belong to Monsanto and its shareholders. In this conflict of agendas, we need to go back to the basics. If getting rid of poverty is at all on our horizon, the task in this 'fight for rights' is to strengthen the control of local communities over the biodiversity they nurture and which nurtures them. Many encouraging initiatives to better articulate, defend and promote the rights of local communities in this direction are sprouting up and merit critical support. At the same time, the increasing privatisation of biodiversity and our cultural heritage in the hands of a few transnational conglomerates, or the governments defending them, must be stopped. This section of the website houses materials that pull us into to the core of this battle -- documents reflecting current positions and political debates, links to organisations working hard at the front line, campaign and educational tools to get more involved. It is organised according a few thematic sections:
BIO-IPR: general news and updates |
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The fight for rights
