GèNOPLANTE: A STRATEGIC ERROR

GèNOPLANTE: A STRATEGIC ERROR

Improving our knowledge of plant genomes has progressively helped our understanding of the mechanisms involved in plant growth and development. These advances are the fruit of decades of publicly-funded research. The practical applications of these advances, however, are now the object of economic and political interests that raise the problems related to the patenting of living material and the role of public research. On the occasion of launching Gènoplante, France's new marriage between public and private sector research, its creators proclaimed happily that public researchers "will no longer have to feel ashamed since they will be making money."

Gènoplante has been born from the reorganisation of a number of public institutions: the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), the Centre de Coopèration Internationale en Recherche Agronomique (CIRAD), the Institut de Recherche pour le Dèveloppement (IRD), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the seed businesses Biogemma and Bioplante and the agrochemical subsidiary of Rhöne-Poulenc which merged recently with the German group Hoechst. Its legal status is currently that of a "group of scientific interest" but this will soon be transformed into a "group of economic interest" with private rights. Gènoplante is headed by a strategic committee consisting of the managing director of INRA (who sat on the directors' board at Rhöne-Poulenc Agro-Chimie from 1989 to 1994), the president and CEO of Rhöne-Poulenc Agro-Chimie and the president of Limagrain.

Gènoplante's objective is to "identify plant genomes and to build up an industrial property resource within the framework of a public-private partnership," and "identify the genes that play a major role in plant production (such as stress tolerance, disease resistance and quality) so as to incorporate them in plant improvement programmes for cultivated species and to ensure industrial protection for these genes." Any delay with respect to competing American, German and Japanese firms can be translated into the "loss of competitiveness by the French scientific community, seed businesses and agrochemical companies," announced Mr Caboche, the principle guiding force behind the project, when he called on researchers to join the "economic war."

Gènoplante's budget is 1,400 million FF ($US 227 million) over five years. Central government funding accounts for 70%, 30% of it direct and the other 40% channelled through the various public research institutions. Resources will be taken away from public laboratories' budgets and existing projects. Gènoplante will operate from two technological centres, Evry and Montpellier. These two units have gained 13 scientific posts, taken from the pool of INRA's Genetics and Plant Improvement department, whose other research units' survival is therefore at risk. Gènoplante will subcontract some of its activities through tender offers. Public laboratories will have to sign contracts in order to survive. INRA's board expects to hire 180 researchers.

To what end? "Quality seeds that respond better to consumer and farmer demands and allow the efficient application of European agroindustrial partners' strategies," we read. What demands? Although obtaining new genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) is one of the programme's commercial goals, no one in the programme will admit it. Are the directors of Gènoplante worried about public opinion, hostile as it is to GMOs? How is consumer demand to be taken into account if Gènoplante's objectives are based only on the interests of industrial partners? What controls and democratic guarantees does the taxpayer (who is financing 70% of the costs) have without a majority participation in the decision-making processes? We have never received answers to these questions.

Gènoplante's commercial goals explain its centralisation and technocratic opacity. France's huge investment in Gènoplante is a serious mistake for at last six reasons. The first mistake is the belief that public researchers are motivated principally by profit. This ignores the fact that they have chosen this work because science and its modus operandi satisfy them in ways that working in the race for profit does not. A public service's objective is to respond to collective needs precisely opposed to private profit. Public services can encourage useful co-operation without losing either their soul or objectives provided that they do not have to go begging bowl in hand: financial independence is a prerequisite for their freedom. Gènoplante is, from this point of view, the fruition of a project that has obsessed our politicians for decades.

The second mistake is the belief that Gènoplante will automatically benefit the public, particularly insofar as employment is concerned. Nothing has been gained from the "Bioavenir" programme, the partnership started five years ago between Rhöne-Poulenc and public research institutions. Gènoplante's private sector partners invest little in research, especially in plant biotechnology, despite the profits they make. The reorientation of public research towards commercial ends may cause a reduction in employment opportunities in Gènoplante's partners' research departments, whilst not encouraging the emergence of risky start-up businesses. Rhöne-Poulenc, Gènoplante's main private partner, offers a salutary lesson in "economic realism": it has recently announced job cuts in its research centres and has invested in the competing Agritope programme in California.

The third mistake is the belief that Gènoplante will stimulate plant research in France. At a meeting in October 1998, the directors of the CNRS emphasised that the programme was not consistent with the goals of the French scientific community's plant genome research because of its commercial goals. Gènoplante favours limited technology, undeniably cutting-edge but already routine and inevitably ephemeral, to the detriment of multidisciplinary research based on molecular biology, cytology, genetics, plant physiology and ecophysiology which are more necessary than ever for an understanding of how plants function. Gènoplante's reorientation of public laboratories towards industrial patenting will distract them from their research goals whilst other laboratories working on their own will have their budgets trimmed. This forced 'technologisation' imposes a unique and sterile 'genome only' debate on plant research, and there is the danger that in due course it will become isolated from new ideas.

The fourth mistake is the desire to compete with companies in the US in the legal arena, in which the US already has an unfair advantage. The acceptance of patenting (of what? Genes? Plants? Animals? Humans?) is to walk into the minefield of intellectual property rights. In the plant world, this means entering the arena of patenting of general ideas rather than specific innovations (ie patenting a mousetrap rather than an improvement in mousetraps). The Chakrabarty sentence in the United States Supreme Court (1980) reversed nearly a century of jurisprudence accepted world-wide, which was based on the understanding that "if it's living it cannot be patented." Neoliberalism has imposed the generally-accepted idea that patents stimulate innovation and progress. Although economists have been unable to establish this link empirically (except possibly in the case of medicines), our political masters have ratified the US position whilst taking care to avoid public debate. Victory seems less certain here. The martial vocabulary of the Gènoplante 'generals' cannot disguise their myopic strategy: 80% of the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, the paradigm for plant genetics, is already patented or is about to be. In this particular battle, Gènoplante will pick up only a few consolation prizes. Instead of engaging in such a futile exercise, would not French interests be better served by France leading an international campaign to make living material a "common resource" belonging to all humanity?

The fifth mistake is the underestimation of the importance of free access to genetic resources and knowledge. The unprecedented advances in crop yields in industrialised countries (multiplied four- or fivefold in less than sixty years, after it had taken centuries to double them) and in a few Third World countries were possible due to the free exchange of genetic resources and information. This was the case in the Green Revolution. Successive crossings of Japanese wheat varieties of Russian and US origin with other US and Mexican varieties, initially by US and then Mexican researchers considerably increased crop yields in Mexico in the 1950s. Gènoplante is substituting the non-commercial globalisation of genetic resources, knowledge and a "common resource" shared by all with the wholesale pillage of genetic resources, economic warfare and a commercial cartel. This is a lamentable step backwards.

The sixth mistake is political. Gènoplante represents one more step towards limiting farmers' freedom. Seed merchants' profit is currently compromised by the fact that farmers use some of their harvest as seed for the following year. The seed industry's aim is therefore to divest farmers altogether of this unfortunate property of plants. 'Terminator Technology,' patented in March 1998 by the US Department of Agriculture and Monsanto does just this: a lethal transferred gene activated prior to sowing kills the germplasm the moment the grain begins to form. The patent is another weapon. Patents on genetically-modified seeds mean that the age-old practice of sowing collected seed freely has been called into question. Hundreds of farmers have been taken to court by Monsanto. The patent effectively results in the legal sterilisation of plants, and is a cheaper alternative to technological tools such as the Terminator.

These issues concern us all. There must be increased public control over the direction that public services are working in. We ask that the setting up of Gènoplante be suspended and that a wide-ranging public debate with nation-wide representation at last be conducted.

Jean Pierre Berlan is the Director of Research at INRA; Jean Louis Durand is on the Scientific Council of INRA; Alain Roques is the Director of Research, National Secretary of CGT union, INRA; and Pascal Tillard is an engineer and an elected member of the board of INRA.