Oneness vs. the 1% by Vandana Shiva

Author:Vandana Shiva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

Gates and his expanding patent empire

Biopiracy of climate resilience in farmers’ varieties

While talking ‘innovation’ Gates has engaged in piracy, from software to seeds. At the Expo Milano 2015, during the Women’s Forum organised by Emma Bonino (Italy’s former foreign minister), I was invited to make the keynote address. In a panel following my address, a representative of the Gates Foundation talked of how it was financing the innovation and invention of climate resilient crops through new technologies. When I asked him which farmers’ varieties they were using, he was silent.

Climate resilience is a complex trait and cannot be ‘engineered’ through the crude tools of transferring single gene traits from one organism to another. What corporations and the Gates Foundation are doing is taking farmers’ varieties with known climate resilient traits from public gene banks, mapping their genome, and taking out patents on the basis of guesswork and speculation about which part of the genome contributes to the known trait.

Along coastal areas in India, farmers have evolved flood tolerant and salt tolerant varieties of rice, such as Bhundi, Kalambank, Lunabakada, Sankarchin, Nalidhulia, Ravana, Seulapuni, and Dhosarakhuda. Crops, such as millets, have been evolved for drought tolerance to provide food security in water-scarce regions, and during water-scarce years.

Navdanya decided to save the vanishing rice diversities of Odisha through a system of germ-plasm-conservation, employing both in situ and ex situ methods and, at the same time, carrying out experiments on their sustainability in varied eco-climatic conditions, in view of rapid climate change and yield potentials under various soil amendments. Their behaviours and responses are being recorded. This has come in handy while selecting the seeds of specific rice diversities for empowering local communities to rehabilitate agriculture in disaster areas like Erasama in Odisha after the super cyclone of 1999, Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2005, and Nandigram in Bengal in 2007.

The tsunami waves affected agriculture due to the intrusion of seawater and deposit of sea land. More than 5,203.73 hectares of agricultural land in Nagapattinam were affected. The Navdanya team conducted a study in the impacted villages to facilitate agricultural recovery. We distributed three saline resistant varieties of paddy, which included Bhundi, Kalambank and Lunabakada, to farmers in the worst-affected areas. A total of 100 quintals were collected from Navdanya farmers in Odisha and transported over a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres from Balasore to Nagapattinam under the ‘seeds of hope’ programme; the yield from these varieties was three times greater and far better than any other known high yielders. The same varieties behaved even better when cultivated in Indonesia, another 1,000 or more kilometres away, in 2006, by Professor Friedhelm Golten of Hohenheim University in Germany.

Patenting life through genetic engineering is rapidly giving way to patenting life through mapping the genome. Navdanya’s Community Seed Bank in Odisha has conserved more than 800 rice varieties and multiplied and distributed salt-tolerant and flood-tolerant varieties, wherever required.

The ‘innovation’ necessary for the evolution of these climate-resilient traits has occurred cumulatively and collectively over thousands of years.

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