| Biotech Giants Put Climate Change on Agenda |
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| Written by Kiki Hubbard | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wednesday, 14 May 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Industry leaders in agricultural biotechnology are seeking hundreds of patents on crops designed to cope with hot and cold weather in the face of global warming, according to a new report by the ETC Group: "Patenting the Climate Genes...And Capturing the Climate Agenda." "The ETC report concludes that biotech giants are hoping to leverage climate change as a way to get into resistant markets, and it warns that the move could undermine public-sector plant-breeding institutions such as those coordinated by the United Nations and the World Bank, which have long made their improved varieties freely available." ETC's research director, Hope Shand, adds, "When a market is dominated by a handful of large multinational companies, the research agenda gets biased toward proprietary products...Monopoly control of plant genes is a bad idea under any circumstance. During a global food crisis, it is unacceptable and has to be challenged." Biotech firms learned early on that they needed exclusive ownership and rights over their products to ensure market power. (The top 10 seed companies control almost 60 percent of the global seed market.) These companies capitalize off current patent law to maintain profit and control over markets, and ultimately, farmers. Only, the effects reach further than patent numbers on seed bags and royalty fees to the company. Seeds tie farmers to the land, to their livelihood, and this relationship is altered when seeds are owned by the manufacturer even after money is exchanged, even after the seed is sown.
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