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TRIPs: A Farmer's Perspective
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Masipag News & Views
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Sep 21, 2001 21:19 PDT
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THE IMPACT OF TRIPs ON SMALL FARMERS IN ASIA:
(A Farmer’s Perspective)
September 2001
By Leopoldo Guilaran
(Mr. Leopoldo Guilaran, 53, is a farmer-breeder and the chairperson of
MASIPAG. He delivered this testimony at the recent "TRIPS on Trial" in
Geneva.)
Agriculture has been a long tradition in my family. My father and
grandfather tilled the land during their time – and I myself have been
farming for 24 years already, with the last 10 years practicing
sustainable agriculture. I now farm a 2.6 hectare area where I grow
rice, corn, various vegetables, fruit trees and root crops. I am one of
the 34 practicing rice breeders in MASIPAG, and my farm is my
laboratory. It is also here where I do on the job coaching for other
farmers who want to learn how to do systematic breeding.
I am also the Chair of a 30,000 strong national network of small
farmers, scientists and NGOs in the Philippines which calls itself
MASIPAG, an acronym which stands for Farmer Scientist Partnership for
Development.
It was during a meeting in MASIPAG in 1998 that I first came to hear
about the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs).
After three months of educating and consulting with other grassroots
members in Negros, we organized a mass mobilization against TRIPs in
which 7,000 farmers and their support groups participated. That was
where our whole campaign against TRIPs took off.
This fight is all the more real to us since in the last Congress our
lawmakers were about to pass a Bill on Plant Variety Protection
patterned after UPOV 91 to satisfy TRIPs. Unfortunately, the farmers –
who would be greatly affected by this law – had hardly been consulted in
the process.
As a farmer breeder, the impact of putting these intellectual property
systems in place can be summarized in four points:
Privatization of genetic resources
TRIPs enforces the private ownership of genetic resources. This will
restrict access to seeds for planting and breeding materials – a factor
which is sure to affect crop improvement, both in the big institutions
and on farm. TRIPs means monopoly control and ownership which is
contrary to free sharing that we farmers have been practicing for
generations. Scientists will not be willing to exchange materials freely
any more and farmer breeders like me, will lose the most.
Promotion of the wrong agricultural agenda
TRIPs will push agricultural research into the wrong direction: towards
corporate agendas in public research, high value export crops rather
than poor people’s food crops, and uniformity in the field rather than
diversity. Experiences in countries which have already implemented TRIPs
confirm this. In addition, our government's research priorities are
currently shifted to modern biotechnology at the expense of research and
development for sustainable agriculture which is more useful to the
majority of our farmers who are small. Lastly, farmer breeders like me,
who have a different set of targets for breeding, will be further pushed
at the margin if not detached from the system.
Vitamin A rice, for instance, is being developed by IRRI, a premiere
research institution, as some kind of humanitarian effort to prevent
malnutrition and blindness. In reality, however, this rice is entangled
in a web of 70 corporate patents and has so many strings attached that
it is a legal terror just to get it into the farmers’ field. Of course,
we don’t believe in this rice. But it shows how intellectual property
makes a mess of research, for no benefit to the poor.
Restriction to saving, exchanging and selling of seeds
Taking care of the seed is essential for small farmers to survive. But
now with TRIPs, the act of saving, exchanging and selling seeds is being
prohibited. Once we establish a system that curtails this, it will get
narrower and narrower until small farmers are finally wiped out. Taking
away the right to reproduce and share seeds is like taking away our
lives.
For example, in the proposed Philippine Bill on Plant Variety
Protection, it states that farmers are only allowed to save, exchange,
and sell seeds if it is for non-commercial purposes and done in their
own landholdings. But the reality is, 1.2 million farming families in
the country are landless. This favors big resource-rich farms while
putting aside the interest of resource-poor farmers.
Undermining of farmers rights
I think the worst part of TRIPs is that it tramples on our inherent
rights as farmers, which has been established for thousands of years. It
takes away the very essence of who we are as stewards of the land that
we till. Breeding, conservation, production and selection are continuous
processes. Farmers have been doing it for so many generations now. How
can someone suddenly claim ownership over genetic resources? And make
farmers pay royalties on them!
We Filipino farmers have been prey to this under our government’s seed
certification system, where scientists took the credit for the
"Burdagol" rice variety, which was in fact, developed by a farmer.
Although there was no IPR involved in case, we can draw from this
experience how worse it would be when the TRIPs regime is established.
Because scientists will now get economic profit from such act. But the
burdagol experience and TRIPs are the same things: denying farmers their
rights, their heritage, taking something away from them. And I don’t
think you can give something back for this. It is just wrong.
Realizing how TRIPs can hurt small farmers’ interests and sustainable
agriculture in general, I have undertaken my own advocacy against TRIPs.
I am campaigning to fellow farmers not to respect this system, which
should be more aptly referred to as Trade Related Intellectual Piracy
Rights. We will not submit ourselves to such a regime, and continue to
uphold our rights as farmers to do whatever is necessary to protect,
conserve and improve our seeds – which belong to all of us collectively,
and to no one privately.
In MASIPAG, we are working to make more people at the grassroots aware
of the issue and challenge our government to protect the small farmers
and indigenous people against the scourge of TRIPs. We are continuing to
expand our alliances with other groups to defeat the Bill on Plant
Variety Protection in our country.
At the regional level in Asia, we are carrying out a "No Patents on
Life! No Patents on Rice!" campaign together with other groups from
Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, India and Bangladesh. We did
a collaborative research together, which was published last March, and
is currently being localized in each country. We also produced a No
Patents t-shirt for our mass actions. More recently, we drew up a common
position paper which we are circulating for the endorsement of other
groups, and which we can use as a tool in lobbying our governments
against TRIPs.
There is indeed much to be done in this struggle, but for us farmers who
have everything to lose with the enforcement of the TRIPs, no work is
too hard nor too costly. And we are determined to keep on – for the good
of agriculture and the generations who will rely on it.
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