People Plants And Patents

People, Plants and Patents: The impact of intellectual property on biodiversity, conservation, trade and rural society

People, Plants, and Patents examines intellectual property and the patenting of life forms as bluntly and as fairly as possible. People, Plants, and Patents helps to identify the major points and the rangeof policy alternatives in this extraordinarily important, fast-changing, and politicized field.

Decisions about intellectual property, particularly for plant life, have major implications for food security, agriculture, rural development, & the environment for every country in the world. For the developing world, in particular, the impact of intellectual property on farmers, rural societies, & biological diversity will be profoundly important. This book identifies the major issues & the range of policy alternatives in this extraordinarily important, fast-changing, & politicized field.

Native to the Kalahari Desert, Hoodia gordonii is a succulent plant known by generations of Indigenous San peoples to have a variety of uses: to reduce hunger, increase energy, and ease breastfeeding. In the global North, it is known as a natural appetite suppressant, a former star of the booming diet industry. In Reinventing Hoodia, Laura Foster explores how the plant was reinvented through patent ownership, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, contractual benefit sharing, commercial development as an herbal supplement, and bioprospecting legislation. Using a feminist decolonial technoscience approach, Foster argues that although patent law is inherently racialized, gendered, and Western, it offered opportunities for Indigenous San peoples, South African scientists, and Hoodia growers to make unequal claims for belonging within the shifting politics of South Africa. This radical interdisciplinary and intersectional account of the multiple materialities of Hoodia illuminates the co-constituted connections between law, science, and the marketplace, while demonstrating how these domains value certain forms of knowledge and matter differently.

Legal control and ownership of plants and traditional knowledge of the uses of plants (TKUP) is a vexing issue. The phenomenon of appropriation of plants and TKUP, otherwise known as biopiracy, thrives in a cultural milieu where non-Western forms of knowledge are systemically marginalized and devalued as "folk knowledge" or characterized as inferior. Global Biopiracy rethinks the role of international law and legal concepts, the Western-based, Eurocentric patent systems of the world, and international agricultural research institutions as they affect legal ownership and control of plants and TKUP.

This title was first published in 2000. This work documents an international and interdisciplinary workshop on the ethical aspects of the patenting of biotechnological inventions, including genes, plants and animals. The public perception is discussed, along with how these perceptions relate to ethical, social and cultural factors. The legal framework in Europe is laid out by several experts in the field of patent law and the situation in the US is also briefly described. This edition also includes a general discussion of three important theories called upon to justify the patent system: the natural rights argument; the distributive justice argument; and the utilitarian argument. The chapter about the European Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions has been updated. A selection of provisions from the August 1997 draft as well as the final text of the Directive, as adopted on 12 May, 1998, are discussed and commented upon. The patent provisions of the TRIP's Agreement (the Agreement on Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights, concluded in 1994 as an Annex to the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization) are also discussed and criticized, paying particular attention to the implications for biotechnology patents. Finally, the question is asked whether the developing countries stand to gain anything from TRIPs. A look at the results of empirical research, conducted by commentators on the economics of patenting, reveals that the new patent regime may prove to entail significant costs for the developing countries. This second edition also contains material on the EU Directive on biotechnology patents adopted in May 1998, justificatory theories of the patent system and the TRIP's agreement on Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights, concluded in the GATT (WTO) framework.