How lawsuits around intellectual property in Brazil and India are
impacting the patentability of plants and seeds, farmers' rights, and
the public interest.
Over the past decade, legal challenges have arisen in the Global South
over patents on genetically modified crops. In this ethnographic study,
Karine E. Peschard explores the effects of these disputes on people's
lives, while uncovering the role of power--material, institutional, and
discursive--in shaping laws and legal systems. The expansion of
corporate intellectual property (IP), she shows, negatively impacts
farmers' rights and, by extension, the right to food, since small farms
produce the bulk of food for domestic consumption. Peschard sees
emerging a new legal common sense concerning the patentability of
plant-related inventions, as well as a balance among IP, farmers'
rights, and the public interest.
Peschard examines the strengthening of IP regimes for plant varieties,
the consolidation of the global biotech industry, the erosion of
agrobiodiversity, and farmers' dispossession. She shows how litigants
question the legality of patents and private IP systems implemented by
Monsanto for royalties on three genetically modified crop varieties,
Roundup Ready soybean in Brazil and Bt cotton and Bt eggplant in India.
Peschard argues that these private IP systems have rendered moot
domestic legislation on plant variety protection and farmers' rights.
This unprecedented level of corporate concentration in such a vital
sector raises concerns over the erosion of agricultural biodiversity,
farmers' rights and livelihoods, food security, and, ultimately, the
merits of extending IP rights to higher life forms such as plants.
