Intellectual Property Rights and the North-South Contest for Agricultural Germplasm: A Historical Perspective
This article examines intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes as they apply to agricultural germplasm in the context of global North-South relations. The issue is pertinent particularly since TRIPs (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) became enshrined in the statutes of the World Trade Organization in 1994, institutionalizing the notion of ‘germplasm as property’ throughout the globe. Yet, the idea of ‘germplasm as property’ is a notion culturally specific to the global North historically. It is perhaps no surprise that many germplasm patents are being held on biological matter that originated in the South–in the Vavilovian ‘centers of diversity’. This paradox situates the contest over biodiversity resources in a world-historic context and undermines the declared reasons for germplasm IPRs. Besides, more than just a North-South conflict over resources, this episode features also a confrontation between competing worldviews of nature-human relations.
The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn
The previous article provided an overview of how science and technology have been used to subordinate the largely precapitalist system of agricultural production to the domination of capital. In this article we provide a case study of the penetration of capital in corn cultivation with the spread of the use of hybrid corn, the flagship of the successful innovations of twentieth-century agricultural research. Geneticists, historians, sociologists, and economists have cited it as a prime example of the enormous yield increases derived from basic research motivated only by the quest for knowledge. Moreover, economists have made extravagant claims about the reaping of social—and only social—benefits from this innovation.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
The devastation of the Indies : a brief account
Five hundred years after Columbus's first voyage to the New World, the debate over the European impact on Native American civilization has grown more heated than ever. Among the first--and most insistent--voices raised in that debate was that of a Spanish priest, Bartolome de Las Casas, acquaintance of Cortes and Pizarro and shipmate of Velasquez on the voyage to conquer Cuba. In 1552, after forty years of witnessing--and opposing--countless acts of brutality in the new Spanish colonies, Las Casas returned to Seville, where he published a book that caused a storm of controversy that persists to the present day. The Devastation of the Indies is an eyewitness account of the first modern genocide, a story of greed, hypocrisy, and cruelties so grotesque as to rival the worst of our own century. Las Casas writes of men, women, and children burned alive "thirteen at a time in memory of Our Redeemer and his twelve apostles." He describes butcher shops that sold human flesh for dog food ("Give me a quarter of that rascal there, " one customer says, "until I can kill some more of my own"). Slave ship captains navigate "without need of compass or charts, " following instead the trail of floating corpses tossed overboard by the ship before them. Native kings are promised peace, then slaughtered. Whole families hang themselves in despair. Once-fertile islands are turned to desert, the wealth of nations plundered, millions killed outright, whole peoples annihilated. In an introduction, historian Bill M. Donovan provides a brief biography of Las Casas and reviews the controversy his work produced among Europeans, whose indignation--and denials--lasted centuries. But the book itself is short. "Were I t describe all this, " writes Las Casas of the four decades of suffering he witnessed, "no amount of time and paper could encompass this task."