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No Patents on Seeds consists of farming and environmental advocacy groups such as Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bäuerliche Landwirtschaft (Germany), Bund Naturschutz in Bayern (Germany), Berne Declaration (Switzerland), Gesellschaft für Ökologische Forschung (Germany), Greenpeace (Germany), No Patents on Life! (Germany), Verband Katholisches Landvolk (Germany) and Foundation for Future Farming.
The coalition also claimed that Monsanto’s melon patent constituted an act of “biopiracy” by violating Indian law and international treaties, adding that the Indian government supported the opposition and sent a letter requesting the patent to be revoked. Biopiracy is the highly unethical practice of commercializing biological materials such as plants from certain countries or territories without compensation.
“Monsanto’s melon Patent is biopiracy at its most devious. First of all, the patented resistance was not invented by Monsanto—just discovered in an Indian melon. Monsanto is now pretending to be the first to have bred it into other melons—but to copy something is not an invention,” Berne Declaration campaign coordinator Francois Meienberg said in a statement.
“Secondly, Monsanto has violated the Indian Biodiversity Act implementing rules on Access and Benefit-Sharing based on the Convention on Biological Diversity,” Meienberg continued. “It would be a disgrace if the European Patent Office rewards Monsanto with a patent based on a flagrant violation of Indian law.”
The opposition also includes renowned Indian activist and outspoken Monsanto critic Dr. Vandana Shiva and her organization Navdanya, network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 18 states in India.
“We believe that plants and seeds are not human inventions and therefore, not patentable. This patent is based on biopiracy since it patents traits taken from indigenous melon varieties from India,” Shiva told The Hindu.
#Monsanto #Biopiracy of
of Indian #melon.In 2004 Navdanya stopped #wheat Biopiracy https://t.co/vs89bUeK9f#NoPatentsOnSeed@PMOIndia— Dr. Vandana Shiva (@drvandanashiva) January 20, 2016
It so happens that the melon patent is “one of several patents granted on plants and animals derived from conventional breeding by the European Patent Office,” No Patents on Seeds said.
So are plants patentable in Europe? The European Patent Office’s Enlarged Board of Appeal ruled that plants are in principle patentable if the technical teaching of the invention is not limited to a specific plant variety or varieties, the agency says. That essentially means that in the European Union, plants are patentable if the invention can be carried out in a number of plants.
The European Patent Office says that the number of patent applications it receives for conventionally bred plants is around 70 applications per year, and seven patents have been granted since 1995.
According to research from No Patents on Seeds, approximately 100 new patent applications from agribusinesses such as Bayer, Dupont/Pioneer, Monsanto, Syngenta and Dow AgroSciences were filed in just 2015 alone. These patents are for carrots, potatoes, brassica plants, maize, melons, pepper, rice, lettuce, soybeans, spinach, tomatoes, wheat and onions.
As plant biotechnology continues to advance, these patents highlight the increasingly murky and controversial topic of corporations patenting—and arguably controlling—the world’s plants and seeds for financial profit.
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