• The EU's 'Life Patents Directive' provides a legal framework for the extension of patents (intellectual property rights) to plants, animals and their genes. This was done without proper public consultation across the whole EU.
  

Effects of patenting in food and farming

• Patents and genetic modification mutually reinforce each other. Patents provide the commercial monopoly that enables companies to control markets and maximise profits. Without patents there would be considerably less genetic modification in food and farming. Together patents and genetic modification will help to deliver the basic components of nature and agriculture into the control of private corporations. Patents are even being applied for, and granted, on whole genetically modified species. In October 2005 the European Patents Office approved a patent on the Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURTs) or Terminator Technology, which provides the ultimate form of patent protection by preventing seeds from germinating thus tying farmers to buying fresh seeds from the biotech corporations every year.
  
• Patenting genetic resources will make farmers more dependent on private corporations. Once a company has a patent it can then charge a fee to anyone who uses it. A particular concern is that farmers will be forbidden to carry out the traditional practise of saving seeds to plant in the following season and instead will be pressurised into buying patented seeds each year. Monsanto is already enforcing this in the US in contracts for its 'Roundup Ready Soya' and GM oilseed rape. Percy Schmeiser, a farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada, was forced to compensate Monsanto by the Canadian Supreme Court when his farm-saved oilseed rape seeds were contaminated with their GM traits by wind-blown seed and pollen.
  
• Patents also promote 'biopiracy', the appropriation of genetic resources from the southern hemisphere for private exploitation and profit . For example Monsanto took out a patent on wax and oil from the Indian Neem tree for fungicidal and insecticidal uses. These properties have not been discovered by the company - the Neem tree has been used in India for centuries. The patent was challenged and overturned by a judge in India. Rice-Tech has been granted a patent on Basmati rice by the US patent office - this was again successfully challenged by India and Pakistan in the US courts. The Convention on Biodiversity agreed that countries where valuable genetic resources are to be found should share in the benefits if any products derived from them become commercially successful. However, there is little evidence that benefits sharing is being applied or that biopiracy has halted. Patent applicants are not required to state the country of origin.
  
• Bioprospecting could be taking place in the UK before too long. English Nature has received an informal approach to bioprospect on National Nature Reserves. The UK has no legal framework in place to deal with bioprospecting and thus ownership of genetic resources and access and benefits sharing are not clear. The genetic resources of the UK should not be patented and should be available to all.
  
• For many people objections to patenting genetic material are based on moral or spiritual grounds because of the way it "treats life itself as a mere commodity". The Church of Scotland for example is opposed to patents on any living organisms
  
• A freeze on patenting would allow time for a thorough public assessment of the moral implications of patenting and the impact of existing patents and patent legislation on genetic resources, agricultural and biological diversity and livelihoods.
  

Summary

To allow time for a full independent assessment of the implications of the patenting of genetic resources there should be:

• an end to patents on genetic resources for food and farm crops
  
• suspension of any existing patents
  
• no patenting of UK genetic resources