Indian supreme court says seeds, plants and animals not patentable
Staff Writer |
There has been a major victory for the planet, for biodiversity, for seeds, for farmers, for the rule of law in India’s Supreme Court with the court refusing to overrule a decision of the High Court that upholds article 3j of India’s Patent law, amended to implement the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement of the WTO.
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Article 3(j) excludes from patentability “plants and animals in whole or in any part thereof other than microorganisns but including seeds, varieties, and species, and essentially biological processes for production or propagation of plants and animalsâ€.
This article is an implementation of article 27.3 b of TRIPs. While Monsanto brought patents on life into a trade treaty, the Indian government and governments of Brazil and Argentina introduced exclusion to patentability, as well as a suigeneris option for protection of plant varieties.
Monsanto has admitted on record that it tried to write the TRIPs agreement, for it’s own benefit. James Enyart of Monsanto is on record at a conference illustrating just how deeply the TRIPs agreement was supposed to be aligned to corporate interest and against the interests of farmers, nations and their citizens:
“Industry has identified a major problem for international trade. It crafted a solution, reduced it to a concrete proposal and sold it to our own and other governments… The industries and traders of world commerce have played simultaneously the role of patients, the diagnosticians and the prescribing physicians.â€
Monsanto is unscientifically trying to argue that a gene is merely a chemical, a plant is a machine into which the chemical can be mechanically introduced and removed at will.
They are trying to make a fallacious argument that Bt cotton is not a plant and Bt genes modified by them is not a part of a plant or plant variety.Genes are part of living organisms.
Subcellular organanelles are parts of living organisms. Monsanto is also trying to say their ppatent is for a “productâ€, not a “process†to try and escape from the restrictions of Art 3j.
However the Patent title itself clarifies that patent number 214436 is for “methods for transforming plants to express bacillus thurengensis delta endotoxis “It is therefore false for Monsanto to argue that that patent is a product patent and not a process patent.
Once the transgenic gene made with Bt toxins extracted from the organism Bacillus Thurengensis, with genes for antibiotic resistance markers and genes that act as viral promoters and introduced into cotton,it becomes Bt cotton a plant variety which is not patentable under 3j.
The Monsanto lawyer actually said in the court that “we have invented a chemical that turns plants into superplants. The seed is just the container of the chemicalâ€. Seed the very source of life has now been reduced to a container in Monsanto’s desperate attempt to continue to collect illegal royalties from farmers.
Besides falsely claiming patents on Bt Cotton Seeds first as patents on plants, then as patents on genes that are modified in a lab, now as patents on chemicals, Monsanto is distorting science at the most basic level and wanting to corrupt our national laws based on the highest scientific understanding of the biology of living organisms, of genes, of GMOs.By referring to Bt genes as a "Technology" and now a chemical product added to plants, Monsanto is hiding from the courts that a "gene" even when described in its chemical form as a nucleic acid sequence becomes pat of the plant and its future generations through the essentially biological process of plant reproduction and future breeding. ■