Skip to main content

Intellectual Property Rights and Ownership of Seeds



Does the Genetically Modified cotton, known as Bt Cotton or Bacillus Thuringiensis, give higher yield than the traditional variety of cotton that the Vidarbha farmer has been planting? Some studies have suggested it does. Qiam and Zilberman (2003); Qaim, 2003; have concluded after studying the field trials of Bt Cotton in India that it successfully reduces pest damage and increases yield. Bennet, Ismael, and Morse’s (2005) study shows that the official variety of Bt cotton outperform the unofficial variety. 

However, this seeming ‘change’ in planting unofficial hybrid variety to official variety is not simply a matter of habit for the farmer. Because, the seed that the now sows doesn’t come from the produce he got from the previous crop cycle. It now comes at a very high cost from a multinational corporation called Monsanto. Bt Cotton seed, aptly called the terminator seed, is designed in such a way that it terminates itself after one production cycle. The terminator technology would be theoretically capable of producing plants that don’t produce viable seeds, forcing farmers to buy new seeds each season (Herring, 2005).

The transgenic variety of cotton requires much higher inputs. It needs sufficient water; and the agriculture in drought-prone Vidarbha is rain dependent. Government’s agriculture extension services are poor, therefore farmers depend on input dealers for advice. There is a lack of formal credit institutions, as a result of which, farmers take help from informal money-lenders (Mishra, 2006).

The Bt cotton seed is patented by Mahyco, licensed by Monsanto, a multinational corporation that is known to employ coercive ways to destroy the traditional varieties of crops and collect royalties from farmers whose crops are found to have the gene developed by Monsanto, even though it is a result of cross-pollination from a neighboring farm due to wind. This new mode of agriculture is capital driven and coercive that is premised on the principle of destruction (as reflected by the terminator technology, and destruction of indigenous varieties of crops). Not only is the farmer’s conventional ways of living erased in adapting to this ‘progressive’, ‘technology-based’ agriculture, he is also robbed of his means of production – the seeds - that he has owned for generations. He gets implicated in the processes of globalization. Capitalism in this way becomes a newer, indirect version of colonialism. The right of the poorest people in developing countries are bought off with the power of the capital, their means of earning are taken from them with no just and fair compensation; and those very means, now owned by big corporations are used to dictate and govern their lives. The principle of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ aided by the glorious narrative of Green Revolution in India overrides the knowledge systems of the poor farmers, discards them as backward, not good enough for the progress of the nation. As over the years, more and more of these indigenous knowledges are erased, the prevalence of uniform, West-centered knowledge system emerges as the only way of practicing agriculture. And thus the project of the new form of colonialism would be complete. And this is accomplished with the help of Intellectual Property Rights. The very central point of this blog is to suggest that technology mediates power relations through Intellectual Property Rights.  


The task for a development communication scholar is cut out here. How could these universalizing processes be opposed in favour of diversity? How can this process be reversed? Can all the various movements touched by Intellectual Property Rights – e.g. Free Software Movement, piracy, etc. be brought into the discussion together with Biotechnology and medicine, for finding any possible theoretical solution?
References:

Qaim, M., & Zilberman, D. (2003). Yield effects of genetically modified crops in developing countries. Science, 299(5608), 900-902.

Qaim, M. (2003). Bt cotton in India: Field trial results and economic projections. World Development, 31(12), 2115-2127.

Bennett, R. M., Ismael, Y., Kambhampati, U., & Morse, S. (2005). Economic impact of genetically modified cotton in India. The Journal of Agrobiotechnology & Economics, 7(3)

Herring, R. J. (2005). Miracle seeds, suicide seeds, and the poor. Social movements in India: Poverty, power, and politics, 203-232.


Mishra, S. (2006). Farmers' suicides in Maharashtra. Economic and Political Weekly, 1538-1545.

Popular posts from this blog

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...
Read more

Upper caste Indian women in the diaspora, DEI, and the politics of hate

Figure 1: Trump, Vance and their partners responding to the remarks by Mariann Edgar Budde   Emergent from the struggles of the civil rights movement , led by African Americans , organized against the oppressive history of settler colonialism and slavery that forms the backbone of US society, structures around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) formed an integral role in forging spaces for diverse recognition and representation.  These struggles around affirmative action, diversity, equity and inclusion were at the heart of the changes to white only immigration policies, building pathways for migration of diverse peoples from the Global South.  The changes to the immigration policies created opportunities for Indians to migrate to the US, with a rise of Indian immigration into the US since the 1970s into educational institutions, research and development infrastructures, and technology-finance infrastructures. These migratory structures into the US were leveraged by l...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...
Read more