Curry, rice and globalisation
By Gerard Greenfield
The special on today's menu is #072829214 and #5,663,484 — a traditional favourite, Indian curry with basmati rice. No, the numbers are not the bar code at the supermarket checkout or the price in Russian roubles. Number 72829214 is the patent application number on "curry" lodged with the patent office in Japan earlier this year. And #5,663,484 is the number of the US patent on South Asian "basmati" rice held by a Texas-based company.
Although curry has been around in India for several thousand years, two people acting on behalf of Japanese food corporations have now claimed the ownership rights on curry. They claim to have invented curry by "mixing ingredients such as onion, potato, carrot and meat, cut and processed by conventional method with water and preferably extract of spices such as tumeric, cumin and coriander".
The patent will allow the "inventors" to claim exclusive ownership rights on the process of making curry. These rights are not limited to Japan. Under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the exclusive right to the process of making curry will be extended to other countries, including India. As a result, anyone making curry for commercial purposes will have to pay the patent-holders in Japan for the right to do so. It also paves the way for Japanese food corporations control the export of pre-cooked, packaged curry in the region.
Basmati rice has been grown in India for a few thousand years. But two years ago RiceTec Inc. acquired the exclusive rights to basmati rice, making 20 claims, including 11 on the plant, five on the grain, three on breeding methods and one on the seed. It has already started selling "Texmati" and "Kasmati" rice as authentic basmati.
But replacing exports from India is just RiceTec Inc's first step. The next is to seek financial compensation from Indian farmers who use the name "basmati" rice, then to monopolise control of seed and through the use of biotechnology. This ensures that the seeds cannot be reproduced through harvest but must be bought from RiceTec Inc. Having stolen basmati rice from farmers and their communities in India, RiceTec Inc is now trying to steal jasmine rice in Thailand.
Corporate bio-piracy
The curry and basmati patents are just two examples of a fast-growing industry under globalisation — bio-piracy. Bio-piracy involves corporations using intellectual property rights regimes like the WTO TRIPS to acquire monopoly control over traditional knowledge and nature.
There are now thousands of patents claimed by corporations on all aspects of traditional knowledge, including traditional medicine and farming methods, on natural resources, such as water, and tens of thousands of species of plant and animal life. Patents on life include ownership claims on the genes of living organisms — including those of human beings.
Corporations call all this the "life industry". One of the largest corporate bio-pirates is Monsanto, a US corporation which has played a leading role not only in patenting life, but in genetically manipulating life so that it can be controlled and sold for profit. In countries like Pakistan and India, Monsanto is preventing attempts to create legal protection that would allow farmers to save, store and exchange seeds as a way of avoiding dependence on Monsanto's hazardous genetically engineered seeds.
The law and regulations that allow corporations like Monsanto to gain so much power don't just fall from the sky. Trade agreements, laws and regulations like the WTO agreements are made by men and women who actively support the interests of the corporations. In fact, many of them work for the corporations that profit from it.
Whose Freedom?
Take the US company Bacardi Rum as an example. In 1996, a law called the Helms-Burton Act was passed to tighten the US economic blockade of Cuba. This Act allows former owners of property nationalised after the Cuban Revolution to sue any foreign companies doing business with Cuba using this property. One of these companies was a French company which had a business deal with Cuba to help it export white rum. This threatened the business interests of Bacardi, which is the biggest producer of white rum outside of Cuba. So Bacardi sued.
If we look closely, we'll see that the Helms-Burton Act was drafted by lawyers from Bacardi. It doesn't look like the invisible hand of the free market, does it? Corporate power and profit are what's on this menu. It's the same with corporate bio-piracy.
To support overseas bio-piracy by US corporations, the US government regularly threatens other countries with trade sanctions. In the same way, the WTO TRIPS regime is a powerful new tool for corporations to carry out bio-piracy. Since any countries trying to take legal measures to stop these claims will face trade sanctions, they must "open up" traditional knowledge and nature to ownership claims by overseas corporations. This forced "opening up" under threats and coercion is what is known as "free trade".
We are "free" to the extent that all aspects of social life and the environment we live in are reduced to products owned, bought and sold by private corporations. We are "free" insofar as we live, work, breathe, eat and reproduce within the iron cage of private profit.
That's a strange kind of freedom. It reminds me of a poem about a prisoner who is freed by her captor one day. The captor enters the prisoner's cell and says: "From this day on you are free." The prisoner gets up to leave, but his captor stops her and says: "You cannot leave. You are only free to stay here in your cell."
What happens when all biological and social life can potentially become the private property of corporations? Nothing is communal, nothing is public, nothing is collectively ours. Private property. No Trespassing! Maximum penalty.
The truth is, it probably won't happen. But those corporations will certainly try to make it happen and it is in the process of them trying that our livelihood, our health, the environment in which we live and work (or try to find work), will be slowly destroyed.
Well, as I sit in my cell looking over the menu, it's clear I've already lost my appetite for globalisation. So have a few million other working-class people. But globalisation is only part of a bigger problem. It's the ever-increasing exploitation of the many for the ever-increasing profit of the few.
It's not new — it's called capitalism. That's what this menu is really about. Exploitation of working-class people by capitalists is what these cell walls are made of. With all the choice they promise us, there's really no choice at all. So it's time for a different menu. And while we're at it, don't you think that maybe we'd better think about this freedom thing a bit more?
[Gerard Greenfield is a labour researcher working in Asia. From the US socialist magazine Against the Current. Visit .]