Cyber Action letter on TRIPS Review to the WTO Director-General

“No Patents on Life in the WTO!”

Dear Sir,

The World Trade Organisation has pushed patents and other forms of Intellectual Property Rights into agriculture, biodiversity and indigenous knowledge around the world. Since the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement was adopted as part of the WTO agreement in 1995, the world has seen an increase in the grab for patents on life forms around the world.

Corporations are claiming “invention” and patents over traditional knowledge and indigenous plants. Cases of biopiracy are increasingly common, such as the recent failed attempt to patent the Neem Tree, used across India for its fungicidal and medicinal properties. Corporations have patented GM crops, conventional crops such as maize, wheat and rice, and the cancerous oncomouse. Now Monsanto has filed an application to patent a pig with certain characteristics, bred through a combination of commonly used techniques. What next? Cows? Humans?

Seed laws ushered in by TRIPS are preventing farmers from carrying out their traditional practices of seed saving and seed exchange, leading to the disappearance of the world’s seed diversity and increasing control over the world’s food by just a few corporations. The biodiversity, seed diversity and traditional knowledge of developing countries in particular, are therefore seriously threatened by TRIPS.

Countries only agreed to Article 27.3 (b), which imposes patents on living organisms because a review of TRIPS was provided for. The very purpose of this commitment to a TRIPS Review was to ensure that WTO members who wanted exclusion from patents on life would be able to exercise their democratic rights and ethical values. Now developing members are calling this review of Article 27.3(b) to put an end to patents on life.

But the TRIPS Review is long overdue. It was to take place 4 years after the original agreement was signed, and was mandated again in the Doha development round of negotiations. Since 1999, developing country governments have been calling for a TRIPS Review because the current agreement surrenders their biodiversity, seed and traditional knowledge, to corporate biopirates. But these calls for the WTO to fulfil its own commitment seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

It has been left to citizens to take action to stop biopiracy and patents on life.

Without taking up and completing the mandated Review of Article 27.3(b), all negotiations on GATS and NAMA should be put on hold in the lead up to the Hong Kong Ministerial in December.

We therefore demand of the WTO:

• To complete the TRIPS Review of Article 27.3(b)
• No negotiations on other issues until TRIPS Review completed
• No to patents on life and traditional knowledge

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