Indigenous peoples rights are being STRIPPED away

Mexico again “Two collecting expeditions, both funded by the US National Institutes of Health, have halted their bioprospecting in Mexico while they wait to see what the new government headed by Vicente Fox does, or doesn't do, about his country's sovereignty over plant germ plasm. The expeditions, composed of US and Mexican researchers and begun under the former Mexican government, which had been in power for 80 years, have been accused of exploiting indigenous peoples. In one of the projects, sponsored by the University of Georgia, researchers collected plants and interviewed traditional healers in Chiapas regarding the substances they use. In the other, the University of Arizona and the National Autonomous University of Mexico planned to collect plants used by the Mayans. Any discoveries useful to industrialized medicine would be developed by American Home Products, a United States–based pharmaceutical corporation. A bizarre case of seed patenting

A Canadian federal judge created an unusual precedent this spring when he found a Saskatoon farmer liable for genetically engineered rape oil plants that he said he never wanted. Investigators from the biotech giant Monsanto had taken samples from a field tended by Percy Schmeiser, a 70-year-old farmer, and found them to contain Monsanto-engineered genes for tolerance to a herbicide that Monsanto makes. Apparently pollen from the seeds had blown in from the fields of neighboring farmers. Schmeiser says he has been growing oilseed rape (canola) for 40 years, using the time-honored method of saving seeds from one year's harvest to plant the next year. He denied that he deliberately used, or even wanted, the seeds from Monsanto, which requires that farmers repurchase seed each year. The judge ruled that, regardless of whether the plants were invaders or not, Schmeiser must pay the multinational corporation about $85,000 and promise not to use the seed again. Schmeiser was quoted as saying: “I've been using my own seed for years, and now farmers like me are being told we can't do that anymore if our neighbors are growing [genetically modified] crops that blow in. Basically, the right to use our own seed has been taken away” (Marc Kaufman, “Farmer Liable for Growing Biotech Crops,” Washington Post, 30 Mar 2001, p. A3).”