L- Biotech Patents
Khan 14. Shahrukh Khan was a staff writer for the Harvard International Review. He graduated from Emory University School of law, was a high school teacher at the Success Academy Charter Schools, and was a Legal at Blackstone. He currently works as an associate at Reed Smith LLP. “A new kind of colonialism: the ramifications of intellectual property rights” https://go-gale-com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA364854935&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=07391854&p=AONE&sw=w&aty=ip&enforceAuth=true&linkSource=delayedAuthFullText&oweAuth=true&userGroupName=umuser&u=umuser. Accessed through the University of Michigan. Kkang
Biotech industry profits have soared over the past few years. The biotech industry has become a business that gains momentum from scoping out organic materials and chemical substances that can be developed into a commercial product. Many of those materials and compounds come from plant life within Indigenous environments.
Unfortunately, these biotech corporations are not consulting Indigenes before using their products for the betterment of humanity; they simply take them out of the equation and heinously exploit the plants and natural resources that these people have been using in a sustainable manner for centuries. What is worse is that these corporations legally place their own control and rights over the resources that Indigenes have been using for survival.
The instrument these corporations use is a patent, commonly referred to as an IPR or Intellectual Property Right. A patent is a document granted by a government giving exclusive rights over a product to the inventor. The Natural Rights Theory of Patents argues that an inventor has a natural right to his or her invention and that society, represented by the state, has an obligation to recognize, protect, and enforce that right.
But the fact of the matter is that these corporations never did create the resource or cultivate the plant that they are placing exclusionary rights on. Instead they extract the elements of the plant's genes and patent the active compounds. Corporations have been able to patent genes from plants and thus claim the plants for themselves in the process. But the most odious thing they do is to take the cultural knowledge of the plant and all that comes with it, knowledge that Indigenes have collected from centuries of observation and interaction with the environment, and call it their own.
Corporations and governments argue that natural resources such as oil, plants, and the like need to be extracted because it will benefit a country. Yet this is only part of the story, because the people living in those areas are greatly displaced. Some governments neglect their obligations to protect its inhabitants. This is especially true in Latin American countries such as Venezuela, where multinational oil titans disregard the native lands they are harming while extracting natural resources