Signed in 1994, the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was the first treaty to impose global standards on intellectual property or legal ownership of plants, animals and microorganisms, bolstered by an enforcement mechanism. Representatives of the US seed and biotech industry brought the issue into the trade talks. Their goal? To ensure that companies like Monsanto, Dow and Pioneer, which spend money on plant breeding to bring new seeds to market, can recoup their investment and make a profit by preventing farmers from re-using those seeds—obligating them to purchase seeds from corporations year after year.

The patenting of life has been hotly contested for decades. For farmers, it makes seeds and livestock more expensive and takes away their right to freely reproduce them. It also reduces life and culture to a commodity that corporations can own and control. While the WTO agreement allowed countries to exclude plants and animals other than microorganisms from their patent laws, it required that they provide some form of intellectual property protection over plant varieties—the seeds that farmers sow—without specifying how to do that. According to industry representatives who helped draft the text, the US corporations got 95 per cent of what they wanted from TRIPS.[1]

Legalised theft

FTAs negotiated outside the WTO go even further and help US and European corporations get what they weren’t able to achieve under TRIPS. These deals often require countries to: 1) allow companies to take out patents on plants and animals, 2) adopt the rules of the International Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (UPOV) which provide patent-like rights for plant breeders, and 3) join the Budapest Treaty on the recognition of deposits of micro-organisms for the purpose of patent protection. These measures give monopoly powers to agribusiness at the expense of small and indigenous farming communities. For example, UPOV and patent laws generally make it illegal for farmers to save, exchange or modify seeds from so-called protected plant varieties. This is a tremendous injustice, since farmers and indigenous peoples are the original source of these seeds. Corporations take seeds from farmers’ fields, tinker with them and then claim property rights over them as “new” varieties.