Nature as a Commodity

From the time people first began cultivating and harvesting cereal grains - some ten to fifteen thousand years ago, plants and their products have been a necessary component of the material foundations upon which human societies were formed. As humans, we all need to eat, and what we eat, whether it is a steak or tofu, pasta or chocolate cake, is originally derived from basic plant material. Plants provide us not only with food, but also with the raw materials required for the production of numerous goods from cotton t-shirts, to automobile tires, to life-saving drugs. Since agriculture began over lO,OOO years ago, humans have selectively bred plants and animals in order to create stronger, healthier, higher yielding organisms.

Selective plant breeding is accomplished by choosing seeds with the most desirable traits from each year's harvest in the hope that the desired characteristics of the selected parent will surface in its offspring. In doing so, over thousands of years the steady accumulation of desirable genes has produced more and more highly productive plants.

In the last two decades, scientists have been able to engage in a more specific form of crop selection by isolating the genetic material of organisms and inducing specific modifications so that the plants carry and reproduce desired genetic traits such as resistance to pesticides, higher nutritional content, and improved appearance. These biotechnological innovations pose large ramifications for agriculture - for farmers, small seed companies and consumers. Seeds reproduce themselves almost indefinitely and thus do not lend themselves to commodification.

So what exactly is “commodification”. Well, it is difficult to own the seed as property because its a biological organism that naturally wants to reproduce under all kinds of different circumstances. So industry pursued two routes of commodification – the social route, which has to do with legislation making the seed ownable, and the technological route, which is hybridisation. In this way they have made seeds patentable by the company that engineers them. They become a commodity of the company.

Because seeds are not easily commodified, two things have remained true until the latter part of this century:

• the genetics of most major crop plants have been regarded as common heritage
• and little private investment has been made in plant and crop improvement. 

In the later part of last century there were technological routes, such as hybridization, taken towards commodification of the seed. Companies have also taken legalistic routes, such as the granting of property rights to plant varieties and, more recently, utility patent protection to certain "new" plant varieties.

The almost infinite reproduction of the seed, however, has always posed a problem for its ultimate commodification: not all plant varieties, especially crops, are able to be hybridized, and even patented plants have numerous offspring.

In recent years, advances in bio-technology have allowed for an increase in the commodification of seeds not only by relying on patent protection for bio-engineered varieties, but through taking a new route to commodification - through bio-technical processes that, among other things, render the seeds sterile or insert easily recognizable "marker" genes that identify plants' DNA strains as being the intellectual property of various biotech firms.

The introduction of these innovations into the international realm of global trade and property protection has been an awkward and at times highly controversial transition. Nevertheless, intellectual property law seems to be the framework under which international protection and control of genetic resources will be discussed and decided.

What used to belong to all on a grand scale is now finding its way into ownership and control by the few.

Interesting?!??

Ages-old plants get a makeover: Corn and tobacco bioengineered as STI and HIV medicines

Bioengineered Plants Gone Wild

Children ofthe Corn: GMO Sterility and Spermicides