Another Day in Patent Land

JJ King on bogus hygiene laws & the takeover of India's edible oil industry

Perhaps you already knew that since 1997, US-based company RiceTec has held a patent on basmati rice lines and grains - the same basmati rice named after the Greater Punjab valley in which it has been grown for centuries. No conspiracy theory. Look it up yourself.

This kind of thing is, presumably, exactly what McKinsey mean when they speak of the ‘“Indian agro-business [having] lots of room to grow”. Or perhaps they’re referring to the new raft of pseudo-hygiene laws that are being used to shut down small-scale oil processing through ‘packaging orders ‘ that make sale of oil illegal – unless it’s packaged in plastic or aluminium. This take-over of the edible oil industry, carried out under the bogus banners of hygiene and health, will slide tens of millions of Indian livelihoods towards poverty as it creates new markets for the West.

Or maybe McKinsey are thinking of the take-over of packaged, branded flour that Vandana Shiva, in her recent Reith lecture, anticipated would cost a hundred million Indian livelihoods. “The globalisation of the food system is destroying the diversity of local food cultures and local food economies,” Shiva warned. “A global monoculture is being forced on people...These are not recipes for feeding the world, but stealing livelihoods from the poor.”

Patent 5,663,484: The Arguments are still Raging[http://www.evb.ch/bd/basmati.htm]The full text of Vandana Shiva’s Reith Lecture:[http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/lecture5.html]