Once bitten, twice stupid is a good way to describe the way the Indian government has reacted to the theft of Indian genetic material by greedy corporations from the West. No prizes for anybody who guesses that Rice Tec, the company that recently walked out of the US Patent office with a patent for our own desi basmati, has been marketing it as their product in the international market for several years now. 

This fact came to the notice of the Indian government two years ago, in February 1996, when they found that Rice Tec had registered for a trademark for exporting what they called "texbasmati" in the UK. The Centre for Science and Environment warned the government that the only permanent way to deal with the problem was to put in place two crucial legislations - the National Biodiversity Act and the Plant Varieties’ Protection Act - which would give them legal powers to act in such situations in the international market.

But the government, capable only of knee-jerk reactions with little or no foresight, had resorted merely to treat the case in isolation, rather than as symptomatic of a larger problem, and had been content with lodging a case against Rice Tec at the UK Economic Court. Their "strategy", according to J S Raju, then Director of the Agriculture and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA), had been "to file such cases in all the countries that Rice Tec approaches for trademark. This way we hope to prevent it from usurping our export market".

This was, at best, a short term solution and the government will pay heavily for being stupid with a smart international trade rival. The pending case in the UK Economic Court prevented Rice Tec from exporting to only UK, but they paid the Indian government back by applying for a patent which not only makes it impossible for the APEDA crew to block it’s entry into any market in any part of the world, but also makes the gigantic US domestic market off-limits for Indian basmati exporters!

CSE’s campaign to get the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture to enact the two bills has fallen on deaf ears. So far, all we have received are copies of extremely inadequate draft bills that get lost in the corridors of Krishi Bhavan and Paryavaran Bhavan almost as soon as they surface.

Unwilling to learn even from the second bout, D Rajagopalan, the present Chairman of the APEDA says they will "fight it out at the US courts and challenge the patent". The Ministry of Commerce has set up yet another "expert committee" to scrutinize the patent.

But such sporadic legal wrangles on isolated issues won’t go very far in safeguarding the country’s biodiversity. They are no guarantee against Rice Tec, or some other corporation, claiming a patent on say a particular line of wheat which is an "improvement" on some variety that our farmers have been growing for generations. The threat of the industry in the West, which has invested mammoth amounts of money on biotechnology and has sophisticated research facilities, is hanging fire for farmers in India.

It has been suggested that India should take the basmati case to the dispute settlement panel of the World Trade Organisation. But India does not have a Geographical Appellation Act, required to invoke the necessary clause of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Chapter of the WTO, which offers propreitary rights to a specific geographical area over the products associated with it. So such a move would be futile.

To complicate matters further, the country is presently without a government. The Centre for Science and Environment has written to Vishwanath Anand, Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, asking him to stop their dawdling, realise that knee-jerk reactions only invite more trouble, and to get on with putting in place the much-needed biodiversity bill.