On the eve of the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Doha last November, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) introduced the "Agriculture and Farm Resources for the Indigenous Communities of Africa (AFRICA) Resolution" (H.Con.Res. 260), calling upon the U.S. government to "respect the rights of African farmers to their agricultural and biological resources, traditional knowledge and technologies."

WHAT'S THE ISSUE?
Essentially multinational corporations have increasingly threatened these rights through efforts to patent - and profit from - African seeds and indigenous crops and plants as well as traditional African knowledge and technologies.

Promoted by the WTO with strong support from the United States, Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, popularly known as TRIPS, permit individuals and corporations to claim exclusive rights over life forms, genes, microorganisms and the micro-processes by which they perform their functions. In fact, the WTO actually requires its member countries to patent plants as an integral part of the global trade and market-based framework it obliges them to follow. This is a radical break from the centuries-old practice in which people exchanged, saved and used their seeds and crop materials as resources that belonged to the entire community.

Other international agreements are at odds with TRIPS policies. For example, the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity and the Food and Agricultural Organization's International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources both uphold the principle that plant genetic resources belong to humankind's common heritage and should stay within the public domain. These conventions, however, do not have enforcement mechanisms; the WTO does. Thus WTO policies predominate in the conflict over private and public control of plant and agriculture genetic resources.

Foreign interests - corporations and individuals - have claimed rights over a number of African indigenous resources. The US Plant Variety Protection office (PVP) issued a certificate on a variety of teff, the grain used to make injera bread, a staple of the Ethiopian diet. The PVP also certified kunde Zulu, an African cowpea variety. The US has issued two patents on genetic material derived from a West African cocoa plant, and another two, endod, known as African soapberry, which has been cultivated and used by African women for centuries. A British company has patented the hoodia cactus plant, which has been used for untold generations by the San people of the Kalahari Desert to stave off hunger on long journeys. The British company then licensed it to a US company as an appetite suppressant. Patents and certificates have also be issued on vari eties of African sweet potatoes, millet, rice, melons, sorghum and cassava.

What are the implications for African smallholder farmers and local communities of this rush by international commercial interests to acquire monopoly rights over African agricultural resources?

It threatens food security - undermining farmers' historic right to save, exchange, use, breed and sell seeds, plants and crops.

It threatens development - the likelihood of having to buy expensive seeds each year could deal a blow to farmers' limited incomes.

It threatens land ownership - pressure to adopt a more industrialized model of agriculture based on large-scale commercial production would make it difficult for smallholder farmers to secure a return on their investment on the small acreage most African farmers own or use.

It threatens biodiversity - use of patented seeds for commercial agriculture engenders mono-cropping (growing a single crop over an extensive area) which results in clearing large expanses of flora and fauna and abandoning local crop varieties.

Multinational agribusiness promotes genetically-modified seeds - one aspect of the patenting issue - as a solution to hunger in the developing world. This remains open to debate. But in any case, there is more to the issue than a question of yields. Of fundamental importance is the fact that monopoly commercial control of agricultural genetic resources involves serious ethical issues… especially questions about the principle of public versus private control of humanity's basic life-support systems, of food, air and water.

Africans have staked out clear positions in favor of protecting communities' rights over their resources. The African Group of ministers at the 1999 WTO Third Ministerial in Seattle took the lead in opposing the patenting of life in any of its forms. They continued to push this position in Qatar.

For its part, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) drafted African Model Legislation for the Protection of the Rights of Local Communities, Farmers and Breeders, and for the Regulation of Access to Biological Resources. Its aim is to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of biological and agricultural genetic resources and traditional knowledge systems and technologies, and to maintain public and communal control and rights over these resources. The OAU is urging individual African governments to enact this legislation into national law.

Among the main principles enunciated in the model legislation are:

*Local communities have the rights over their biological resources, traditional knowledge and technologies. These rights are of a collective nature and take precedence over rights based on individual and corporate interests.

*African states and people have the right to ensure the conservation, evaluation and sustainable use of their biological resources, traditional knowledge and technologies, and to govern access to them.

*Local communities have the inalienable right to access, use, exchange or share their biological resources in sustaining their livelihood systems as regulated by customary law and practice.

*African states and people have the right to protect community intellectual property rights and farmers' rights according to customary practices and laws.

These values are what the resolution now before Congress embraces. H.Con.Res. 260 signals a commitment by the U.S. to fair economic policies for Africa's small holder farmers. It demonstrates that the U.S. is listening to the concerns raised both by African governments and by African civil society. During these difficult times, our sensitivity to African concerns and hopes is especially appropriate. But of course there is more: An understanding of economic justice, and an expression of identification with the common good.

General Assembly
In an interdependent world, no nation can be fully independent of other nations, and no nation should be overly dependent on other nations. This means that the international trading system must incorporate the basic norms of social justice and environmental sustainability rather than depend solely on the norms and outcomes of free trade. (p. 131)

The General Assembly "calls upon the U.S. government to develop sustainability criteria to appraise the likeliest impact on developing countries of existing and proposed United States trade policies. These criteria should reflect the principle that trade, to be supported, must genuinely promote poverty reduction, democracy, and ecological sustainability. No trade policy reform should be undertaken that does not meet these criteria except in cases where injured parties are fully compensated for their losses." (p. 136) Excerpts from "Hope for a Global Future: Toward Just and Sustainable Human Development," Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (1996)