Stealing, suppressing???

Food or rather gene patenting might start to look like an excuse to exploit people, especially those who are from the developing countries who are prone to famine to buy the rights to grow the same or similar type of crops that can have been grown on their land from the large transnational corporations. This view can be derived from http://www.globalissues.org/article/191/food-patents-stealing-indigenous-knowledge

In this article it shows some statistics that are quite depressing to see that some companies are so profit driven that they might have neglected the actual needs of the less fortunate.

Derived portions from the article:

Large transnational corporations like Monsanto, DuPont and others have been investing into biotechnology in such a way that patents have been taken out on indigenous plants which have been used for generations by the local people, without their knowledge or consent. The people then find that the only way to use their age-old knowledge is be to buy them back from the big corporations. In Brazil, which has some of the richest biodiversity in the world, large multinational corporations have already patented more than half the known plant species. (Brazil is estimated to have around 55,000 species of flora, amounting to some 22% of the world's total. India, for example, has about46,000.)

While many biotech companies claim that genetically engineered foods will help alleviate hunger and increase food security, their acts of patenting the knowledge and food that has been developed over centuries itself may be a threat to food security, due to more concentrated ownership and the political advantages that goes with that. The large biotech firms are mainly from western nations, especially America.

Kong Carol