Shiva, Vandana. "Biodiversity and Intellectual Property Rights," in Ralph Nader, et al., eds. The Case Against Free Trade. Earth Island Press, 1993. pp. 108-120.

Vandana Shiva begins her investigation of the impact of intellectual property rights (IPR) on biodiversity by recalling the long history of Indian struggle against imperialism. She argues that the newest form of this struggle is over the rights of farmers to have access to their own seeds in opposition to attempts by transnational agrochemical corporations (TNCs) to monopolise this crucial resource.

The increasing internationalisation of IPR concepts through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade’s article on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) is one that benefits TNCs at the expense of third world farmers, particularly because these IPRs are based on the assumption that only corporate knowledge requires protection or compensation. The IPR war represents a specific conflict of knowledge systems where the intellectual contributions of local communities are exploited but not recognised. Furthermore, IPR rewrites the terms of biodiversity so that "‘whereas germplasm flows out of the South as the common heritage of mankind,’ it returns as a commodity" (112).

Indian patent law as it now stands does not recognise any form of patenting where genetic materials or biotechnologies are concerned. The internationalisation of U.S. standards through GATT-TRIPs threatens to change that. It is predicted that TNCs will use these rights to force farmers to pay royalties for even saving seeds from one harvest to the next. This type of monopolistic control ensures that farmers are dependent on TNCs year after year. In addition to the cultural, ethical and economic erosion that this represents for third world nations, it also displaces farmers as competition, while neatly retaining them as both suppliers of raw materials (in the form of centuries-old land race varieties) and consumers of commodities. IPRs destroy knowledge development in both the informal sector (by refusing to recognise it) and the formal sector (by restricting free access to scientific knowledge). In addition, biodiversity is seen as an impediment to TNC expansion because "the corporate perspective views as value only that which serves the market" (118). As a neo-colonialist project IPR is a profitable one, one which sees a tremendous flight of material and intellectual capital flow North from Southern nations. Shiva closes by suggesting that we consider the impact of this capital flow on third world debt.

See also IPR info sheets Nos. 2, 3, and 4, and Mooney, "The Conservation and Development of Indigenous Knowledge in the Context of Intellectual Property Systems."