[iDC] seed patents, Indian farmer suicides, and the future of Iraq

[Keith Hart]

Nancy and others,
> (Regis, as far as Monsanto's presence in India is concerned, what I've 
> found is that the company was able to overcome the government's 
> resistance to their presence in 2005; more on that here -- 
> http://www.hindu.com/2005/05/21/stories/2005052103121300.htm, for 
> example. I certainly don't know enough about Indian politics to make 
> sense of why that happened.)
If you Google 'patents India' you will get the following announcement of 
The Patents (Amendment) Act which was passed in April 2005.

http://www.patentoffice.nic.in/ipr/patent/patent_2005.pdf

This came after pressure from the WTO (and the US) to conform to the 
1994 intellectual property treaty (TRIPs). The consequences for India's 
role as the sole large-scale producer of cheap generic medicines for the 
world's poor and the benefits accruing to Big Pharma were widely 
discussed at the time. But  Indian competition with American digital 
exports of movies, music and  software was also affected, as presumably 
was Monsanto's campaign to introduce GMOs to India.

In order to understand why India's political elite would so readily 
abandon the moral and practical high ground in this respect, you need to 
visit the US-India nuclear deal concluded the following July in 
Washington DC.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/9663/usindia_nuclear_deal.html

The Indian government's desire to be America's principal ally in the 
region (at the expense of Pakistan and China) also lay behind their 
signing a disgraceful bilateral treaty exempting US citizens from future 
prosecution for war crimes. This treaty has been signed by some fifty 
other countries, but by no large non-western country other than India. 
(In Europe only Britain has signed -- go figure).

The United States currently has three ways of bending foreign 
governments to its imperial designs: denying them entry to the US 
market;  the IP treaty; and military force. Its major corporations 
represent the arm of economic expansion in particular instances.

Knowledge of this background (which is available in an hour or so of 
browsing the internet) might be useful for your research. It would 
certainly seem to be necessary for Regis'.

Keith