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Soya beans in northeast China.
Biological diversity is undergoing a dangerous wave of privatisation under the label of 'intellectual property rights' such as patenting of plants, animals and individual parts of DNA.
Patents are government guarantees that provide an inventor with exclusive rights to use, sell or manufacture an invention for a set period of time.
Patents should be granted only to human inventions, not discoveries.
Existing living organisms, like plants and animals as well as their genes are no-one's invention and should therefore never be patented and put under private control.
However, over the past decades patent claims on plants and animals as well as genes and parts of human bodies have been continuously extended by industry and patent offices of industrialised countries.
For example, Greenpeace China has discovered that all of the GE rice waiting for commerical approval in China has some foreign patent.
By patenting life now, the genetic engineering industry gains control not only over its own genetically engineered organisms, but also over the food chain and the planet's own future genetic heritage.
Patenting allows industry to take control of and exploit organisms and genetic material as exclusive private property that can be sold to or withheld from farmers, breeders, scientists and doctors.
Technology agreements and fees on seeds deprive farmers of their generations-old right to replant and exchange their seeds.
Vast, unsubstantiated patent claims on DNA deter scientists from research in areas that have already been claimed by big companies with large legal budgets.
Patents on life create bio-piracy and a new form of colonialism. In developing nations, where most global food crops originate, freely available seeds and specimens are analysed by genetic engineering companies,
patented and then sold back to them at higher prices.
Greenpeace opposes all patents on genes, plants, humans and parts of the human body and regards the biodiversity of this planet the common heritage of humankind.
