International “free trade” agreements like GATT, NAFTA and the WTO served to make US patent law the global rule. Hence, American corporations beginning in the 1990s were able file a blizzard of patents claiming varieties of rice and wheat grown for centuries in India, beans cultivated before Columbus in Mexico, a staggering array of medicinal plants known and used by local inhabitants of Africa, of South and Southeast Asia, of Amazonia and elsewhere, along with the foods and medicines derived from them, and their methods of preparation as the private “intellectual property” of those corporations.
The job of corporate researchers was to come up with new and patentable life forms to which their sponsors could claim property rights. Corporate geneticists learned to insert genetic material from one kind of organism into another, creating the first transgenic organisms. Human genes were spliced into animals, animal and bacterial DNA into plants, often using infectious viruses as insertion tools and markers, all in the service of maximizing corporate profit. A typical example involves the placement of genes into seeds that make plants resist or require the application of herbicide manufactured by that same corporation, or genes that produce “proto-toxin” insecticides, that supposedly do not turn toxic until ingested by a pest insect or the predator of a helpful insect.
“Citizens in Europe, Africa and Asia have, with varying degrees of success mobilized to force their governments to resist the importation of American “FrankenFood”
Attendant risks, such as the uncontrolled pollination of transgenic plants contaminating the genome of existing ones, or horizontal gene transfer, in which genetic material from inserted viruses can end up in the genes of those who eat genetically modified food, are given scant attention, except by the public relations flacks who assure us there is nothing, absolutely nothing to worry about. But according to scientists, farmers and consumers around the world there is plenty to worry about.