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Seed Activism: Patent Politics And Litigation In The Global South

December 13, 2022 @ 7:30 am 9:30 am

The bedrock of sustainable human futures is in conserving biodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, and ensuring local community’s right to seed sovereignty and seed purity is protected. A variety of corporate and state efforts, however, are systematically accessing these bioresources without priorly informing and seeking permission from communities who have conserved these resources over millenia, and then turning them into corporatised, industrialised, commodified, chemicalised, transgenic and proprietary products.

In ‘Seed Activism’, Karine Peschard explores the effects of these developments on people’s lives, while uncovering the role of power—material, institutional, and discursive—in shaping laws and legal systems. The expansion of corporate intellectual property (IP), she shows, negatively impacts farmers’ rights and, by extension, the right to food, since small farms produce the bulk of food for domestic consumption.

The book talk will be followed with an introduction by Bhargavi Rao and Leo Saldanha to Environment Support’s Group’s B.t.Brinjal biopiracy case against Monsanto/Mahyco et al, and an update by Aruna Rodriques on her almost two decades long challenge in the Supreme Court against release of GMOs in India on socio-economic, ecological and health grounds.