Rice is synonymous with food security in most parts of Asia. The region produces over 90 per cent of the world’s number one grain, on a harvested area of nearly 150 million hectares. In aggregate terms, rice accounts for up to half of Asia’s farm incomes and makes up nearly 80 per cent of people’s daily calories. In many Asian societies, rice is the basis of breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner – for those able to eat that often in a day.

Rice goes back thousands and thousands of years in Asia’s agricultural history. Over this time, farmers developed and conserved an enormous amount of genetic diversity in rice. Some scientists estimate that rural communities have generated over 140,000 rice varieties. Almost 80,000 of them are presently stored in the gene bank of the International Rice Research Institute (Los Baños, the Philippines), the largest collection of rice in the world, These different varieties have, since time immemorial, allowed farmers and consumers to meet their needs. Some grow well during droughts, others can withstand certain pests. Certain rice varieties produce long and slender grains, others short and round ones. Aromatic, sticky, slow cooking, medicinal – the types of rice Asian communities have developed are impressive indeed.

Much of this diversity, and the communities’ knowledge ingrained in it, has disappeared over the past 30 years, however. Under the guise of feeding the world, the Green Revolution has been a vast campaign to bring Asia’s peasantry into the grips of the world trade system. Suddenly, packages of uniform technologies – fertilisers, high-yielding seeds, pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, credit and marketing schemes – displaced the ecological wealth, the skills and the self-esteem of many local farmers. All in the name of modernisation.

The Green Revolution has raised rice grain yields in some irrigated areas – maybe 30 per cent of Asia’s rice land – but at the significant cost of environmental, health and economic problems for both farmers and consumers. Rice farmers are among the poorest in many countries. Soil fertility and yields are declining throughout the region. Communities are being forced into the uplands to eke out a living on fragile ecosystems. And of course, pesticide use has soared.

In fact, most of these problems stem directly from the loss of biodiversity and farmer control over productive resources. Take the brown planthopper, a devastating pest in rice fields. The rise of this disease-carrier corresponds almost exactly with the spread of just a few high-yielding varieties (HYVs) in most countries of Asia. This was clear in the 1970s in Indonesia and Taiwan. It has become painfully clear again in countries newly converted to HYVs like Thailand and Vietnam. According to a spokesperson from the Ministry of Agriculture in Hanoi, "The Green Revolution in Vietnam has led to monocultures of preferred and constantly used varieties, which in turn has led to pest and diseases. In addition, the increased use of chemicals has unbalanced the natural ecology and has lead to an infertile soil."

This blanket of uniformity – a genetic monopoly – is gripping Asian farmers’ field today.

In Thailand and Burma, almost 40 per cent of the total rice area is planted to only five varieties. In Pakistan, the top five varieties occupy 80 per cent of the total area. In Cambodia, the lone IR66 – from IRRI – accounts for 84 per cent of the country’s dry season crop. For farmers, and for food security, this is excessively dangerous. It forces us to depend on toxic chemicals, and soon genetic engineering, to help defend the region’s paramount crop from the inherent weaknesses of monoculture and uniformity.

It is against this background that peoples’ organisations, NGOs and attuned scientists have been trying to develop sustainable alternatives for Asian agriculture. A broad and dynamic movement is under way to help farmers regain control and improve their farming systems without chemicals, economic dependency or environmental destruction characteristic of industrial agriculture. Sustainable agriculture aims at providing much better system yields on a long-terms basis and restore opportunities to farmers and their families. After much headway in the past two decades, however, this whole movement is now seriously threatened by WTO TRIPs. Genetic engineering and the imposition of intellectual property rights on life will directly undermine the space to pursue these kinds of alternatives.

The private sector is taking an interest in controlling rice from the starting point of the seed. Until now, the industry’s involvement in the rice sector focused on chemical inputs, machinery, transport and trade. Seeds were not so interesting. Asian farmers plant back their rice harvest for about 80 per cent of their needs – and most are poor farmers who could not afford to purchase seeds every year if they had to. This is all changing rapidly now.

Private corporations are starting to invest in biotechnology research on rice because there is money to be made. For one thing, 30 years of IRRI’s Green Revolution have created an ecological debacle in Asia. Now, environment-friendly rice production is all the rage. Genetic engineering allows chemical companies themselves to prevent any market losses that the organic farming trend could bring about. If they control the seed and the genetic technologies to insert new traits in crops, any dip in chemical sales will be offset. A few mega-trends in rice biotechnology illustrate the corporate logic.

Herbicide tolerant rice : Several companies are racing to develop herbicide tolerant rice. Herbicide use has grown recently in Asia because of direct seeding strategies promoted by IRRI. Corporations are now inserting genes in rice to make the plant withstand chemicals. Their advertising says farmers will use less herbicide but in fact the companies want farmers to use more. American Cyanmid is co-operating with universities, public and private seed companies to develop rice varieties, sold as IMIä Rice Seed, tolerant to its proprietary imidazolinone herbicides. AgrEvo is working on Liberty Linkä Rice which will have to be used with the company’s Liberty herbicide. Roundup-Ready Rice, from Monsanto, will be resistant to glyphosate. The japonica version is expected to be on the market in temperate countries like Japan, China and the US by 2002, and plans to insert the gene in indica rice for cultivation in the tropics of South and Southeast Asia are underway.

Bt rice : Another trend is Bt rice, containing an insect-killing toxin from the soil microbe Bacillus thuringiensis. Bt rice produces its own pesticide: an insect such as the yellow stem borer bites the plant and dies. However, insects are quickly developing their own resistance to the toxin and consumers are at risk of allergic and other reactions from eating Bt rice. Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis, after its merger with Sandoz) has been working through IRRI and the Swiss Federal Institute of technology to see its proprietary gene for resistance to Bt deployed widely in Asia’s rice fields. IRRI will be field-testing Bt rice soon and then passing it on to national programmes in Asia. The Belgian-based Plant Genetic Systems (now owned by AgrEvo) has also worked with IRRI to collect thousands of strains of Asian Bt for insertion in rice, including over 7,500 native Filipino strains. PGS won a controversial US patent claiming "all transgenic plants containing Bt gene". IRRI will be crucial to the release of Bt rice in Asia.

Hybrid rice : A third very important trend is the development of F1 hybrids. Rice seeds can normally be saved at harvest time and sown again for the next cropping season. Companies want to stop this so that farmers are obliged to purchase new seeds from them every year. The corporations investing in hybrid rice in Asia include Cargill, Hybrid Rice International and East-West Seed Company. Different technologies are under development to ensure this, many of them coming from IRRI. A radical approach was patented in March 1997 in the US and dubbed "Terminator Technology". Developed by Delta and Pine Land with the help of the US Department of Agriculture, it involves a gene that simply prevents seeds from germinating. The patent claims the gene’s use in any plant – including rice. Monsanto, which recently bought out Delta and Pine Land, now owns the patent.

All of these research trends are hotly contested by proponents of sustainable agriculture because they will, contrary to propaganda, increase farmers dependency on chemicals and other external inputs and will further disrupt the ecological balance. Hybrid rice is especially threatening to the farm sector. In fact, the economic justification for most of this research is hard to find. Bt rice is mainly aimed at preventing stem borer damage, which hardly affects five per cent of the Asia’s rice harvest and can be controlled ecologically on the farm. Herbicide tolerance is designed to facilitate herbicide sales. And hybrid rice will certainly boost seeds sales but not necessarily farmers’ incomes. The yield boost is currently around 15 – 20 per cent but the price boost makes it inaccessible to the poor.

(Source: "Biopiracy, TRIPS and the Patenting of Asia’s Rice Bowl", May 1998. The paper is a common initiative of Assisi Foundation, BIOTHAI, CEC, GRAIN, Greens Philippines, Hayuma, MAPISAN, MASIPAG, PAN Indonesia, PDG, SIBAT, TREE and the University of the Philippines colleagues Dr. Romy Quijano & Dr. Oscar Zamora)

After two years of developing HYVs, IRRI – and the Philippines – experienced its first outbreak of brown planthopper (BPH) infestation in 1964. A few years later, IR8 was released and its progeny started monopolising Asia’s rice fields. Between 1970 and 1974, BPH became the most important pest in all of Asia paddies.

From analysis, we found that the BPH outbreak correlates neatly with the increasing domination of HYVs. HYVs started being planted in India in 1965, Indonesia 1967, Thailand 1969, Malaysia and Pakistan 1976-77. By 1976, IRRI rice had invaded one-third of Asia’s rice land, causing the first period of BPH outbreak in 1970-76. At that time, Indonesia and Japan lost $100 million each, Taiwan $50 million, the Philippines $26 million, India $20 million and Korea $20 million. Thailand was entirely spared of the problem because as of 1976 Thai rice farmers planted only five per cent of their land to HYVs, compared with 56 per cent in the Philippines, 25 pre cent in India, 20 per cent in Taiwan and 18 per cent in Indonesia.

However, after the Thai government enforced its Seed Exchange Programme in 1981, which uprooted 45 per cent of traditional varieties from farmers’ fields throughout a coercive HYV adoption scheme, Thailand joined the ranks of BPH victims. In 1990, 76 per cent of Thailand’s rice area was sown to HYVs. In fact, four varieties alone cover nearly 50 per cent of rice area! This caused a terrible BPH outbreak in 1991. Over half a million hectares of riceland were fully destroyed. The country lost at least 2.5 million tons of rice of $400 million that year.

Until recently, the rice cultures of Asia have been securely under the control of local peoples. Since 1960, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in the Philippines, has virtually taken over. IRRI is an international agency funded throughout the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) which operates from the World Bank. Its aim is to raise rice yields and incomes in Asia. IRRI quickly developed new strains of rice that respond well to chemical inputs like fertilisers and pesticides. However the strategy soon reached its limits. Yields stopped increasing, the environment got polluted and farmers are in a spiral of debt. Nevertheless, with Asian output averaging 5 tonnes of rice per hectare, IRRI is now trying to create a 15-tonne super rice.

IRRI was able to take over rice farming in Asia because it amassed the wealth of the farmers’ rice varieties and put these seeds into a gene bank. IRRI’s collection contains almost all the genes that the world’s rice breeders dig into to develop new rice. While intended to serve rice research work for poor countries, industrialised countries benefit enormously from IRRI. Three-quarters of the rice harvest in the US is based on germplasm provided by IRRI, bringing the country an economic gain of $1 billion since 1970. In fact, rice germplasm from IRRI adds $655 million in value to the rice industry of the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada each year.

The Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), ratified by almost all Asian countries except Thailand, sets out internationally-agreed conditions on access to developing countries’ genetic resources. Getting hold of Third World biodiversity is supposed to be subject to prior informed consent and benefit sharing. However, the CBD only applies to germplasms acquired after the Convention came into force in December 1993. Because of US pressure, all the germplasms held by the CGIAR network of international research agencies, like IRRI’s, are outside the rules. This affects half a million seed accessions or 40 per cent of the world’s unique food crop germplasm held in gene banks. This means that industrialised countries are still free to take and patent them. While heading the group of developing countries at the UN, the Philippine government has urged that this be changed. It has argued that donor countries should be consulted before their seeds are taken from international gene banks like IRRI’s and in fact the CGIAR collections should be under the remit of CBD.

As a stopgap measure, the seeds held in these international gene banks were placed under the auspices of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in 1994. Under the FAO-CGIAR trust Agreement, patenting of the designated germplasm is prohibited. Most of the rice seeds in IRRI’s gene bank fall under this agreement. However, it is not waterproof. Recently, RAFI discovered that the Australian government was entertaining patent clams on town chickpeas taken directly from the gene bank of CRISA, IRRI’s sister institute in India. No breeding was done; the Australian seed industry simply wanted a commercial monopoly on the material. At least 16 other cases of biopiracy on material held under the trust provisions are under examination now. The CG has even called a moratorium on patenting of germplasm held in centres like IRRI.

Aside from the FAO trusteeship agreement, IRRI has its own policy on intellectual property. The policy says the materials from the gene bank should not be patented, but once a scientist – public or private, Asian or American – has done breeding work, the material can be patented! The recent controversy over RiceTec’s patent on basmati rice has IRRI directly implicated. The Texan firm got its basmati lines from IRRI, who got them from India and Pakistan. Now they are patented in the US. Jasmine rice from Thailand is also prey to intellectual property in the US. It got their thanks to IRRI.