Scientists Radhika Singh / Economic Times of India, New Delhi / August 12, 1998
As basmati hits the headlines in a series of legal battles over India's natural resources, scientists are outraged at the misuse of a published Indian research paper by American company RiceTec, which is defending its claim to the patent.
Stating that rice breeder and scientist E A Siddiq's paper "should not have been quoted out of context," eminent scientist M S Swaminathan said, "When you write a scientific paper, you are certainly not thinking of the patents that will come 15 years later." "It (basmati) is not generic in the trade sense," he added.
Referring to the lack of 'public policy support' in the absence of proper biodiversity and patent legislation, Mr. Swaminathan said, "We must terminate our lethargy." The world-renowned scientist said that basmati was certainly not referred to as a generic name in the papers referred to by RiceTec's CEO, but it was a case of geographic appellation.
Supporting the argument, former director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute S K Sinha said, "Terming basmati as generic is like saying 'scotch' is generic and using it for Indian whisky, when actually it is referring to a geographical region." Basmati is, in fact, not a generic name, as the Americans would have us believe but a geographic appellation, as its distribution is confined to the rice grown in the Gangetic plain regions of North West India and Pakistan, confirm scientists.
Mr. Siddiq's references to 'basmati,' 'basmati type' and 'scented type' in the paper were for an entire set of experimental varieties of aromatic rice. That did not give the American company the right to use the name in its trademark and patent, as is the case in Patent No. 5663484 issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the scientists reasoned.
Mr. Swaminathan recalls that he had assigned Mr. Siddiq with the task of identifying the existing breeds to convert basmati to high yielding varieties from strains across the world. The outcome was Basmati 370, a widely exported basmati rice that was developed around 1980. The controversial paper was published then in a German Journal of Plant Breeding and said that the extent of natural variation for various components of basmati quality was estimated by screening 94 diverse basmati types collected from the different regions of the world. The study was to identify the ideal donor parents for basmati improvement programs, and only 3-4 strains qualified. Officials in the commerce, agriculture and science and technology ministries chose not to go on record as the matter is subjudice, but all agreed that the U.S. company 'misinterpreted' Mr. Siddiq's paper as also the references to Indian documents.
The entire episode has once again brought to light the glaring lacuna created by the lackadaisical approach of successive governments to pass the Plant Varieties Protection Act, the Biodiversity Bill and the Agriculture Policy to protect breeders' rights in India. This is an issue scientists across fields agree on in totality. Mr. Sinha terms it as "ambivalence" on the part of the government to believe that everything is all right and hence there is no hurry.
Mr. Swaminathan feels that if our laws are not in place soon, India will be battling Darjeeling Tea, kapoor (camphor) and saffron too.
Mr. Sinha laments about the lack of 'patent literacy,' a concern that had been voiced by CSIR director general R A Mashelkar for long. Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology points out in the journal Bija on biodiversity that the RiceTec patent is contradictory in itself as it claims a patent for the 'invention' of 'novel rice lines' while it admits to being "essentially derived from the traditional basmati." The outcome of this controversy will be positive for India only if the Indian government pushes through the legislation with renewed urgency. Amendments can always follow to please the whims of changing governments, suggests Mr. Sinha.
