Plant diversity? How the Global South’s wealth became the North’s asset

By Bharat Dogra 

Many countries that are economically poor due to a complex set of factors have been well endowed by nature in various ways. However, the exploitative use of natural resources over several decades or even centuries, generally under colonial or neo-colonial conditions, has contributed greatly to the poverty that exists today. One natural resource whose value is being increasingly realized is the diversity of plant wealth. This diversity has been exceptionally rich in many economically poor countries.

With the growing importance of biotechnologies and the increasing application of plants in medicine and other fields, this richness could have become a vital resource base for important developments worldwide. But just as this importance is being fully recognized, heavy erosion of genetic diversity has already taken place. Many plant varieties that once thrived in the natural environments of these countries are now preserved only in laboratories and gene banks of developed nations.

This is one of the most striking examples of weaker countries losing their natural advantage to stronger ones—so much so that their own resources are now being sold back to them at a high profit.

Pat Roy Mooney, a researcher who received the Right Livelihood Award for his pioneering work in this field, explains how different parts of the world were endowed unequally by nature in this respect:

“With the exception of a small area around the Mediterranean, the industrialized world is excluded from the centres of diversity. The reason for this botanical poverty stems from the time of the ice age: while the vegetative assets of the temperate zones were frozen, the tropical climates flourished in genetic diversity. The resulting differences in plant life are difficult to exaggerate. Dr. Norman Myers of Nairobi points out that one small Philippine volcano, Mount Makiliang, has more woody plant species growing on its slopes than are found in the whole of Canada. The Amazon River contains eight times as many living species as the Mississippi system and ten times as many as are in all of Europe.

"It is therefore not surprising that scientists in developed countries have long used genetic material derived from poorer countries not only to improve their crops but also to protect them from destructive diseases and pests. For instance, in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture acknowledged that U.S. cucumbers depended heavily on varieties introduced from Korea, Burma, and India. Disease-resistant strains of common beans were obtained from Mexico, Syria, and Turkey, while peas gained resistance from Peru and Iran. The same report noted that the U.S. spinach industry “has been rescued repeatedly from disaster through new introductions from India, Iran, and elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, the destruction of natural forests and the spread of Green Revolution–style agriculture—which replaced local varieties across vast areas with monocultures—caused massive genetic erosion even in the countries that were the original sources of much plant diversity. Thousands of varieties were lost forever. Yet, by then, many had already been carefully stored in the laboratories and gene banks of developed countries, whose scientists had been collecting them for years. In just a few decades, the natural advantage that some regions had enjoyed for millions of years was reversed.

Today, experts agree that more than two-thirds of collected genetic diversity is stored in gene banks in Europe and North America. In a handful of high-security institutions in developed countries, the world’s most valuable raw material is preserved—and the countries of origin, from which most of this material came, are unlikely to have free access to it.

Pat Roy Mooney highlights the injustice of this situation:

“It is a raw material like any other in the world. It has not been bought. It has been donated. It has been donated by the poor to the rich. The donation has been made under a noble banner proclaiming that genetic resources form a part of the heritage of all humanity, and thus can be owned by no one.

“But as the primary building blocks of agriculture, genes have incalculable political and economic importance. Industrialized governments—often overruling the intentions of their scientists—have come to hoard germplasm and to stock seeds as part of the arsenal of international power diplomacy. Private companies in the North, though glad to receive free genes, are reluctant to divulge or share the adaptations they develop from these donations.”

Several cases illustrate how countries now controlling plant diversity use it as leverage against those from which the wealth originally came. For instance, efforts were made to exclude Southern African nations from benefitting from a sorghum and millet germplasm development programme in the region. Similarly, a trade embargo against Nicaragua also included a “gene embargo,” blocking access to seeds that Nicaraguan farmers had originally donated for safekeeping in the North.

Thus, the way control over plant diversity has shifted—and how this control is now used against already poor countries—is deeply unjust. Urgent steps must be taken at the international level to correct this situation. The rapid advances in biotechnology, and the profound impact they are likely to have in the near future, make it all the more important that corrective measures are not delayed.

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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include A Day in 2071, Man over Machine, Earth without Borders, and India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food