However, in the absence of litigation or arbitration, all is speculative. Neither is anyone certain as to whether their country will be forced to comply with the WTO now, or if they can delay compliance until 2006. To top off the confusion, the signatories to the trade treaty agreed to conduct a review of TRIPS Article 27(3)b in 1999. Given that such a review could significantly alter governments' obligations and legislative timetables, many states are reluctant to commit to plant monopoly laws they might otherwise avoid. Indeed, the indications coming from the WTO's TRIPS Council are that everyone is reluctant to go ahead with the review for a variety of contradictory reasons. The whole review process could well be pre-empted by a formal or de facto new global trade round. When trade ministers gather in Seattle at the end of November this year, they will either give their benediction to a whole new negotiation or re-set the clock for reviews of their 1994 agreement.

No Dice
Andrew Mushita of COMMUTECH in Zimbabwe, a veteran of patent negotiations says, "We seem to be debating intellectual property without much intellectual capacity. Nothing is clear and no one seems able to offer clarity." Two oceans away in the Philippines, Neth Dano of SEARICE agrees. "The only thing that makes sense," she suggests, "is not to make laws. Anything adopted now may be inappropriate by November." SEARICE, the Southeast Asian Regional Institute for Community Education in Manila, is working with ASEAN Governments to sort out their options.

Track Record
Would intellectual property for plant varieties have benefits for poor farmers and for food security? UPOV's convention and other plant patenting regimes have a very short and limited history in the South. Where there is a track record, in a country such as South Africa for example, its apartheid history and the domination of just two companies so skewed the market as to render any study of the legislation's impact useless. In the North, where some countries have had what is usually called "Plant Breeders' Rights" for decades, the lack of data is one of the greatest causes of alarm. "Europe and the USA have had intellectual property for plant varieties for half a century," argues Camila Montecinos of Chile's Centro de Educacion y Tecnologia (CET), "and the seed companies still can't prove that the legislation is beneficial."

RAFI is just completing the third in a trilogy of empirical studies of the three US intellectual property laws that relate to plants. The oldest, passed in 1930, covers asexually propagated fruits and ornamentals. Despite almost seventy years of data, the survey shows: (1) that unlike the claims of the legislation's original backers, plant breeding in new or minor species has not increased substantially (and, in fact, has been declining in recent decades); (2) that the number of breeders has not even kept pace with US population or crop acreage increases and; (3) that there is growing concentration in the hands of fewer and fewer companies.

RAFI also examined US plant patents under that country's industrial patent regime. Plant patents of this kind in the USA have only been permitted since the mid-eighties but RAFI could see no indication of beneficial increases in the numbers of breeders, species bred, or research funds invested.

RAFI's latest study of the US Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 has identified tremendous concentration in ownership of the 9,000 plant varieties that have been monopolized. The top dozen corporations rule the roost for all the major crop species. Almost all the research activity has focused on soybeans, cotton, wheat, maize, and barley where, in every case, fewer than half a dozen firms dominate the claims. As with the other two forms of US legislation, there is no evidence of sustained new breeding activity or of real diversification into other species. The scattered evidence from European countries (specifically the UK, Germany, and The Netherlands) suggests a similar track record.

This is not to suggest that there has been no increase in plant breeding over the past half century. However, the reasons for this increase have nothing to do with the opportunity for intellectual property. They have everything to do with population growth, the expansion of agricultural lands, the strong base of germplasm support from public breeding initiatives such as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and the advent of jumbo jet cargo transport and laptop computers. Jets allow breeding enterprises to conduct their breeding and seed multiplication activities year-round (moving from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn avoiding winters and doubling or tripling the pace of research). Laptops allow breeders to field-manage a vastly greater array of experiments. If rewards were to go where they are due, commercial breeders should surrender their royalties to Boeing, Apple, and the CGIAR.

The patented biopiracy of Africa's natural resources is becoming epidemic.

A Sucker Every Minute? If granting monopoly protection over seeds the first link in the food chain, can't be proven unequivocally to be beneficial to industrialized countries, why on earth would the South want to adopt any of these models? Why would the OAPI states or Nicaragua not protect their national sovereignty and food security? Why not delay legislation until the results are in from the TRIPS Review (if it ever happens)? Why would the South not explore Farmers' Rights and other forms of sui generis' legislation not dictated by UPOV and the WTO?

Gambling Tax
What is clear from the US experience is that agricultural input costs have risen more than 85% in the past decade. It is also clear that a handful of multinational "Gene Giants" have almost total control over both seeds and chemicals. Indeed, the four multinationals who, in 1998, shared the entire genetically modified crop expect to control well over 80% of the global seed market and almost 100% of the pesticides market within another ten years.