WTO - TRIPs Trade Regulations for the Rich against the Poor
Anon. | 09.09.2001 12:28
Armchair Activists sit down and add your comments or write to the Right Honourable Patricia Hewitt Secretary of State for Trade and Industry House of Commons London SW1A 0AA. She will be attending the WTO meetings as your representative on food patenting.
Dear Patricia Hewitt
Food patenting laws amounts to a modern day process of enclosure which is systematically curtailing poor people's basic human rights. The rights of farmers and small holders to grow, sell, conserve and exchange seeds without being answerable to transnational corporations. It is simply an act of aggression that biological and genetic resources should be legislated as property to be appropriated and privatised.
The multinational biotech industry protests that, ordinary people fail to appreciate the opportunites to relieve world hunger that are offered by the laws and technology they advocate. Despite the contemporary context Milton's insight still applies
"They who put out the people's eyes, berate them for their blindness"
Isn't it remarkable how the poorest and most vulnerable are so perceptive when realising that their livelihoods are being threatened?
People from across the developed and developing world are massing in their hundreds of thousands in a catagorical rejection of the increasing centralisation of state and corporate power. The brutal repression usually reserved for those in developing countries is now being extended and the global elites have started to murder the children of their own citizens.
You will be representing me on the thinnest of electoral mandates at the 20th September WTO meeting where food patenting will be on the agenda. I demand that you acknowledge the illegitimacy of your position, even within your own distorted democratic terms of reference. Should you endorse the TRIPs legislation you are well aware that you will be imposing regulations that will bring greater division between the rich and poor.
Despite the New Labour retoric it would appear that there has been no deflection from the US approach in 1948, when George Kennan, senior planner in the US State department wrote
"We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity: To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality … we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation"
I look forward to your response
Food patenting laws amounts to a modern day process of enclosure which is systematically curtailing poor people's basic human rights. The rights of farmers and small holders to grow, sell, conserve and exchange seeds without being answerable to transnational corporations. It is simply an act of aggression that biological and genetic resources should be legislated as property to be appropriated and privatised.
The multinational biotech industry protests that, ordinary people fail to appreciate the opportunites to relieve world hunger that are offered by the laws and technology they advocate. Despite the contemporary context Milton's insight still applies
"They who put out the people's eyes, berate them for their blindness"
Isn't it remarkable how the poorest and most vulnerable are so perceptive when realising that their livelihoods are being threatened?
People from across the developed and developing world are massing in their hundreds of thousands in a catagorical rejection of the increasing centralisation of state and corporate power. The brutal repression usually reserved for those in developing countries is now being extended and the global elites have started to murder the children of their own citizens.
You will be representing me on the thinnest of electoral mandates at the 20th September WTO meeting where food patenting will be on the agenda. I demand that you acknowledge the illegitimacy of your position, even within your own distorted democratic terms of reference. Should you endorse the TRIPs legislation you are well aware that you will be imposing regulations that will bring greater division between the rich and poor.
Despite the New Labour retoric it would appear that there has been no deflection from the US approach in 1948, when George Kennan, senior planner in the US State department wrote
"We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity: To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality … we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation"
I look forward to your response
Anon.
Comments
Display the following comment