Vandana Shiva:
Golden Rice:
When the first successful prototype of Golden Rice had finally yielded its elusive yellow kernel, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned an audit of intellectual property rights that had been used in its making. The result was shocking. Thirty-two companies owned seventy different intellectual and technical property rights, otherwise known as patents, on the various laboratory techniques and procedures that Potrykus and his team had used in making Golden Rice. In order for Golden Rice to be distributed commercially, each of these would need to be negotiated. …”It seemed to me unacceptable, even immoral, that an achievement based on research in a public institution and with exclusively public funding, and designed for a humanitarian purpose, was in the hands of those who had patented enabling technology early enough or had sneaked in a material transfer agreement in the context of doing an earlier experiment. It turned out that whatever public research one was doing, it was all in the hands of industry (and some universities).” (p. 79)