Have you ever thought about who earns money from the use of local plant species from South America for a commercial medicine produced in Northern Europe? Or who possess these plants the medicine is made out of and the way the plant is used? To be honest, I didn’t before I attended the Master class of Sustainable Development in Belgium organised by the environmental organisation Act4Change.

Participants of the Masterclass on Sustainable Development

When you can’t earn money with something, it isn’t attractive to start with it. That particular idea was the main inspiration to introduce the system of patents in Europe. Although the ancient Greeks already started with something that is related to our patent system today, it is a hot topic nowadays. Patents are mainly introduced to stimulate the creativity and inventiveness of companies and people. A patent is a form of protection that provides a person or legal entity with exclusive rights for making, using or selling a concept or invention and excludes others from doing the same for the duration of the patent. You can buy a patent for transgenic modified animals, plants or single human genes, but not for specific plant breeds for example. A product or idea has to be new, inventive and be able to be used in some kind of industry in order to be patented.

To come back to the question that opens this article, I would like to present the biological view of the world as a gene pool. The genetic sources we have on this earth are in fact the health insurance and security for our future. Every single gene available can help us find a medicine against diseases now, and especially in the future. In the Northern hemisphere, most of the genetic richness of the Earth is collected in certain gene banks. Those banks can become very important in the future. Perhaps a disease will break out and affect all the corn of the world and the corn disappears, than we can make new corn out of the genes we have. Most of the genes in the genetic bank come from the South, because that hemisphere has a higher level of biodiversity in comparison with the Northern hemisphere.

Do patents protect ideas, or rather steal them?

The link with patent rights is that researchers from the Northern hemisphere can come to the rain-forest and bring back plants with traits that help them to find a medicine against a disease. By getting a patent, they can earn a lot of money by producing the medicine, because no one else is allowed to produce that particular medicine. At the same time, the local people in the rain-forest didn’t get any money from a treatment they may have been using for ages, and that is now copied by the researchers. The question is if and how the local people should benefit from it as well. Who owns the world and who should benefit from what is growing on it? In the case I described above, it should not be allowed to get a patent for it, because it is not a new kind of medicine, but a treatment already used for ages. Still, the patent is given is many cases. A lot of times the discussion within the group ended with: is it ethically justified that our economy is purely money and benefit based?

Well, that is quite a big question to answer and I won’t burn my fingers on it right now. But there is something changing for the good in this process of granting patents. Recently there is a Protocol composed that aims for the equitable and fair share of the benefits arising from the using the genetic resources. This international agreement is named the Nagoya Protocol, and is part of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The European Union is now in the implementation phase of the Nagoya Protocol, and we should make sure that the practical outcome of the protocol will be fair for the whole world.

 Written by Iris Hordijk, Policy Officer on Sustainability

“Are you a good lobbyist”? This was the central question to a simulation played at the Summer University of AEGEE-Delft, “Create your own world”. More than 20 participants and some of the organisers took part in this interactive workshop on European Union sustainability policy, getting a hands-on grip on the mechanisms of lobbying at the European level.

In order to facilitate the discussion, the workshop at Delft’s amazing modern university library was kicked off with a brief introduction to sustainability and the European policy-making process. With the adoption of the Lisbon treaty sustainable development became a fundamental objective of the European Union. This is partly operationalised in the Europe 2020 Strategy, though unfortunately limited to energy and resource efficiency.

Nonetheless, a number of sustainability topics outside this restricted scope remain hot items in European politics. One of them is of course climate change, which is being recognised as a strategic priority of the EU. The international deal is to stay within a 2°C temperature rise since pre-industrial times (say 1750), but this will of course require significant cuts in CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions: from 20% by 2020 to up to 95% by 2050, compared to 1990 levels.

The EU has designed a cap-and-trade system to help achieving these goals, but due to the economic crisis and flaws inherent to the auction basis of this Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the carbon price is currently far too low to stimulate any investment into cleaner production. Still, European climate ambitions remain ahead of most other developed countries, making the EU a front-runner in international negotiations.

Another topic currently under discussion is the protection of biodiversity, which in recent years has reached alarming levels of destruction. With extinction threatening 1 in 4 mammals, 1 in 3 amphibians, and 1 in 8 birds in the near future, the EU’s initiative to translate the Nagoya Protocol into European law is more than welcome. This international protocol aims to preserve biodiversity by sharing some of the profits generated by its uses (e.g. in medicines or foodstuffs) with the inhabitants of the regions it originates from.

With such powerful players as the pharmaceutical or agricultural industry, and such huge amounts of money concerned, it comes as no surprise that the Members of European Parliament (MEPs) working on the new rules are constantly being approached by lobby groups, both from industry and civil society. What are their demands? How do MEPs deal with them? And who is the best lobbyist, using the best arguments to protect his/her interests?

Based on personal work experience at the European Parliament, a simulation of the lobbying activities was developed, with each of the participants receiving a specific role, ranging from French small-scale farmers over Peruvian indigenous populations to big industry representatives. Of course a couple of MEPs from various political parties were added to the mix as well, with the difficult task of judging the lobbying efforts and taking a final decision on the proposed European legislation.

After a cautious start, arguments started flying up and down the circle, with people adding new elements to the discussion to refute claims made by other lobby groups. The representative of the agricultural industry, for example, proposed the French small-scale farmers to switch to his more lucrative, genetically modified crops, but saw his argument countered by a particularly stubborn scientist from Germany pointing to the threats such crops can pose to local biodiversity.

At the end of the debate the lead rapporteur from the European Greens, acting as moderator, consulted with her colleagues and they then delivered their verdict: a percentage of commercial profits to be used for supporting small-scale farming, additional funding for research into the effects of GMOs on biodiversity, and a number of industry-supported and NGO-monitored projects to conserve biodiversity on site. A reasonable and balanced deal, applauded by all parties — though in reality things are not always that easy.

Written by Mathieu Soete, Policy Officer on Sustainability