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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (98900)	5/23/2003 7:36:49 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Interesting note from SLATE. Someone here may have the article. "The WSJ reports that Saddam Hussein's oldest sun, Odai, is hiding in a Baghdad suburb and is negotiating his surrender with U.S. forces. The paper cites "a third party with knowledge of the discussions."

To: Bill Ulrich who wrote (98900)	5/23/2003 7:45:30 AM
From: thames_sider	Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the update on that, I didn't know the patents had been denied. I was referring to the more general Indian anger over the patents being applied to 'their' natural resources, for example in the patenting of herbns and crops used for medicinal purposes, which got wrapped up into the same argument - I didn't know they'd had a different beef about the Basmati rice. Actually, this link I found by the sidebar summarises some of the patenting issue concerns... "The seed market is now dominated by a few giant transnational corporations, all competing to take out patents which claim the right to own and exploit crops such as a variety of Basmati rice, grown for many years by third world farmers," the charity says. "But these patents are just the beginning. For the agrochemical and seed industry, genetically engineered crops are a way to access the developing countries' market, where 80% of farmers now save their best seed every year to plant the following year's harvest." ActionAid says having these farmers buying seed each year would bolster seed companies' profits, and it fears that aggressive marketing could force the farmers onto "an expensive treadmill of dependence on the firms' seeds and chemicals". "This would mean increased costs and chemicals, but less biodiversity," it says. news.bbc.co.uk The UK farmers were concerned about the cost, I suspect, rather than the biodiversity. And wisely - would you want to be dependent on a single supplier with an absolute lock on a product?