Fwd: [Food-news] Why New Supreme Doesn’t Ask “Are You a Man or a Mouse”

[Guest guest]

> [Food-news] Why New Supreme

> Doesn’t Ask “Are You a Man or

> a Mouse”

>

> www.foodnews.ca

>

> Editor's Note: European patent expert, Geoff Tansey

> (http://www.tansey.org.uk/), spoke recently in

> Toronto about corporate

> patenting of the food system. Mr. Tansey’s talk was

> well-timed, falling

> between two UN meetings (one in Spain in January,

> the next to be held next

> week in Brazil) of the fate of terminator

> technology. Canada along with

> Australia and New Zealand supports the reversal of a

> UN ban on the

> technology which prohibits the natural reproduction

> of seeds. Canada’s

> most recent appointee to the Supreme Court

> (following the installation of

> a new conservative government) has a history

> supporting the patenting of

> life.

>

>

http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-03-09/news_story3.php

>

> Why New Supreme Doesn’t Ask “Are You a Man or a

> Mouse”

>

> By Wayne Roberts

>

> A purely serendipitous visit to Toronto by one of

> Europe’s most senior

> food researchers tipped me off to the ominously

> anti-serendipitous

> appointment of Marshall Rothstein to the Supreme

> Court of Canada.

>

> Geoff Tansey, the founding editor of the influential

> English journal Food

> Policy, is a research visionary supported by the

> international Quaker

> movement to lend his expertise to poor countries and

> citizen-based

> organizations about goldfingerish plans by global

> corporations to own and

> control, and thereby charge a fee for, the means of

> reproducing life.

>

> As chance would have it, Tansey was invited to speak

> at a World Bank

> seminar in (where else) Washington, which covered

> the costs of getting him

> to North America, whereupon Quakers in Toronto and

> Ottawa agreed to add

> the little extra of a flight to the north, whereupon

> University of Toronto

> professor Harriett Friedmann heard that a scholar of

> his eminence was

> coming to town and booked him to speak for Food for

> Talk, a network of

> local food analysts who sponsored a public meeting

> for him.

>

> This is precisely the kind of chaos,

> unpredictability and sheer

> inventiveness of life despised by the bean counters

> who control the dark

> side of the food industry – the input manufacturers

> and traders who work

> in the shadows of the limelight cast by the name

> brands and public

> controversies over the last phase of food that’s

> actually sold to

> consumers in broad daylight. The drug and chemical

> companies that

> increasingly control the backrooms of the food

> industry can’t control, own

> or sell the spontaneous, fortuitous, interactive,

> ingenious process of

> developing new food recipes, products or production

> processes any more

> than they can control, own or sell the weather. They

> – and who “they” are

> is no easy matter to determine -- don’t like being

> squeezed out of the

> play like that, Tansey argued in his March 3 talk in

> Toronto. So the food

> input corporations try to patent and put a corporate

> lock on the seminal

> side of food production that had previously been

> considered the realm of

> gods, the universe, nature, the common room of all

> the world’s people.

> They are putting a big push on this right now,

> Tansey said.

>

> A big push, I thought to myself while Tansey spoke,

> such as in the

> Canadian government’s aggressive moves at the

> January 27 (that would be

> shortly after the federal election) United Nations

> meeting in Spain

> dealing with biological diversity. There had been an

> international

> consensus that “terminator seeds” – designed so that

> seeds they produce

> are sterile, and can never germinate to be saved by

> farmers and used

> again, as has been the case for millennia – would be

> banned and kept in

> the genie’s bottle until thoughtful and pro-active

> laws could be

> developed. But Canada, together with Australia and

> New Zealand,

> successfully pushed for an end to this consensus on

> a temporary ban, and

> the new ruling they promoted gives the green light

> to “capacity building”

> efforts by corporations to try out their terminator

> seeds in the real

> world, thereby developing technologies that bypass

> the need for patents.

>

> As I stood up to thank Tansey for speaking for free

> in Toronto, my mind

> flipped to the latest addition to the Supremes. Do

> not digress, I reminded

> myself, to the metaphorical conceit of referring to

> ageing lawyers, in

> their youth members of a profession universally

> despised for its ungodly

> lack of ethics and common sense, as if they were

> suddenly elevated to the

> godly judgment-giving powers of supreme beings.

> Don’t get in an

> unQuaker-like rant, I grit my teeth while pleading

> to myself, about how

> judges are elevated to supreme status beyond the ken

> of lowlifes, as if

> they are appointed by prime ministers as their

> statesmanlike miracles and

> mysteries they do perform. And let me not abuse my

> thanks to Tansey by

> raising any issues, I chanted to myself, as to why

> mere elected officials

> in Canada are not allowed to question future judges

> as to their opinions

> or biases, as if judges had human opinions or biases

> that could ever

> interfere with their legal expertise.

>

> But I couldn’t help but use my public thank-you of

> Tansey to note the

> coincidence that at this very time when, as Tansey

> says and the recent

> U.N. experience confirms, there’s a push on the

> corporate patenting of

> life, Canada gets a new Supreme being who ruled,

> when he was a Manitoba

> Appeals Judge in 2000, that a U.S. corporation

> (Harvard University) had

> the right to patent and own higher life forms in

> Canada, as is done in the

> United States.

>

> No elected official got to ask Hizoner about that,

> nor – may I be spared a

> contempt of Supremes charge – why a prime minister

> who said he was looking

> for judges who didn’t have activist leanings with a

> tendency to stray far

> from the black and white letters of law books, chose

> a judge who was an

> activist on behalf of property rights. Hizoner gave

> no less than 12 public

> speeches on his decision about the Harvard Mouse

> case, and even had the

> cheek to give a talk in Britain dismissing the logic

> of the Supreme Court

> judges who in 2002 over-ruled his decision by a 5-4

> vote – now about to

> become a 5-4 vote the other way, thanks to a new

> Supreme who can’t be

> asked rude questions by elected officials

>

> The mouse that roared and made its way into the

> history of bio-technology

> was developed by Harvard researchers who did their

> thing with mice genes

> so they could be used in tests of carcinogens. To

> sell the rights to use

> such mice in cancer experiments, Harvard needed to

> patent its “invention.”

> Canadian patent officials turned Harvard down,

> saying, as all humans used

> to assume until the last 30 years, that no-one can

> own higher life forms

> (life above the level of yeasts, germs and cells

> used to make cheese or

> beer, for example). Harvard appealed to the federal

> court of appeals,

> where Judge Rothstein ruled in Harvard’s favor.

>

> Hizoner referred to the Harvard mouse as a “new and

> useful composition of

> matter,” a chilling definition of an animal with an

> inserted gene change,

> and therefore qualified as an invention that

> deserved patent protection.

> He ruled that there was no case for distinguishing

> between lower (i.e.

> brewers’ yeast) and higher life forms. Shortly

> after, during a public

> speech in Alberta on genetics in the courtroom, he

> stated starkly that the

> “distinction between what is and is not patentable

> should not be between

> animate and inanimate things.” Hope you “things” out

> there are catching

> the language used in such circles to frame such

> discussions.

>

> In case anyone was concerned about the human and

> medical applicability of

> such thoughts, or thought any application to humans

> was patently absurd,

> Rothstein concluded that “I do not say that human

> genes or products or

> processes at the genetic level involving human

> beings may not be

> patentable.” This is a judge who doesn’t see the

> value of asking “Are you

> a man or a mouse?”

>

> As if he were the kind of activist judge that

> Conservative prime ministers

> are sworn to oppose – lest, to put a fine point on

> it, judges innovate in

> legal matters, and rule that gays and straights

> deserve equal rights to

> marry, even though it’s not stated in black and

> white in the Charter of

> Rights – Hizoner said clearly in his ruling that

> it’s the job of

> legislatures to be clear about prohibiting or not

> prohibiting patents on

> life forms. But if they aren’t explicit, despite

> hundreds of years of

> tradition to the contrary, “the Patent Act should be

> broadly applied,”

> Hizoner said. Broadly applied is precisely the kind

> of “judicial

> temperament” Conservative say they abhor.

>

> Ah, the inconsistencies of life, which is exactly

> the point Tansey is

> trying to make in his campaign against corporate

> patenting over seeds and

> livestock.

>

> But as luck would have it, I’m already way over

> length, and Tansey’s

> awesome ideas will have to wait another chance

> encounter.

>

> (adapted from NOW Magazine, March 2-8, 2006)

>

>

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