Snippets from the Italian Scene
GREED
Moving somewhat off topic, on Wednesday nights RAI 3, one of the State-owned television networks, transmits a current events program called Reporter. Last week's was fascinating: the island of Sardinia has been settled for thousands of years, and one of the major activities has always been shepherding. Unlike some other animals, sheep graze down to the ground and the plants of the island have had to adapt to this insult. Sardinian clovers have done so by developing into an endemic strain with powerful roots that won't get pulled up, and rich seed pods. In the mid-1970s an Australian company visited the island, took cuttings of the Sardinian plant, and registered them. Now, if a Sardinian wants to plant commercially grown seeds of an endemic Sardinian plant he has to send money to an Australian for the privilege. We're not talking small change here; the Australian company is getting several billion dollars in revenue per year for something they simply collected and walked off with (lots of areas need plants resistant to sheep), and the only way to get around paying them would be to breed a man-made strain.
Of course Sardinia isn't the only place that this is happening, nor are seed growers the only ones involved. 40% of the genetic compounds used in modern medicine come from South-East Asia, we were told, and all the major pharmaceutical and chemical companies of Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan have people swarming through the region, talking to the locals, finding out what leaves they chew and why, and then absconding with samples, which they register when they get home. No compensation to the locals who provide the information, or to local governments and populations whose lands are picked through. To be frank, this reminds me of the coal companies that bought mineral rights from farmers in the US a few generations back, and then stripped away the topsoil (and the farms) to get at the coal because the contracts had written, in vary fine print, that they could mine using any technique they wanted.
While it is true that the farmers should have read the fine print (assuming they could read), what the miners did was hardly ethical. And though they're all long gone we're still paying for it today: If you visit western Pennsylvania or other areas that were strip mined you'll see wastelands, because the rock above the coal contained lots of pyrite (FeS2, iron sulfide, because the depositional environment was reducing) -- under normal conditions it would have entered the environment slowly with erosion. However, the stripping produced huge piles of rubble that the rain seeps into easily, interacting with the pyrite. As a result the streams run rusty red, and much of the ground is so acidic that almost nothing can grow. It will be thousands of years before balance is restored. What's to keep the gene seekers from pulling the same sort of stunt?
And there's more: Driven by visions of profit and accommodating western institutions, the companies are doing more than just going after plants that have adapted to specific conditions or may prove useful in the future. It turns out an American company is trying to register basmati rice, and its London-based subsidiary is trying to register jasmine rice, Thailand's classic rice. Think about it: Westerners take plants from fields in third world countries, register them in Western courts, and the farmers of the third world then have to pay royalties to Western companies if they want to continue to grow the crops they've been growing for generations. Greedy isn't quite the word for this racket. It's obscene.
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine
Thoughts on Italian food
On Italian wine
On living
in Italy
Send a card from the Italian
Cuisine Post Office, or browse the photos!
