It is a concern that patents on varieties of our traditional foods have been granted to biotechnology companies. It logically absurd and legally invalid that companies have been able to alter a few genes out of hundreds of thousands in a natural plant and successfully argue to patent-granting bodies that their product is completely novel and therefore they should hold patent and seed rights, and simultaneously go to food safety regulators and argue that their product is identical to a natural product and should therefore be passed as safe with minimal testing and sold without labelling. A parallel situation would be that of a company that redesigned the door handle of a BMW and claimed an international patent to manufacture and sell the whole car under their own marque. Nor have plant breeders and Maori in New Zealand been consulted. And yet a very large number of the products are protected by patents that should never have legally been granted because they do not meet the simple and basic criteria of patentability.
Patents are a lynch pin of the biotechnology industry.
Industry strategy involves the patenting of natural foods, which are the creation of Natural Law and should be the birth right of everyone. Not Excluded by Law Biotechnology products generally fail all these criteria, but biotechnology legal advisors and lobbyists have successfully sought to bypass these legal safeguards by arguing that they have invested so much in research that they should be able to patent naturally occurring biochemicals and structures. The EPO ruled that if a substance is 'new' it should be patentable. However Relaxin was not new, and the process used to isolate it was also not new. One of the judges in this case disagreed with the decision by essentially saying that it obviously doesn't qualify for a patent .