Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America

Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America PDF Author: F. Filomeno
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137356693
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Intellectual property is one of the most valuable forms of property in the modern world. From the perspective of companies producing knowledge-intensive goods, it encourages technological innovations for the benefit of humanity. For consumers of technology, it can be seen as a restriction on access to knowledge that inflates corporate rents. When genetic material crucial for human life is isolated from the commons, engineered and turned into private intellectual property, dissent is likely to emerge. Felipe Filomeno uses the case of Monsanto in South American soybean agriculture to theorize about the emergence and change of intellectual property regimes. Based on official documents, interviews, journalistic material, and academic literature, the study shows not only the relations of competition, coercion, and alliances that lie behind the post-1980 global upward ratchet of intellectual property protection but also the strategies that have the potential to reverse it.

Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America

Monsanto and Intellectual Property in South America PDF Author: F. Filomeno
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137356693
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book Here

Book Description
Intellectual property is one of the most valuable forms of property in the modern world. From the perspective of companies producing knowledge-intensive goods, it encourages technological innovations for the benefit of humanity. For consumers of technology, it can be seen as a restriction on access to knowledge that inflates corporate rents. When genetic material crucial for human life is isolated from the commons, engineered and turned into private intellectual property, dissent is likely to emerge. Felipe Filomeno uses the case of Monsanto in South American soybean agriculture to theorize about the emergence and change of intellectual property regimes. Based on official documents, interviews, journalistic material, and academic literature, the study shows not only the relations of competition, coercion, and alliances that lie behind the post-1980 global upward ratchet of intellectual property protection but also the strategies that have the potential to reverse it.

Seed Activism

Seed Activism PDF Author: Karine E. Peschard
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262372223
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
How lawsuits around intellectual property in Brazil and India are impacting the patentability of plants and seeds, farmers’ rights, and the public interest. Over the past decade, legal challenges have arisen in the Global South over patents on genetically modified crops. In this ethnographic study, Karine E. Peschard explores the effects of these disputes on people’s lives, while uncovering the role of power—material, institutional, and discursive—in shaping laws and legal systems. The expansion of corporate intellectual property (IP), she shows, negatively impacts farmers’ rights and, by extension, the right to food, since small farms produce the bulk of food for domestic consumption. Peschard sees emerging a new legal common sense concerning the patentability of plant-related inventions, as well as a balance among IP, farmers’ rights, and the public interest. Peschard examines the strengthening of IP regimes for plant varieties, the consolidation of the global biotech industry, the erosion of agrobiodiversity, and farmers’ dispossession. She shows how litigants question the legality of patents and private IP systems implemented by Monsanto for royalties on three genetically modified crop varieties, Roundup Ready soybean in Brazil and Bt cotton and Bt eggplant in India. Peschard argues that these private IP systems have rendered moot domestic legislation on plant variety protection and farmers’ rights. This unprecedented level of corporate concentration in such a vital sector raises concerns over the erosion of agricultural biodiversity, farmers’ rights and livelihoods, food security, and, ultimately, the merits of extending IP rights to higher life forms such as plants.

The New Orleans Garden

The New Orleans Garden PDF Author: Charlotte Seidenberg
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604736879
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
Among America's garden cities, one of the most remarkably beautiful is New Orleans. Now the exotic New Orleans garden can live not only in romance but also in settings very close to home. Whether in the Vieux Carre or in the humid hinterlands, anyone hoping to recreate such a romantic spot in the climes of the Gulf Coast region should consult Charlotte Seidenberg's essential handbook.In this new edition of a favorite manual among New Orleans gardeners, Seidenberg instructs how to create a beautiful garden in this subtropical, sometimes richly alluvial zone and identifies plants that over generations have become a part of the gardening heritage of New Orleans. She discusses such basics as soil preparation and pest control and advises the gardener on how to grow roses, native and exotic trees and shrubs, vines, annuals, perennials, ferns, wildflowers, bulbous and tuberous plants, and groundcovers. She instructs how best to create specialty gardens such as container gardens and herb gardens. Like many other gardeners today, she is ecology-conscious, strongly advocating that one should garden not only for beauty but also for attracting wildlife.

Break all the Borders

Break all the Borders PDF Author: Ariel I. Ahram
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190917407
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Since 2011, civil wars and state failure have wracked the Arab world, underlying the misalignment between national identity and political borders. In Break all the Borders, Ariel I. Ahram examines the separatist movements that aimed to remake those borders and create new independent states. With detailed studies of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the federalists in eastern Libya, the southern resistance in Yemen, and Kurdish nationalist parties, Ahram explains how separatists captured territory and handled the tasks of rebel governance, including managing oil exports, electricity grids, and irrigation networks. Ahram emphasizes that the separatism arose not just as an opportunistic response to state collapse. Rather, separatists drew inspiration from the legacy of Woodrow Wilson and ideal of self-determination. They sought to reinstate political autonomy that had been lost during the early and mid-twentieth century. Speaking to the international community, separatist promised a more just and stable world order. In Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Libya, they served as key allies against radical Islamic groups. Yet their hopes for international recognition have gone unfulfilled. Separatism is symptomatic of the contradictions in sovereignty and statehood in the Arab world. Finding ways to integrate, instead of eliminate, separatist movements may be critical for rebuilding regional order.

Transgenics and the Poor

Transgenics and the Poor PDF Author: Ronald J. Herring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317998049
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Genetic engineering is changing the terrain of development studies. Technologies with unprecedented potential - the capacity to move genes across species - have created widely politicized phenomena: ‘Frankenfoods’, ‘GMOs’, and ‘The Terminator’. En masse, the public has reacted with equanimity or appreciation to genetically engineered pharmaceuticals, beginning with insulin, but transgenics in food and agriculture have raised a globally contentious politics. This book begins with the needs of the poor - for income, nutrition, environmental integrity - and evaluates the theory and evidence for contributions from transgenic crops. Social scientists with expertise in regional studies, economics, sociology, agriculture and political science join biologists to bring specialized knowledge on genuinely new questions created by the genomics revolution; questions of: ecological integrity biodiversity international trade the costs and effectiveness of biosafety protocols. The authors collectively conclude that predictions of disaster for the poor from transgenic technology are uninformed by empirical results, rest on misunderstandings of biotechnology or the poor or both, or get the science wrong. Yet the triumphalism of pro-transgenic forces, however, must be tempered by serious unanswered questions: much is unknown, but the transgenic genie is out of the bottle. In this much-needed book, an emergent empirical literature allows scholars in disciplines ranging from micro-biology to economics and political science to assess the potential effects of transgenic organisms on poverty through multiple dynamics of property, yields, prices, biodiversity, environmental integrity and nutrition.

Southern Florist and Nurseryman

Southern Florist and Nurseryman PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Floriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 1070

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Book Description


Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization

Transnational Agrarian Movements Confronting Globalization PDF Author: Saturnino M. Borras, Jr.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444307207
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Readers of this book will encounter peasants and farmers whostruggle at home and traverse national borders to challenge theWorld Trade Organization and other powerful global institutions. Studies the activists in Brazil who uproot plots of geneticallymodified soybeans, forest dwellers in Indonesia who chop downrubber plantations to cultivate rice to feed their families,‘runaway villages’ in China that take up arms to resistcorrupt officials, and Mexican migrants who, having exited indesperation, return from abroad to transform their communities Little-known transnational agrarian movements of the earlytwentieth century share the stage with more recent, high-profileglobal alliances, such as Vía Campesina Celebrates a dynamic sector of international civil society, andtackles the thorny questions of successes and failures, ethical andpolitical dilemmas, troubled alliances with NGOs, protestrepertoires, and representation claims Analyzes contemporary collective action in all its complexity,acknowledging ambiguities and contradictions, posing challengingquestions, and providing concrete strategies for scholars andactivists

Seeds

Seeds PDF Author: Carolyn Fry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022622449X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
From the magnificence of a towering redwood to the simple elegance of a tiny dandelion, seed-bearing plants abound on planet Earth. The sheer diversity of plants thriving today is largely thanks to the evolution of the seed, as this made plants resilient to environmental changes by enabling them to await optimum conditions for growth before springing to life. In a time of declining biodiversity, studying seeds is now helping scientists preserve this plant diversity for future generations. With Seeds, Carolyn Fry offers a celebration of these vital but unassuming packages of life. She begins with a sweeping tour through human history, designed to help us understand why we should appreciate and respect these floral parcels. Wheat, corn, and rice, she reminds us, supply the foundations of meals eaten by people around the world. Countless medicines, oils, clothing materials, and building supplies are available only because of the versatility and variety of seed-bearing plants. Fry then provides a comprehensive history of the evolution of seeds, explaining the myriad ways that they have adapted, survived, and thrived across the globe. Delving deeper into the science of seeds, she reveals the fascinating processes of dormancy, reproduction, germination, and dispersal, and showcases the estimable work conservationists are doing today to gather and bank seeds in order to prevent species from going extinct. Enriched by a stunning array of full-color images, Seeds offers a comprehensive exploration of some of the most enduring and essential players in the natural world.

AgBiotech Reporter

AgBiotech Reporter PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agricultural biotechnology
Languages : en
Pages : 794

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Book Description


China Engages Latin America

China Engages Latin America PDF Author: R. Evan Ellis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030960498
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This book explores China’s engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean as a case study of its broader effort to use commercial tools and instruments of state to create a global economic order that functions to its benefit, while neutralizing challenges from institutions, states, and others that would oppose it. Unlike the common representation of the Cold War as a political-military struggle, this work uniquely examines China’s current efforts as primarily seeking to dominate global value chains, with supporting political, technological, and military components. In this regard, it both leverages and goes beyond works based on dependency theory, which has played a key role in the academic and popular discourse in the region. The book examines evidence for China’s economically-focused strategy within Latin America and the Caribbean, including the interrelationships and coordination between China’s activities in different sectors, and between commercial, political, and other dimensions in the region. It further looks at the supporting role played by a diverse range of Chinese initiatives, from China’s Belt and Road initiative, to people-to-people diplomacy, soft power, security engagement, and the PRC struggle with Taiwan for diplomatic recognition in the region, among others. The book highlights the implications for Latin America and the Caribbean, and for the U.S. whose prosperity and security is intimately tied to the region.