The quest for unknown organisms with useful properties has sent many "bioprospectors" to the world's tropical forests, and prompted others to study the agricultural and medical practices of indigenous cultures. The fruits of their research can bring large profits to the few biotech companies that develop them into products, but the countries where the discoveries are made are unlikely to get much in return.

The transfer of valuable resources from poor countries to rich ones is nothing new. But biotechnology is adding further insult to injury. The global distribution of modified crop seeds and livestock, for example, reduces the diversity of food grown around the world, increases costs to farmers, and makes everyone dependent on a few large corporations for this most basic of commodities.

The patenting of plants and animals means that farmers must pay royalties to the patent holder each time they breed their stock. The traditional farming practice of saving part of one year's crop to use as seed for planting the following year at no cost is no longer even possible with many hybrid crops. These crops cannot be regrown, and the farmer is forced to buy a fresh supply of patented seed each year, together with the agrochemicals on which the seeds depend.

Fed up with the appropriation of resources and the imposition of agricultural systems that work against them, half a million farmers in India demonstrated at the offices of the giant agribusiness Cargill in October 1993. They were objecting to the patenting of seeds they had used for thousands of years, and protesting against the