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{
    "id": 305858,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/305858/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 480,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Mrs. Odhiambo-Mabona",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 376,
        "legal_name": "Millie Grace Akoth Odhiambo Mabona",
        "slug": "millie-odhiambo-mabona"
    },
    "content": "Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, I want to thank the hon. Minister for bringing these amendments. In thanking the hon. Minister, I want to indicate that I congratulate her for doing a very good balance. The amendments respond to some issues that I had raised in my thesis several years ago when I was a university student. I see that the Minister has tried a delicate balancing between breeders’ rights and the rights of farmers and rights of communities on the other hand. Because of the advent of biotechnology there has been a lot of increased interest in plant genetic resources which has pitted multinational agrochemical companies against local communities. In some countries like India where there is a lot of activism around issues of farmers’ rights, we have even seen farmers killing themselves when we have had negotiations around the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) especially when there were negotiations around the Uruguay round of the GATT that was focusing on providing an international legal framework that was patenting plant genetic resources against farmers’ rights. Some farmers actually burnt themselves because they were saying that it was taking away the control of a vital resource from them. It is understandable because the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) estimates that about 40,000 plant species exist on earth. Of these, two-thirds of plant species are found in the tropics and one fourth is found in Latin America alone. Of these species 20,000 to 25,000 are threatened with extinction and an estimated 15,000 a year to be discovered. So far, scientists have only analyzed in detail about 5,000 plant species. Given the beneficial properties of plant genetic resources, there may be a lot of plants out there that can cure diseases such as HIV/AIDS, cancer and other diseases. Therefore, it is important to protect breeders’ rights on one hand and protect countries on the other, so that we do not have a situation where you have an international community, especially from the North, saying that you can have free access to plant genetic resources that they call “the common heritage of mankind” but who, at the same time, deny us access to the biotechnology that they use for genetic engineering. Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, therefore, one of the things that I would want to urge the Minister to do is, especially, in Clause 22---. I would want us to put a firm"
}