GENE CAMPAIGN was born out of a growing awareness that the subject of genetics, genetic research and genetic material had left the laboratory and reached the market place. It was also born out of the experience of seeing the unequal positions between the countries of the South, which are the repository of most of the world's genetic resources, and the countries of the North, which had developed the technologies of genetic engineering but had practically no genetic resources.

This disparity in positions led to Intellectual Property Rights for biological material becoming one of the most important features of international trade, a development that would give the industrialised North guaranteed access to the South's genetic wealth. IPRs entered bilateral and multilateral trade and environmental negotiations so the North could use the threat of trade retaliations if germplasm rich countries did not accept their wish for uniform patent laws encompassing life forms.
 

Governments in developing countries began to succumb to western pressure partly out of ignorance of the craftily worded IPR clauses. And partly because their own elitist policies and neglect of rural poor prevented them from attaching any great importance to the use and control of resources that were seen as essential only to rural economies.

Being a geneticist, I have watched the changing trends in the laboratory. Genetic material freely shared earlier has begun to come with all kinds of conditions over the last few years. It cannot be passed around freely between labs and talk of patents on basic methods used by almost all scientists has begun to increase. This is the trend concurrent with international developments in trade.

Realising what was at stake for India and other agriculture based economies if seeds and agricultural products and practices became the property of corporate giants, we decided it was not enough to write in newspapers and journals and speak at meetings as we had been doing. We needed a public program to inform and educate the people and build public opinion to convince our government not to accept such IPR conditions. We also realised that in order to involve people, one has to go to them to discuss issues, more so when the issues are new and complex and the government was withholding information.

Having decided that these issues have to be raised at the national level, I held a series of discussions with people from diverse backgrounds to decide how best to go about it. Finally, along with long time colleague Mr. Mohan Prakash and experts from science, law, foreign policy and economics, we decided to launch a formal group called Gene Campaign. The group would work full time to raise awareness about the importance of genetic resources, the threats from IPRs and its consequences for the socio-economic fabric of India.