The anti-western environmental marxists can’t seem to get off the same old tired theme. The evil west (especially those greedy biotech firms) are pillaging the poor repressed indiginous peoples of formerly colonized lands. At least they came up with a new term to keep us entertained, ‘biopiracy’. From a story in the U.K. Guardian newspaper:

The new piracy: how West ’steals’ Africa’s plants

Swiss and British firms are accused of using the scientific properties of plants from the developing world to make huge profits while giving nothing to the people there. Antony Barnett reports

Shocking! Evil corporate profiteers are importing huge harvesters to trudge across the third world landscape, leaving trails of destruction in their wake as they rape the pristine green landscape of valuable botanicals. The locals watch in horror as their beautiful land is turned into a barren dustbowl!

Well, not exactly. Apparently the former president of the Alpine Garden Society visited Tanzania back in 1976 and took a handful of seeds of a local wildflower back to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. They’ve been happily growing away in the evil west since then, until some brilliant western scientists (who happen to work for a large biotech firm) discovered they they could be crossed with another plant to produce an excellent hybrid for hanging baskets. Other brilliant (western) people with expertise in marketing convinced others to take a risk by investing their money in advertising the result, which seems to have turned out well for them in this case. The article glosses over all of the expensive failures and dead-ends that the firm has had to eat in between successes.

Now the marxists are calling foul, saying that the profits should be shared with the Tanzanians, who have plenty of the plants still on their hills, had no idea the plants were worth anything, never dreamed of crossing them with another plant, wouldn’t know how to begin doing this even if they did dream it, certainly could not have gotten anyone to bankroll the experiment, and didn’t invent the stupid plant in the first place.

Piracy implies theft. And theft generally implies something tangible, like gold, cash or your car. Even in intellectual property theft, such as software or an invention, the victim has to have done work to create something first before it can be stolen. How is biopiracy theft? And who was it ’stolen’ from, exactly?

The eco-nuts simply despise capitalism, western civilization and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives progress. They have the bizarre self-loathing that defines so many on the left.

From the article, here are a few other examples of what they are calling ‘colonial pillaging’.

· A diabetes drug being developed by a British firm that comes from the Libyan plant Artemisia judaica.

· An immuno-suppressant drug being developed by GlaxoSmithKline that comes from a compound found in a termite hill in Gambia.

· A treatment for HIV taken from mycobacteria discovered in mud samples from the Lango district of central Uganda.

· Infection-fighting drugs made from amoebas in Mauritius and Venezuela.

· An anti-diarrhoea vaccine developed from Egyptian microbes.

· A slug barrier made from a Somalian species of myrrh.

All of humanity needs these inventions, and more like them. Calling their discovery ‘piracy’ is insulting.