EXCERPT: The environmentalist, who is using the Nobel Prize money to set up her own Foundation, says big business is managing to browbeat and bribe "poor governments" into "embracing genetically modified organisms (GMOs)".

She is indignant, "In Africa we are told if we only embrace GMOs, we will have no hunger." But, she says, "People fear the control of seeds once they are patented and owned by multi-nationals. They will not be owned by the farmer. Just like trade, he who owns the seed, owns the trade. You would be food insecure."
------

'Protecting environment a personal issue'
RASHMEE Z AHMED
TIMES OF INDIA, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2004
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/961371.cms

LONDON: Thirty million trees and the Nobel Peace Prize later, Africa's Earth Mother Extraordinaire Wangari Mathai is embarking on a passage to India, TOI [times of India] can reveal.

But Mathai, who plans to travel East early next year, will uncharacteristically give the do-gooding a miss. Indian farmers' long and lonely campaign against multi-national seed patenting and bio-piracy will receive no more than moral support and good wishes from the woman hailed as a 'green goddess' worldwide for helping empower her Kenyan sisterhood by the simple act of planting a tree.

Mathai, who is justifiably credited with a modern miracle in that she helped make a desert bloom, picked up her treasured Peace Prize just six days ago. But buoyant or not, Mathai tells TOI that she has no intention of interfering with India's grassroots green activism.

It is going well, she says, referring to India's long, still-unresolved battle to prevent big business patenting seeds they have used for free for generations. "Indian campaigners such as Vandana Shiva are doing a great job. I have no reason to go to India for that," says the 64-year-old professor, who doubles as Kenya's deputy environment minister.

But Mathai, who clearly prefers to wage the anti bio-piracy battle on her own dark continent, admits the global import of seed patenting is huge for developing countries everywhere. The environmentalist, who is using the Nobel Prize money to set up her own Foundation, says big business is managing to browbeat and bribe "poor
governments" into "embracing genetically modified organisms (GMOs)".

She is indignant, "In Africa we are told if we only embrace GMOs, we will have no hunger." But, she says, "People fear the control of seeds once they are patented and owned by multi-nationals. They will not be owned by the farmer. Just like trade, he who owns the seed, owns the trade. You would be food insecure."

Mathai has previously railed about big global corporation's ploy in obtaining "private monopolies on mere 'discoveries' of biological materials and their properties, such as umbilical chord blood cells and basmati rice."

That said though, Mathai's message to India will be substantially different. She says it is important "to educate people, particularly in the developing world, that protection of the environment needs to be a personal issue."

Only then, says the woman who single-handedly built a Green Belt Movement in Kenya and spent 25 years helping reverse her tree-shorn country's chronic drought, can the developing world force "its governments to put the right international codes in place."

Mathai believes that her Nobel Peace Prize is delayed recognition of a basic truth. That peace can only come when "when you share your resources equally". And that includes the environment, says the green goddess.