The subject of biodiversity has become one of the focal points of North-South tension in the world trade debates. Northern representatives have insisted on the incorporation of intellectual property rights into trade agreements. Such rights would include the patenting of life forms, such as plant germ plasm. Because much of the planet’s remaining biodiversity resides in the Global South, Southern critics have countered that such an approach both fails to preserve diverse ecosystems and amounts to a license to Northern Corporations to profit exclusively from the South’s biological resources. This chapter explains the Third World argument for a different approach.
