Spices Board Gears Up For Patents Challenge

The Spices Board is taking steps to combat the granting of patents to traditional spices and their extracts in other countries, particularly the United States, its chairman, V Jayashankar said yesterday.

'We are alert and are preparing ourselves to answer all questions in this regard,' Jayashankar said. A committee of scientists and researchers was set up last week to study the issue, he added.

"This committee will prepare a ready reckoner on the spices used in the country over the ages and establish their traditional use in the country so that none can claim patent elsewhere," Jayashanker said.

The committee, which would be looking at areas such as pepper, cardamom, turmeric, ginger, chilli, coriander, fenugreen, fennel, cumin and garlic, is expected to complete the documentation in three months.

 

The Spices Board chairman said this became necessary after reports that patent rights over certain spices produced in the country for years were being given to firms in the US.

He said an agent of a Indian exporter in the US had been issued a legal notice by a company for selling piperine, a 98 per cent extract from pepper, as peperine had been patented by a company in the US. Jayashankar said that was wrong since the patent given to the company in 1996 was a formulation in which piperine was one of the ingredients. 'Piperine in its entirety was never patented.'

He said the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in India had been using piperine for the past 10 years. But despite patenting of the formulation in the US, the country's pepper exports had not been hit, he said.

"If anything, pepper exports had only grown in the last couple of years after patenting, showing that the world has not attached importance to the patenting of piperine," he said. US firms had sought to patent turmeric and now Basmati rice.

Indian officials, who won the turmeric patent battle and are now fighting the Basmati patent, have suggested a long-term strategy to preserve the nation's vast genetic wealth. The government is developing a bio-diversity law to help ward off patenting predators. (Reuters)