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Rice row: Basmati name in dispute. Credit: EASTERN

India has been dragged into another dispute with the US Patents and Trademark Office, this time over the patenting of ‘Basmati rice’, the long-grain rice variety known for its distinct aroma and unique to the Indian subcontinent. It has only recently won a patents case over the plant turmeric (see Nature 389, 6; 1997).

The US seed company RiceTec, based in Alvin, Texas, claims to have “invented novel rice lines” whose grains have qualities of Indian Basmati and can be grown worldwide. US patent 5663484 would allow the company to market its aromatic rice as Basmati.

India says the US company is free to patent its aromatic rice under any name except Basmati, which it says is specific to the varieties grown for centuries by farmers in northern states of India and parts of Pakistan. It argues that the name Basmati cannot be used to describe another product, even if it is similar to the Indian variety. But RiceTec claims that “Basmati is a generic name for a type of rice just as durum is for a type of wheat”. It has dismissed Indian claims about uniqueness, saying aromatic rice grows worldwide.

RiceTec president Robin Andrews says the US patent is for an improved version of the “long-grain American Basmati rice” his company has already been selling under the brand names ‘Texmati’ and ‘Kasmati’. Paula Coute, a spokesperson for the US patents office, says the RiceTec strain deserved to be called Basmati as it met the definition of Basmati.

But Indian officials say the patent would have a heavy impact on India's exports of Basmati, worth $800 million a year. “What is worse is the negation of centuries of contributions by traditional farmers who have bred and cultivated Basmati,” says Vandana Shiva, an expert in biodiversity with the environmentalist group Third World Network. She says real Basmati will now have to compete with “fakes” and substandard Basmati grown outside the subcontinent — a possibility that must worry consumer groups.

The Indian government has promised that the patent will be challenged. A high-level inter-ministerial group, including M. S. Swaminathan, the former director-general of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, has been set up to present the country's case to the US patent office. Several approaches are being considered.

Scientists say one approach is to establish, through DNA fingerprinting, that the source of RiceTec's variety is the germ plasm from India accessed through international gene banks. “No one can breed Basmati without using original lines from us,” says Suresh Sinha, former director of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi.

Another approach being considered is to see whether RiceTec's patented variety measures up to the quality standards laid down for Basmati rice in India. E. A. Siddiqi, who has worked on the genetic improvement of Basmati for more than 20 years at IARI, says Basmati rice must pass seven tests.

India is also likely to initiate a dispute at the Geneva-based World Trade Organization. Suman Sahai, a geneticist and president of Gene Campaign, a non-governmental organization, says India and Pakistan should take the case to the organization's dispute settlement board on the grounds that patenting Basmati violates the protection offered to products that are ‘geographically indicated’ under the TRIPS international trade and intellectual property rights agreement.

Sahai claims that Basmati rice is exclusively associated with India and Pakistan in the same way as champagne is associated with France.