BIOTECH INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS and INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
No to Patenting of Life! Indigenous Peoples' Statement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the WTO Agreement -  Adopted in Geneva on 25 July 1999

" WE, INDIGENOUS PEOPLES from around the world, believe that nobody can own what exists in nature except nature herself.   A human being cannot own its own mother.  Humankind is part of Mother Nature, we have created nothing and so we can in no way claim to be owners of what does not belong to us. But  time and again, western legal property regimes have been imposed on us, contradicting our own cosmologies and values.
WE VIEW with regret and anxiety how, Article 27.3b of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements  will further denigrate and undermine our rights to our cultural and intellectual heritage, our plant, animal, and even human genetic resources and discriminate against our indigenous ways of thinking and behaving.