As the world has recently been reminded, India and Pakistan hate each other. Always have, always will. Split at birth, the countries want nothing to do with each other and may well reduce each other to smoldering nuclear wastelands in short order. But there's at least one issue that infuriates both countries so much that they're working closely together--against the United States. That issue is biopiracy.

The particular controversy that has united India and Pakistan where 50 years of reconciliation efforts have failed is basmati rice--a staple food central to numerous cultures in both countries--and the willingness of not only the U.S. Patent Office to issue a patent for basmati rice, but also of the U.S. to issue a trademark for the word "basmati." To add further insult, both were issued to a corporation called Ricetec, for its basmati-Texas rice strain, an entirely different (and, to south Asians, decidedly inferior) strain. It's now sold in packaging that says "Kasmati, Indian style Basmati."

The British government, which takes basmati rice to mean Indian rice, has refused entry to Kasmati on the grounds that the company is passing it off as something that it isn't. The Indians and Pakistanis are also arguing that you can't grow anything labelled "basmati" in the United States, because the climate, soil, and water are different from the region in the Himalayas where both countries grow the rice.

Basmati is just one of thousands of such biopiracy issues, where global corporations--often U.S.-based--are buying up the rights to traditional plants, seeds, foodstuffs, animals, and even human genetic material from agencies that have no authority to sell them. It's analagous to white settlers in the Americas "buying" from a distant government land never legitimately ceded by the native peoples who live there. The analogy especially holds because many native cultures had no concept of private property, let alone selling land. Today, most of the world has no concept of the claims being legally made by the biopirates.

For global corporations anxious to own the property rights to, say, "corn," or "caterpillars," or the DNA responsible for blue eyes and blond hair, the profit potential is at least as lucrative as the gold lust that led to 500 years of devastation and genocide in the New World. And, in fact, many Third World biopiracy activists are referring to the issue as the second coming of Columbus, a new and frightening hi-tech form of colonialism. Traditional assets and ways of life are stolen and then sold back, reconstituted, over and over again, to those who can pay the price.

Biopiracy issues are enormous in Third World countries, particularly those in tropical and subtropical climates where the biological diversity is the greatest and the least well-mapped. They have largely been ignored in the U.S. outside of the business press. But they raise huge and fundamental questions, questions that social activists of all types would do well to start echoing. For instance: Is there anything, exactly, that shouldn't be owned in global capitalism, and if so, what?

And, in an age of rapidly accelerating biotechnology, what constitutes a life? If we prohibit slavery, that is, the ownership of a human being, do we also prohibit the ownership of the combination of DNA and genetic fabric that make up that human being?

If life is sacred, when can it no longer be for sale?