Teff flour: low hand on an African tradition

Text by: Léonard Vincent Follow

For more than fifteen years, a Dutch company has flourished a patent it had filed in Europe on teff flour, a cereal that has been used as a staple food in Ethiopia and Eritrea for centuries, despite protests by many of NGOs who consider this practice as a theft of traditional cultures, especially African. Investigation.

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It is a thick, sand-colored pancake, on which the cooks disperse the purees, simmered meats, stews. Scraps torn with the pincers of the fingers are used to bring the meal to the mouth. For centuries, this is how we eat in Ethiopia and Eritrea: on an injera, a large spongy and acidulous pancake made from teff, a tiny seed with exceptional nutritional properties, rich in protein and gluten-free. For three thousand years, it has been harvested on the cob in armfuls of fine and tall green grasses on the Abyssinian highlands.

But a cargo of teff shipped to the Netherlands in 2003 also made the fortune of a small private Dutch company. Directed by businessman Johannes "Hans" Turkensteen and researcher Jans Roosjen, this structure, called at the time Soil & Crop Improvements (S&C) indeed flourished on a European patent appropriating the use of this " super cereal ”, while the organic and gluten-free food market was gradually expanding.

A business trip

It all started a few months earlier with a trip from Hans Turkensteen to Addis Ababa. Availing himself of the support of the Larenstein University of Applied Sciences, the businessman had signed, in March 2003, a memorandum with the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Organization, EARO, granting his company the delivery of 1,440 kg of teff seeds, allegedly intended for scientific experimentation.

" Turkensteen led to believe in a mutually beneficial agreement for all parties: a better teff return for Ethiopian farmers and a university poverty alleviation program," said Ethiopian journalist Zecharias Zelalem, who led the subject. a major survey for the Ethiopian daily Addis Standard . He even used the pretext of the great famine of 1984 to convince the signatories, saying that if the Ethiopian peasants had had a better teff at the time, the disaster would not have happened. "

At the same time, S&C has filed a request with the Dutch patent agency for protection of the "processing methods" of teff; a patent finally granted on January 25, 2005, obliging all those who would like to produce teff flour or products made from the Ethiopian seed to obtain a license from them, against the payment of royalties. At the bottom of the document was this remark, to say the least astonishing for a flour used for millennia: "Inventor: Jans Roosjen".

A young Ethiopian woman prepares the injera a cake made from teff flour. SOLAN GEMECHU / AFP

" Surprisingly, the Ethiopian authorities did not admit - or did not want to admit - the deception," says Zecharias Zelalem. Even after Larenstein University expressed doubts and commissioned an investigative report on the deal and even after the Dutch received a "Captain Hook Award" [an infamous award named after the cartoon pirate Captain Hook and awarded each year by a coalition of NGOs, the Coalition against biopiracy, editor's note in 2004, for their achievement in biopiracy. "

Without other obstacles than protests and bad publicity, the two partners therefore continued their harvest of patents. In the following years, they first obtained a license from the European Patent Office, granting it the right to apply to the intellectual property protection agencies of Germany, Australia, Italy and from the United Kingdom.

" The most astonishing thing," explains German lawyer Anton Horn, a specialist in intellectual property, is that the European patent office granted them a patent exactly as they had requested. It's very rare. Usually a fairly broad request is made initially, so that the perimeter can be reduced during its examination by the patent office. Non. It was accepted as it was, whereas for my part, it only took me thirty minutes to understand that something was wrong with this patent. "Besides, he adds, it was refused by agencies in the United States and Japan.

Thirteen years of profits

However, for the next thirteen years, no one came to oppose what Zecharias Zelalem considers as " a pillage of Ethiopian traditions and a pure and simple robbery of Ethiopian peasants ". It was the curiosity of the Ethiopian press that began to disrupt flourishing businesses.

However, in the event of timely bankruptcies in name changes, the Dutch company, renamed in the meantime ProGrain International, has done everything to preserve the rights acquired by its legal sleight of hand. It continued to develop its activity, to the point that Turkensteen was able, for example, to celebrate with great pomp, in 2010, the production of its thousandth tonne of teff flour in its factories in Spain, Romania and the Netherlands . At a rate of 100 euros per kilo, according to the account made in 2012 by the Ethiopian weekly Addis Fortune , its profit was considerable, while Ethiopia only touched, all in all, about 4,000 euros dividends, according to the survey of journalist Zecharias Zelalem.

But the adventure ended up reaching its limits. One day in 2017, seized by an Ethiopian friend who became director of the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office, the lawyer Anton Horn first suggested to the Dutch partners of ProGrain International, by mail, to abandon, at least in Germany, their duties on teff flour. But the Dutch duo did not respond. Then a company having bought a license to the company of Turkensteen and Roosjen attacked the Dutch patent before a court of The Hague, refusing henceforth to pay him royalties. Bet won: on December 7, 2018, justice agreed with him and " canceled " the patent, believing that it was neither " innovative " nor " inventive ", while, simultaneously, on his own money, Anton Horn challenged the patent in Germany before the courts and obtained, there too, its cancellation. Two blows struck at the heart of the Dutch industrial machine, after fifteen years without a hitch.

Gradual abandonment

Solicited by RFI, neither the company holding the remaining patents nor Hans Turkensteen declined to give their version of the story. But the Dutch duo seem to have abandoned the game and given up their rights. Canceled in the Netherlands and Germany, the patent remains valid today in several European countries. " But since August 2019, the non-payment of patent renewal fees should logically lead, in the summer of 2020, to the cancellation of it in all the countries of the European space ", hopes Anton Horn.

This commercial appropriation of an African tradition by a Western society is not a unique case. In 1997, the American company RiceTec had obtained a patent on basmati rice, effectively prohibiting the sale in the United States of basmati rice grown in its countries of origin, India and Pakistan. " In 2007, the German pharmaceutical company Schwabe Pharmaceuticals obtained a patent on the therapeutic properties of the so-called Cape Pelargonium flower, originating in South Africa and known for its antimicrobial and expectorant properties, adds François Meienberg, from the Swiss NGO ProSpecieRara , which campaigns for the protection of genetic and cultural diversity. Patent finally canceled in 2010 after a legal battle. And it is today the rooibos (a red tea, note), also South African, which is the subject of a similar battle. "

International negotiations have been launched to try to define a normative framework which would stem the multiplication of scandals of theft of ancestral traditions by industrial predators. But they have so far led to nothing significant. The problem is that, on the one hand, "not all countries protect indigenous traditions in the same way," explains François Meierberg. The Scandinavian countries or Bolivia, for example, take this issue seriously, but these are rare examples. The other problem is that many industrialized states refuse to attack the holy law of "free trade". At the cost, suddenly, of the spoliation of the poorest.

► Also listen to the Africa Report: The importance of teff in the diet of Ethiopians

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