“Life Is Not for Sale!”: Confronting Free Trade and Intellectual Property in Costa Rica

Abstract

ABSTRACT Expansion of intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes has been achieved in part through bilateral free‐trade agreements. This process, however, has not gone uncontested. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Costa Rica, in this article I examine a conflict over IPR in the context of a social movement against the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). I focus specifically on reforms that have set the stage for the private appropriation of biodiversity, plant varieties, and other biological materials. Environmentalists have struggled against these reforms since the mid‐1990s, and during the confrontation over CAFTA they positioned “defense of life itself” as a key issue for the social movement. Activists challenged the legal constitution of seeds, biodiversity, and other biological materials as objects of IPR by ideologically situating life outside of commodity exchange and as part of the collective property of the nation.