"The tragedy of our century is that we did not carry the knowledge of neem with us when we began to chemicalise our agriculture with packages from abroad. For us, indigenous is never modern. There has been scientific work supporting indigenous practices, but modern industry has always been impressed with the practices in :dvanced' countries.

This is the reason we havE? not tried to develop patents in the field of neem. Most patents are taken by the industry. A derivative industry, with its foreign-based collaborators and knowhow, and with development being defined as a race to catch up with what has been current abroad for a number of years, makes patents exploiting people's knowlege rather unlikely. "