Seeds are one of the irreplaceable pillars of food production. Farmers all over the world have been acutely aware of this throughout the centuries. It is one of the most universal and basic understandings that all farmers share. Except in those cases where they have suffered external aggressions or extreme circumstances, almost all farming communities know how to save, store and share seeds. Millions of families and farming communities have worked to create hundreds of crops and thousands of varieties of these crops. The regular exchange of seeds among communities and peoples has allowed crops to adapt to different conditions, climates and topographies. This is what has allowed farming to spread and grow and feed the world with a diversified diet.
But seeds have also been the basis of productive, social and cultural processes that have given rural people the resolute ability to maintain some degree of autonomy and to refuse to be completely controlled by big business and big money. From the point of view of corporate interests that are striving to take control of land, farming, food and the huge market that these factors represent, this independence is an obstacle.
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Ever since the Green Revolution, corporations have deployed a range of strategies to get this control: agricultural research and extension programmes, the development of global commodity chains, and the massive expansion of export agriculture and agribusiness. Most farmers and indigenous peoples have resisted and continue to resist this takeover in different ways.
Experience shows that people do not want these laws, once the misinformation and secrecy used to push the laws through have been countered by information campaigns and mobilisation on the part of social organisations. Most people reject the idea that a company can take ownership of a plant variety and prohibit farmers from reproducing their seeds. They find it completely absurd. People also generally do not agree that the work that farmers do to feed the world should suddenly become a crime. Wherever resistance has been strong enough, the legal plunder embodied in these laws has been stopped.
Experience also shows that those who want to privatise, monopolise and control seeds on behalf of large transnational corporations have no limits. There is no possibility to negotiate, make concessions, or reach common agreements on this in a way that would allow the different interests to co-exist peacefully. The corporate agenda is to make it impossible for farmers to save seeds and to make them dependent on purchased seeds.
Similarly, experience shows that it is possible to resist and dismantle these attacks. But doing so requires informative tools that can be widely shared, in order to blow away the smoke of false promises and nice words, so that people can see what really lies behind seed laws. This booklet aims to help to make this work possible.
The PVP is often presented as being preferable over a patent because it authorises free use of protected plant varieties for research and selection of other varieties. This is the main argument used in the effort to convince governments to adopt the laws of the UPOV Convention. However, there are no advantages whatsoever for farmers, especially since UPOV 1991. The exception for research and selection only benefits the industry and researchers and is no longer extended to farmers conducting selection in their fields.
Intellectual property laws applied to seeds are regulations that recognise a person or an entity, most often a seed company, as the exclusive owner of seeds having specific characteristics. The owner then has the legal right to prevent others from using, producing, exchanging or selling them. The justification for this is to give companies a temporary monopoly so that they can collect a return on their investment without facing competition. But there are huge problems involved.
Trade agreements such as those required by the WTO and FTAs set market rules that supposedly aim to prohibit discrimination but may also give agribusiness preferred access to certain markets. As a result, governments may no longer be able to implement procurement programmes under which state authorities buy seeds from local farmers. (The rationale is that, by restraining competition, local procurement requirements put transnational companies at a trade disadvantage.) These are harsh conditions that give preference to corporations rather than to the welfare of farmers or consumers.
Bilateral investment treaties, pushed by countries such as the US and members of the European Union, also contain a rule that intellectual property on seeds is a form of foreign investment that must be protected in the same way as an oil well or car factory. Thus, if such investments are expropriated or nationalised, or if the expected profits from them are jeopardised, then a US or EU seed company can sue the country in which the investment is located in an international court (investor-state dispute settlement).
Similarly, biosafety laws often have the opposite effect of what they were intended to do. Instead of setting up barriers to the entry and spread of GMOs, which by their very nature are hazardous, they create a legal framework to manage risks and therefore facilitate the acceptance and spread of transgenic seeds. For example, biosafety laws often lay out formal procedures for planting GMOs that result in standards making these procedures legal without their being any safer. Such laws can also force farmers who do not want GMO and who produce their own seeds to have all their seeds analysed in order to guarantee the absence of GMO, which they obviously are unable to do, thus obliging them to buy industry-sold GMO seeds. In other instances, these laws make it much easier to import or export GM crops, since the countries involved have the necessary legal mechanisms set up to oversee the crops. In yet other cases, such as that of Europe, there are good biosafety laws in place which do have preventive measures to stop the cultivation or import of GMOs, but these laws are under fire as the seed industry sees them as barriers to trade.
It should be noted that United Nations agencies such as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Conference on Trade and Development or the World Intellectual Property Organisation are today important proponents of all of the above laws. They draft model laws and train governments in how to implement them.
To mobilise against the Bill, booklets have been prepared in order to explain the consequences of the law to village chiefs and farmer leaders in their local languages. This social mobilisation emphasises that seeds belong to farmers collectively and that there can be no private owners. As an alternative, farmers in Ghana are demanding that public breeding programmes be put in place to ensure quality seed for indigenous crops such as cowpeas, cassava, rice and coconut. In addition, groups of farmers and their allies have plans to organise collective projects for access to seed in the villages. This will allow farmers to access varieties that have vanished locally but may still be being used in neighbouring areas or by farmers in other villages across Ghana.
But in a country where the vast majority of producers are peasant farmers who rely on their local seeds and breeds, initiatives like this are not a good fit. By 2012, Mali could boast PVP certificates on fifty crops, but their usefulness was unclear. The Malian government has to pay a yearly sum of 16.5 million CFA (25,000 euros) to maintain the property titles on these seeds, a situation that is problematic because Malian institutions are hardly receiving any income from the crops. On the one hand, there have not been enough enterprises interested in reproducing and marketing the seeds. On the other, most peasants are not interested in paying high prices for high input-requiring seeds such as hybrids that do not fit in with their small-scale, low-input farms. Furthermore, in some cases the PVP titles can be considered as direct biopiracy since the crops are clearly peasant varieties, even still carrying their local names. (The PVP certificates were granted even though the DUS criteria - the varieties should be distinct, novel, uniform and stable - were not fully met.) Now, since the PVP titles are valid in all 16 African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI) member states, farmers not just in Mali but in the other OAPI member states may no longer sell or exchange the seeds of these peasant varieties. Farmers can still reproduce these seeds on their fields, but only for use on their own farm. This situation may become even worse for farmers as OAPI joined UPOV in 2014.
The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) involves 20 countries, stretching from Ethiopia to South Africa. According to the COMESA treaty, all member countries must abide by common seed trade regulations. These regulations were drafted in 2013 and, if adopted, which would allow corporations to certify their seeds in one member country and automatically acquire the right to market them in all COMESA states. This is particularly useful for the seed industry as, by eliminating national rules, it will facilitate the marketing of seeds over a large part of Africa. A common catalogue listing the authorised varieties for all countries will be drawn up and all countries will adopt the same certification system. The COMESA seed laws contain no measures to foster local peasant seed varieties.
COMESA has also approved draft policy guidelines for GMOs, a step that bypasses national regulations on GMOs in trade, farming and food aid. Farmers organisations have complained that these guidelines did not come principally from COMESA member states but rather from a biotechnology policy initiative funded by the US government. Experts trained by USAID dominated the drafting process, and the voices of farmers and civil society groups have not been heard. Furthermore, like the seed marketing regulations, the GMO policies have immediate application in all COMESA countries, undermining the ability of civil society groups to fight these laws through national governments, many of which currently have relatively strict regulations in place. 152ee80cbc
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