Seeds

Control of seeds

Brewster Kneen

    How a society regards its seeds, whether they are  respected or abused, ‘owned’ or freely shared, is an     important expression of its culture and politics.  

Canada’s present seed policy is eroding farmers’ and communities’ abilities to select, save and use
seeds, while at the same time supporting transnational corporations’ ownership and control of seeds. The
Seed Policy Project’s aim is to gather a broad based network that can create and mobilise around a truly
public seed policy for Canada that supports seeds and seed keepers. The Seed Policy Project’s first step was
to have conversations with people across Canada who have an interest in seed policy from both a practical

The Fictions of Autonomous Invention: Accumulation by Dispossession,
Commodification and Life Patents in Canada

by Scott Prudham

Seed Companies Seeks More Power

Paul Beingessner, Truax, Saskatchewan
18/02/07

The promised increase in crop prices is giving new hope to some in the farm community. Farmers desperately need to reinvest in their operations as years of poor prices and poor crops have left them with old equipment and an inability to put capital into infrastructure improvements. While good prices are still more a matter of promise than reality, farmers have always lived on hope.

With the prospect of good prices comes the prospect that all sorts of folks will see the opportunity to get their hands deeper into farmers' pockets. It's like the withered hand reaching out of the muck to drag you back under just as you get your head above water. We can see the beginnings of this as fertilizer prices rise to unprecedented levels. Be prepared for all sorts of cost to hike upward.

One sector of the agricultural economy lying in wait to suck some more money out of farmers is the seed industry. Farmers have become more concerned about this as seed prices, especially those for canola, have reached extortionary levels. As well, some canola organizations have expressed concern that the agenda for plant breeders often does not match with the needs of farmers. Traits which farmers could use lie undeveloped while the plant breeders concentrate on traits that yield revenue increases to the companies themselves.

The root of the problem lies in the evolution of plant breeding since the introduction of plant breeders rights and patents on plants. When this happened in Canada in the 1980s, government gained support from some farm groups on the promise that government's role in plant breeding would not diminish. Since that time, farmers have picked up an increasing share of the cost of plant breeding through check offs, while paying more for the seeds they finally plant.

There can be no doubt that the ultimate goal of the seed industry is to have farmers pay a royalty on every seed that goes into the ground. That was not the stated intent when the Plant Breeders Rights act was passed.

The act contained provisions allowing farmers to retain seed of protected varieties for replanting. However, the seed industry has found multiple ways to circumvent this provision. Most obvious is through patents on plants. Right now, these are only available on specific genes, but this aspect gives a seed company de facto control over a variety that contains those genes. Seed companies also maintain control over seed use by the use of hybrids. The corn industry, for example, has gone almost exclusively to hybrids. We are told the yield increases seen in corn in the past several decades are due to the hybrid effect, but there are some who question this. Since little conventional breeding is done, it is hard to say what yield advances would have taken place if there had been strong conventional breeding programs.

The third way companies control the use of seed is through contracts that require farmers to buy new seed each year and to sell all production back to the company. Increasingly, this is the means seed companies use to extract more money from farmers, often under the guise of keeping the end product pure.

If farmers think all this is counter to their best interests, wait until they see what is coming. While many countries are still operating under UPOV 78 (UPOV is the international convention that regulates intellectual property rights over plants and seeds) and some are just now implementing UPOV 91, the large seed companies and their organizations are already planning the next version of UPOV, which could be reached in about five years.

Here is some of what we can expect:
* The end to the right to save any seed for replanting - European seed organizations are especially determined to get this out of UPOV.
* Longer patent terms - already these are from 18 to 25 years but seed companies are complaining this is not long enough.
* The ability to layer patents on plant breeders rights. The companies want to tie you up every way possible.
* Perhaps most disturbing, an end to using new varieties in breeding programs to create still better ones. Proposals have called for a ten year term in which new varieties could not be used and even after this they could only be used with permission and the payment of royalties.
Now, breeders are free to use protected varieties with no restrictions.

Canada still has strong public plant breeding programs centered in universities and government research stations. However, new varieties from these programs are increasingly being covered by plant breeders rights and are often turned over to companies that gain complete control over them. Navigator durum and the hard white wheats are examples of publicly bred varieties that were turned over to private companies which then tied up production in contracts requiring farmers to buy new seed each year. The Canadian Wheat Board was instrumental in preventing this happening to Strongfield durum.

Governments that support these breeding programs, whether provincial or federal, seem to have no problem with this. Farmers are beginning to question a system that uses their money and public money and then gives the results to private companies, but no one appears to be listening much. Look for this issue to continue in future months.

This interview with Also Gonzales was given to Carlos Santos in May 2004, when Aldo was participating in the seminar on “Food Sovereignty and Biodiversity,” in Montevideo, to mark Biodiversidad’s tenth anniversary. Biodiversidad (www.grain.org/biodiversidad) is GRAIN’s sister magazine. It is published in Spanish and has a Latin American focus. It is published in the January 2005 issue of SEEDLING (www.grain.org).

Aldo Gonzalez is a Zapotec indigenous and community leader from Guelatao in the Sierra Juarez mountain range of northern Oaxaca, Mexico. Aldo is director of UNOSJO, a grassroots campesino organisation in the Sierra Juarez. UNOSJO provides technical assistance and consultation to small farmers with the goal of promoting sustainable rural economies that are based on respect for indigenous culture. It plays a vital role in educating local communities and collaborating with national and international organisations about the threat of GM maize.

JEREMY F. DEBEER
University of Ottawa - Faculty of Law
Journal of World Intellectual Property, Vol. 8, No. 1, p. 5, 2005
by permission

Abstract:
This essay shows how to reconcile competing intellectual, common and "classic" property rights, using plants and agricultural biotechnology as an exemplar. As intellectual property (IP) has become philosophically fashionable, other important property rights have been neglected. This is evidenced in copyright law by debates over private copying and decryption technologies. It is apparent in the realm of biotechnology and human body samples. And it is epitomized in the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Monsanto Canada Inc v Schmeiser concerning patented plant genes and farmers' seed saving rights.

SEEDLING, Oct 2005 www.grain.org

Software and seeds: lessons in community sharing

Roberto Verzola
In many countries, control over information has become a big issue. An underlying aspect of this control has been the use – or threat of use – of force to establish control. The aim is often to prevent information from being freely exchanged, creating an artificial scarcity that keeps information prices high. The fight to protect such freedoms is being fought out in many different arenas. Roberto Verzola explores the synergies, similarities and differences between those trying to protect the freedom of innovators in the worlds of software and seeds.

Access to information raises a whole suite of questions about democracy, public participation, confidentiality, competition, and, indeed, intellectual property rights. More fundamentally, however, access to information goes to the question of whether information should be privately held and controlled or part of the public domain. Responses to this issue are not necessarily going to be the same in all contexts but this paper begins an examination of the conflict between public and private through an analysis of the regulation of biotechnology in Canada.

The thinking behind the paper was not one of presenting another case where privatization is winning at the expense of the public so the analysis may be disappointing from this perspective. Nonetheless, I think the paper can certainly be a starting point for these sorts of discussions – discussions that only become more important with attempts to extend data exclusivity requirements in the intellectual property chapters of international trade agreements and to expand the scope of copyright protection as is currently being attempted through Bill C-60 in Canada.

MA Thesis, Université du Québec À Montréal, Feb. 2005

Changes to seed systems carry major implications for agriculture practices and the food system, as well as the environment. While the Canadian seed system is in the midst of a profound transformation, these
changes have not been the subject of much study and analysis. In this study, a history of the seed system is described in which change to the system is viewed within the larger processes of the industrialisation of agriculture and the restructuring of the global agri-food order. The history of the Canadian seed system is divided into three successive seed regimes: an initial seed regime where decisions over seeds were

Rene Van Acker, “Research Of the Public, By the Public and For the Public”

Manitoba Alternatives, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2004
Rene Van Acker is Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Plant Science, University of Manitoba

Truly public research provides tremendous social and economic benefits. In our time, one of the most spectacular examples of public research effort was the publicly funded effort by the United States government to put a man on the moon. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for man-kind.” The memorable, if not scripted words of Neil Armstrong reflected the remarkable scientific and technological advancement that was represented by man traveling to and walking on the moon in 1969. Because the moon shot was the culmination of innovations resulting from public science research funding on a grand scale, Armstrong should have expanded on his sound bite by adding “..and another tremendously valuable effort by public scientists funded by public research and development grants. ” The spin-off’s from the U.S. moon shot and space race were big. They include, for example, all current IT technologies. So publicly funded research is beneficial; what’s the problem? In Canada, the problem is that publicly funded research is being distracted and undermined by a shift in government research funding programs towards industry research matching funds. This policy direction creates a public research funding climate in Canada in which there is less opportunity for true innovation in science and less opportunity for public science to service the broad and long-term needs of the nation rather than the narrow and short-term desires of corporations.