Farmers' Rights: Intellectual Property Regimes and the Struggle over Seeds (original) (raw)
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‘Free our seeds !’ Strategies of farmers’ movements to reappropriate seeds (Demeulenaere, 2018)
The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research. Challenges for Food Security and Agrobiodiversity, 2018
Girard, F. and C. Frison (eds). Seed movements around the world share a common enemy: global seed corporations, which are seen as organizing an unfair monopoly over seed markets, using technical devices, industrial property rights, and economic concentration, at the expenses of farmers’ livelihoods. Yet these movements differ in their aims and strategies. Some defend a principle of the free circulation of seeds, rejecting any public regulation of the seed trade. They argue that seeds embody a vital principle that, by its essence, cannot be constrained, either by regulation or intellectual property rights (IPRs). Some others want to counter-balance asymmetries of power between corporations and farmers, arguing that for centuries farmers have collectively managed and enriched crop genetic resources and have now earned rights in return. This chapter focuses on an organisation belonging to the second group – the French Réseau Semences Paysannes. From the beginning, it has clearly placed emphasis on farmers, framed as commoners who replenish a common pool resource, genetic resources, which is essential to plant breeders’ activity. Yet the positioning of the movement towards the banner of ‘the commons’ is internally debated: presenting oneself as stewards of agrobiodiversity is certainly productive but appears to some members as reductive of their experience. Farmers’ seed ‘reappropriations’ do not necessarily translate into property claims, but rather into the defense of farmers’ collective rights on seeds. [Free download : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01793041/document\]
Although many developing countries have drafted legislation to address plant variety protection (PVP) requirements, relatively few have begun to implement PVP, and little guidance is available on appropriate strategies. This note looks at some of the key decisions facing agricultural policymakers in establishing a PVP regime, examines the implementation of PVP, assesses some of the impacts and limitations of PVP regimes, and identifies policy priorities that complement the establishment of IPRs for plant breeding
What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right
Agronomy
Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) as a means of recognising the past, present, and future contributions of farmers in conserving, improving, and making available the plant genetic materials that are important for food and agriculture. Discussions have been underway under the auspices of the ITPGRFA’s Governing Body with the recent Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights (AHTEG-FR) collecting together views, experiences, and best practices to produce an inventory and options for encouraging, guiding, and promoting the realisation of Farmers’ Rights. While this is useful, this article reports on the outcomes of a workshop that applied a different methodology. Our purpose was to identify what could be and should be the substance of Farmers’ Rights so that the policy substance drives the implementation rather than the AHTEG-FR’s retro-fitting Farmers’ Rights to existing views, best practic...
Intellectual Property In Agriculture[.] Plant Breeders’ Rights and Geographical Indications: Towards a comprehensive approach to Intellectual Property in Agriculture, 2022
This book is the first collective publication bringing together the results of the research activity carried out by the members of the international network «Intellectual Property in Agriculture» (https://ipagri.uib.eu/). The network is committed to cross-cutting and comprehensive research approaches to intellectual property and competition law in the agri-food and biotech sectors, and this book attempts to move in that direction, by addressing a limited but diverse number of relevant topics in those fields. It focuses mainly on two typically agricultural intellectual property rights, plant breeders’ rights and geographical indications, in connection with a number of diverse issues, such as organic farming and the new notion of «organic variety suitable for organic production» from art. 3(19) of Regulation (EU) 2018/848, the evolution of the UPOV system, Opinion 0003/19 of 14 May 2020 of the EBA of the EPO, the state of play in the EU with the regulation of GM crops, the new framework set by the «European Green Deal», or innovation within the GIs’ paradigm through plant breeding. The book is particularly addressed to policy-makers, lawyers, technical experts, and, in general, anyone with an interest in life sciences and law in those fields.
2006
Current farmers' breeding goes beyond the gradual selection in landraces, and includes development and maintenance of major new farmers' varieties that are rather uniform, in particular in South-East Asia. Modern varieties developed in the formal sector have simply replaced landraces as the source of diversity, but have not abolished farmers' breeding practices. Interpretations of the new international agreements on plant genetic resources should protect the development of modern farmers' varieties. However, ensuring recognition of collective innovation, allowing access to relevant germplasm sources for farmers' breeding activities, keeping materials freely available, and arranging for effective benefit sharing, all form major challenges. This paper proposes a new protective measure: namely "origin recognition rights."
Farmers’ rights to seed: Conflicts in international legal regimes
Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, 2016
The human right to adequate food and nutrition has not paid enough attention to seeds and agricultural biodiversity, but the time has now come to turn this trend around. Peasant seed systems feed the world and are resilient in times of natural disasters. Yet they face severe threats due to the increasing corporate capture of seeds and nature on the one hand and the accelerated destruction of agricultural biodiversity on the other. Right to food and nutrition activists can strengthen the work of small-scale food producers to protect their agrarian, fishing, pastoral and agro-ecological systems by granting seeds and agricultural biodiversity their well-deserved place. WHAT ARE THE MAIN THREATS TO SEEDS AND AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY TODAY? Peasants are steadily losing their seeds: Their collective seeds systems are being made illegal and are destroyed and contaminated by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The Green Revolution's agricultural policies, trade agreements, and more recently, the national and international legal frameworks protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) are behind this encroachment on peasants' seeds. 2 IPR protection regimes such as the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) have been devised so as to protect the interests of the seed and breeder industry. 3 They severely impair access to seeds outside of UPOV by restricting peasant practices and seed management systems. In Tanzania and Colombia, among other countries, peasant practices have been declared illegal, and criminalized. Furthermore, IPR protection regimes tend to create monopolies, which then place them in the position to reap profits and to enlarge their market power. It is estimated that Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta control 53% of the global commercial market for seeds. 4 The big six agro-chemical corporations (BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta) have recently announced that mergers are in the pipeline, leading to even more market concentration. 5 The economic, ecological, and socio-political risks of a monopolized seeds and breeds supply system are innumerable. Other major threats relate to the destruction of agricultural biodiversity. This sad state of affairs is the result of land clearing, population pressure, overgrazing, environmental degradation, and industrialized farming, fishing and livestock keeping practices. 6 The industrial seed and breeding systems favor standardization and homogeneity. These have a negative impact on the very variables that underpin biodiversity. 7 The destruction of agrobiodiversity is particularly problematic given the challenges that climate change is posing on the realization of the right to food and nutrition.