Seed wars and farmers’ rights: comparative perspectives from Brazil and India (original) (raw)
Related papers
PhD Dissertation, 2010
For the past decade, seeds have been at the centre of a relentless global war. This is a war of rhetoric—fought in courts, in corporate publicity campaigns, and in international environment and trade negotiations; but it is also a “down-to-earth” struggle, fought in farmers’ fields around the world. Indeed, with the advent of plant genetic engineering, seeds have undergone a formidable transformation. Formerly a common good, produced by peasants/farmers and exchanged freely among them, seeds are becoming a tradable commodity on the global marketplace covered by extensive patent rights. As the first link in the food chain and the basis of our food supply, seeds carry tremendous material and symbolic importance. Not surprisingly, these developments have proven highly controversial, and Brazil is one of the terrains where the global struggle over seeds is being played out. This dissertation combines an ethnographic analysis of how genetic engineering is transforming small farmers’ seed practices in Southern Brazil with a broader analysis of the Brazilian transgenic seed landscape. It includes a discussion of the recent evolution of Brazilian seed industry, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) and seed legislation; a detailed account of the transgenics controversy in Brazil; and an examination of the role played by civil society in the transgenics debate. I argue that the right of farmers to save, use and exchange their seeds—and not genetic engineering per se—is at the heart of farmers’ resistance to genetically engineered organisms in Southern Brazil. Small farmers’ response to transgenic seeds does not reflect so much a distrust of a new technology as an acute awareness of the power relations intrinsic to the current biotechnological revolution. Indeed, small farmers are aware that recent technological developments open the way to the heightened commodification of seeds, and that, in this process, they are being dispossessed of the right to seeds, the most fundamental input in farming. I conclude by briefly discussing how these developments have prompted the emergence of “farmers’ rights” in an attempt to reassert the age-old practice of seed saving.
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.
Farmers' rights and food sovereignty: critical insights from India
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2014
Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researchers and activists who are sympathetic to farmers' rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India's unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on an analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmers' rights.
Restoring farmers’ sovereignty over food, seed and genetic resources in Guaraciaba, Brazil
2016
Access to quality seed has become one of the underlying developmental needs of farming communities for achieving food security and sustainable development. The advent of the green revolution in Brazil heralded a massive loss of farmers’ varieties, which were replaced by a few high-yielding and hybrid varieties. Small-scale farmers in Guaraciaba, in the western part of the state of Santa Catarina (Figure 1.5.1), recall that up until as recently as the 1970s they were only growing their own local varieties of major staple crops. However, by the 1990s these had already vanished from most of their farms. The resulting dependency of farmers on the seed of external sources has been a burden for them, in terms of the high costs involved with such cultivation. The Micro-watershed Development Programme was implemented by Santa Catarina State Enterprise for Rural Development and Extension (Epagri), from 2004 to 2009, with funding from the World Bank. In the municipality of Guaraciaba, communi...
Impacts of International and National Regulatory Frameworks on Guaranteeing Farmers’ Right in Brazil
Journal of Agricultural Science
As guardians of agrobiodiversity, farmers must have their rights to these resources recognized, rewarded, and supported by their unparalleled contributions in the development of landraces of cultivated plants and domestic animals. Thus, it is worth questioning to what extent multilateral treaties that deal with the use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture would ensure the protection of these rights. With this objective, we evaluated legal and administrative multilateral, and national mechanisms for the protection of Farmers’ Rights—FR regarding the sharing of benefits generated by the access to genetic resources and its implications for the conservation of agrobiodiversity. We conducted analyzes of official documents on norms, treaties, decrees, and regulations which enabled the understanding of the elements constituted by the agrobiodiversity conservation system. We demonstrated that the evaluated international regimes do not guarantee the FR but propose that the Nat...
Since 2000s, Africa and India severally rejected the notion that UPOV's 1991 standard of Plant Breeders Rights (PBRs) is the only route to fulfill their obligations under Article 27 of the TRIPs Agreement. Objecting to the exclusive focus of the UPOV regime on formal plant breeders, African countries, insisted on a holistic approach to plant breeders' rights to include protection for rights of communities, farmers and their indigenous knowledge, innovation and practices. Consequently, under the African Union's (AU) auspices, Africa proposed the Model Law for the Protection of the Rights of Local Communities and Breeders, and for Regulations of Access to Biological Resources. Self-evidently, the law not only recognizes the centrality of the smallholder indigenous and local community farmers on the continent's food production, it also underscores the interconnectedness of biodiversity conservation, farmers' rights, traditional knowledge, access and benefit sharing over genetic resources within then emergent international regimes. Nearly two decades after, Africa's resolve has proven to be fickle. The continent has reversed itself and fully embraced the UPOV regime. At about the same time as the Model Law, India enacted the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001 –an instrument consistent with the spirit of Africa's Model Law. Both regimes take into account the role of local farmers as the backbone of agricultural innovation, food production and food security in the developing world, including Africa and India, thereby further enhancing the idea of farmers' rights in food and agriculture law and policy. This Article juxtaposes the circumstances around Africa's failure of resolve and India's wobbly experience over farmers' rights. It calls attention to farmers' rights as a site for a missed and yet potentially redeemable opportunity for both Africa and India to advance South-South solidarity for food security. *Paper forthcoming in Indian Journal of Law and Technology 2018
Farmers' Rights: Intellectual Property Regimes and the Struggle over Seeds
Politics & Society, 2004
This article analyzes "farmers' rights" as a strategy of resistance against the perceived inequities of intellectual property rights regimes for plant varieties. As commercial models of intellectual property have made their way into agriculture, farmers' traditional seed-saving practices have been increasingly delegitimized. In response, farmers have adopted the language of farmers' rights to demand greater material recognition of their contributions and better measures to protect their autonomy. This campaign has mixed implications. On one hand, farmers'rights are a unique form of right that may help transform conventions of intellectual property in ways that are better suited for registering and materially encouraging alternative forms of innovation, such as those offered by farming communities. On the other hand, farmers' rights have proved enormously difficult to enact. And by situating farmers'rights alongside easily enacted commercial breeders'rights, the campaign risks further legitimizing the inequities it is responding to.
‘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\]