NEWS RELEASE

New global push for restrictive seed laws: imposing agricultural apartheid

GRAIN, 18 July 2005

Back in the 1960s "seed laws" referred to rules governing the commercialisation of seeds: what materials could be sold on the market under what conditions. From the 1960s through the 1980s, agencies like FAO and the World Bank played a very strong role in getting developing countries to adopt seed laws. The main idea, officially speaking, was to ensure that only "good quality" planting materials reach farmers in order to raise productivity and therefore feed growing populations. However, the marketing rules, that the FAO and the World Bank effectively pushed, came from Europe and North America, the very place where the seed industry is in place. And the seed industry produces seeds by specialised professionals and no longer on the farm by farmers themselves.

It is clear that these seed laws have very little to do with protecting farmers at all and a lot to do with creating conditions for the private seed industry to gain and control markets worldwide. Seed laws are all about repression. They're about what farmers can't do.

In Asia and Latin America, the laws are being rewritten to accommodate new trends in the seed industry and the seed trade. This translates to increased integration with intellectual property rights legislation, new linkages to biosafety regulations to facilitate the marketing of genetically-modified (GM) seeds and, in some countries, a scary shift towards Europe's mandatory approach. In numerous countries, from Bolivia to India, farmers groups, social movements and NGOs are trying to get a grip on these new legal changes and sort out appropriate strategies to work around them.
In Africa, seed industry hacks plus the US and some European governments are working hard to construct new regional seed markets based on new regional seed laws. Africa has perhaps least been hit by seed laws up to now, but these new regional systems could make life very tough for small scale farmers trying to build or reinforce local seed autonomy.

In Eastern Europe, many countries are adopting the EU system in the name of harmonisation and eventual integration in the Union. In Western Europe, countries are struggling on the one hand to accommodate the biotech industry and the new policy of coexistence (between conventional, organic and GM agriculture) and on the other hand, ironically, pressure to create new legal space for traditional and local varieties. In many respects, Europe has been hardest hit by seed laws all these years and there are a lot of groups and activists working to pull crop diversity out of its economic and legal ghetto and into daily farming and food markets again.

Farmer-controlled seed systems have to thrive if we are to have any hopes for autonomous, culturally meaningful and socially-supported forms of agriculture in our different countries. It may seem a given, with a whopping 70% of the developing world's seed supply coming from farmers today. Not at all. That 70% is increasingly vulnerable to full-scale absorption by the global seed industry as we've seen already happen in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. That is the very agenda of the seed laws.


This news release is an extract of the Editorial. Visit  http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=337 to read the full text.

The Seedling magazine articles are all available on the GRAIN website:  http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=45