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Africa: Stealth Assault on African Seeds
AfricaFocus Bulletin
January 19, 2016 (160119)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"There is a renewed and stronger assault on seed ... based on legal
systems that permit exclusive rights over seeds on the spurious
contention that plant varieties were 'discovered' and improved on.
But these 'discovered' varieties are the product of the whole
history of collective human improvements and maintenance carried out
by peasants. To assert exclusive rights over the whole on the basis
of small adjustments is nothing short of outright theft." - SouthSouth
Dialogue, Durban, South Africa, November 2015
In rich countries, debate about industrialized agriculture often
focuses on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and the safety and
transparency consequences for consumers. In developing countries
with large sectors of peasant farmers, this is only a small part of
a larger debate on the future of agriculture, pitting multinational
companies and large-scale investors against the autonomy and rights
of peasant farmers. Land grabbing is highly visible, and has
attracted much international attention. Less visible, and
potentially even more damaging, is the appropriation of rights to
seeds, fueled not only by the companies themselves but also by a
concerted campaign to erode farmers' traditional rights to seeds in
favor of patents by multinational corporations. This is a issue not
only for GMOs, but also for other seeds produced by other breeding
technologies.
The debate is filled with acronyms, as well as the claim that
"scientific" agriculture will provide food and development
benefiting the peasants as well. And the campaign to change laws and
erode traditional rights is unrelenting. It is based on the
Universal Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV
91), which works for the privatization of seeds by imposing
intellectual property rights on plant varieties.
In recent years a drive to extend these laws on "plant variety
protection" in African and other developing countries has rapidly
accelerated.
This Africa Focus Bulletin contains a recent declaration by groups
resisting this drive, and excerpts from a brief article by Dr. Carol
Thompson, noting the apartheid-like differential effect of these
laws. Also included (just below) are linked to other essential
resources on this issue.
For a recent series of short articles featuring interviews with
African grassroots leaders (mainly women), visit
http://otherworldsarepossible.org / direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/hjhe756
For global overviews of the issue, see
Two longer related reports with additional background specifically
on African seeds include:
For talking points and previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on
agriculture, food sovereignty, and related issues, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/intro-ag.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++
Declaration on Plant Variety Protection and Seed Laws from the
South-South Dialogue
Durban, South Africa
29 November 2015
http://www.acbio.org.za - direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/j5uxvkc
We, participants at the South-South Dialogue, are members of peasant
and civil society organisations and concerned individuals from
Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe working on issues of food and
seed sovereignty, peasants' control of seed production and exchange,
and biodiversity. We gathered in Durban, South Africa 27-29 November
2015 to share information and knowledge, and to come to a common
understanding on seed and plant variety protection (PVP) policy and
laws and strategies for resistance and alternatives in the global
South.
We are working in our countries and regions to advance the ongoing
global struggle for socially just and ecologically sustainable
societies, in which farming households and communities have control
and decision-making power over the production and distribution of
food and seed.
Human societies and the seeds we use to produce the food that
sustains us have grown symbiotically over millennia. Seeds emerged
from nature and have been diversified, conserved, nurtured and
enhanced through processes of human experimentation, discovery and
innovation throughout this time. Seeds have been improved by means
of traditional and cultural knowledge transmitted from generation to
generation. Seeds are therefore the collective heritage for people
serving humanity. Peasants and indigenous peoples have always been
the custodians and guardians of the collective knowledge embedded in
the wide diversity of seed that has enabled the development of
humankind as a species.
However, today capitalist greed poses fundamental threats to the
continued conservation, reproduction and use of the biological
diversity nurtured for all this time. The forced enclosure of land
and other natural resources and its capture and conversion into
private property was one disastrous step. This has caused and
continues to cause social dislocation and displacement, damaging the
social fabric of human societies, severing the connection between
people and the land, and consolidating social, collectively-produced
wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.
There is a renewed and stronger assault on seed, agricultural
biodiversity heritage and the knowledge associated with these.
Related law and policy making processes are already far advanced in
Europe, the United States and other parts of the world and are being
imposed on our countries in the South through multilateral and
bilateral trade and investment agreements. They are based on legal
systems that permit exclusive rights over seeds on the spurious
contention that plant varieties were 'discovered' and improved on.
But these 'discovered' varieties are the product of the whole
history of collective human improvements and maintenance carried out
by peasants. To assert exclusive rights over the whole on the basis
of small adjustments is nothing short of outright theft.
Efforts to expand this expropriation to the global South are being
pursued aggressively by multinational seed and life sciences
corporations and their cohorts in state and multilateral
institutions. This takes the form of a coordinated political and
technocratic crusade to impose uniform and draconian laws and
regulations in favour of intellectual property (IP) rights such as
plant variety protection (PVP) for private interests, the
proliferation of genetically modified (GM) seeds, and exclusive
recognition and marketing of seed and plant varieties that pass
through breeding and production systems tightly controlled by
economic elites.
There are no benefits for peasant and farming households and
communities, or for society in general, from these developments. In
a few short decades - just a small fraction of the time humans have
been engaged in industrial agriculture - this enclosure of the
collective seed heritage has spread virulently across the globe. The
historical practices of context-specific peasant-managed seed
systems we have relied on are vilified, denigrated as being backward
and obsolete, and criminalised. Farmers are taken to court and
imprisoned for maintaining the biological base as a living system
while seed and food corporations make huge profits legitimised by
seed and IP laws.
The result is the alarming erosion of agricultural biodiversity and
related knowledge, and a deepening threat to the sustainable use of
the genetic base, and consequently to food production and ecological
balance, and to humanity. Current seed and IP laws violate the ethos
of sharing between farmers, which is the backbone of peasant farming
systems, seed and people's sovereignty and the basic human right to
food.
We cannot stand by passively and watch this legalised dispossession
and destruction. We are compelled to resist. We declare our
commitment to work in alliance with one another, with peasant and
indigenous peoples' movements, and with other likeminded civil
society organisations and individuals, to fight the spread of this
aggressive and violent system of domination on the basis of
autonomy, collective self-organisation, cooperation, sharing,
solidarity and mutual respect.
We declare our principled opposition to any form of IP on life
forms, seeds and related information or exclusive rights to their
use. We reject genetic modification and other current and emerging
proprietary technologies in agriculture as these technologies are
built on the disintegration of holistic farming systems, the
exclusion of farmers from processes of plant breeding and natural
resource management, and the control of seeds and planting material
in the hands of corporate and political elites.
We reject the imposition of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on
its country members, through the Trade Related aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, to adopt rules
allowing the privatization of seeds and related knowledge. We reject
the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of
Plants (UPOV) type laws and other intellectual property regulation
on seeds and plant varieties. It is also unacceptable that bilateral
free trade agreements impose on Southern countries intellectual
property measures that go beyond the provisions of the WTO.
We are opposed to laws dealing with the marketing and certification
of seed. These new seed laws undermine peasant seed systems that
have been developed locally over generations of farmers and are
geared towards creating massively increased private sector
participation in seed trade. In addition, these laws promote only
one type of seed breeding. The entire orientation of these seed laws
is geared towards genetically uniform, commercially bred varieties
in terms of seed quality control and variety registration. What is
very clear is that these laws criminalise the marketing of farmers'
varieties. The ultimate aim of these laws is to facilitate new
markets for commercial seed companies and the occupation by
multinationals in the seed sector in the global south and displace
and criminalise peasant seed systems.
We oppose the fragmentation of genetic information and the divorce
of this information from physical resources through the Global
Information Systems (GIS) such as DivSeek (a global information
system on genetic sequencing and related knowledge for seed,
proposed by the World Bank), since there is the possibility of the
use of this information expediting the further privatisation of
seeds through international legal systems.
We will fight for laws, policies and public programmes that support
and strengthen peasants and communities to continue with their
diverse and context-specific practices of plant breeding, selection,
production and distribution. We will fight for a more responsible
role for public sector activities based on ongoing democratic,
participatory and transparent processes of engagement with citizens
and inhabitants of our countries and regions. We will continue to
defend our rights to produce, use, exchange and sell all seed and
planting material. We will work to recover, maintain and expand the
use of native and local seed, and the revival of diverse food
cultures as the most effective routes to protect biodiversity. We
recognise the irreducible diversity that can only be managed through
peasant seed production systems and maintained by peasants as
breeders and users of seed.
We believe seeds are the people's heritage in the service of
humanity that should be managed collectively, democratically and
sustainably. We reaffirm the centrality of agricultural producers as
the primary stewards of our collective genetic resources, especially
women peasants who continue to play a direct role in the maintenance
and enhancement of these resources. We commit to supporting peasant
households and communities in their stewardship, and to building
links with allies, wherever we may find them, to advance the cause
of food and seed sovereignty.
Organisations
Acción Ecológica - Ecuador, Acción por la Biodiversidad - Argentina,
African Centre for Biodiversity - South Africa, Articulación
Nacional de Agroecología/Grupo de Trabajo en Biodiversidad,
Asociación Nacional para el Fomento de la Agricultura Ecológica -
ANAFAE- Honduras, Commons for EcoJustice - Malawi, Earthlife Africa
Durban, Fahamu Africa, Farmers' Seed Network - China, GRAIN, Growth
Partners Africa, Grupo Semillas - Colombia, JINUKUN - COPAGEN,
Cotonou, Benin, Kenya Food Rights Alliance, Movimiento de Pequeños
Agricultores (MPA) - Brasil, Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana,
PELUM Association Zimbabwe, Red de Agrobiodiversidad en la Zona
Semiárida de Minas Gerais - Brasil, Red de Coordinación en
Biodiversidad - Costa Rica, Red Nacional para la defensa de la
Soberanía Alimentaria en Guatemala, REDSAG - Guatemala, Red por una
América Latina Libre de Transgénicos Swissaid Guinea-Bissau Zimbabwe
Smallholder Organic Farmers Forum (ZIMSOFF)
South-South Dialogue Participants (list available in original
document)
Apartheid Seed Law
Carol B. Thompson
Pambazuka News, June 3, 2015
[Excerpts only: for full text and references with explicit
comparisons to apartheid laws, see the original text at
http://www.pambazuka.net/en/category.php/features/94834]
[Carol Thompson is a professor emerita at Northern Arizona
University, a member of AGRA-Watch in Seattle, Washington, and coauthor
with Andrew Mushita of Biopiracy of Biodiversity: Global
Exchange as Enclosure, which was featured in AfricaFocus after its
publication in 2007.]
Although political apartheid was dismantled by the 1994 election of
President Nelson Mandela, a new form of economic apartheid is now
stalking the entire African continent.
This new economic apartheid refers to the seed convention known as
UPOV 91 (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of
Plants), advanced by the European Union, the United States, and the
World Bank presuming to protect plant breeders' rights under the
World Trade Organization. The EU is requiring its implementation by
African governments as a prerequisite for trading under the Economic
Partnership Agreements (EPAs), scheduled for 2016.
UPOV91 gives exclusive proprietary rights to plant breeders, who
work in modern laboratories full of expensive equipment. The
convention gives these breeders, or their corporate sponsors,
private ownership over a new strain, extending property rights
beyond the seed, to the full plant, and to "essentially derived"
products (e.g., flour from wheat).
To obtain this legal ownership, the new variety must be distinct,
uniform, and stable (DUS), characteristics not found in farmers'
newly bred varieties after their experimentation in the fields. It
means that farmers' new varieties are not protected by the UPOV
convention and remain free for the taking.
Farmer breeders do not desire seed traits that are highly stable,
for they are looking for nuances in traits in order to choose the
next seeds for breeding. As one farmer asked, "what do they mean by
'heritage seed'? Aren't the seeds changing all the time?"
During the 20 years of proprietary rights for breeders of DUS
varieties, no one can exchange, use, experiment or save the seed
without permission, a prohibition eradicating farmers' rights to
work with any seeds. Because farmers have cultivated diverse food
crops over millennia, two international laws protect farmers' rights
(International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and
Agriculture and the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological
Diversity). For African governments to incorporate UPOV91 into
national laws, they would have to violate these two treaties.
Farmers' experimentation and freely sharing involve not only seeds
but the indigenous knowledge embedded in them. African farmers, for
example, know the hundreds of varieties of millets and sorghums or
teff, grains more nutritious than maize or rice or wheat, and ones
that are regaining interest on the continent because they grow well
in semi-arid conditions, while the more familiar maize varieties are
not standing up to climate change aridity. Smallholder African
farmers grow 20-25 crops on one hectare, sharing knowledge�sometimes
formally in farmer field schools but also daily in informal
ways�about which variety grows best under another crop, where to
place the various crops in terms of moisture percolation in the
small field, and especially, variable planting times in case the
rains come late, or start early. Farmers know the nutrition value of
their biodiverse crops, encouraging children and mothers to partake
more of one (e.g., pearl and finger millets) than of another
(cassava). And nutrition includes feeding the living soil with
leguminous plants rotated with grain crops.
Why would anyone want to destroy farmers' experimentation and
knowledge? For the same reason apartheid reigned too long: it is
profitable. UPOV91 offers another way to privatize a living
organism, accomplished more easily than the difficult job of
enforcing a patent across the globe.
[The following comparisons make clear the parallel to apartheid
laws, in establishing unequal rights to access to resources that are
essential for human survival.]
Segregation with inferiority
UPOV91 is trying to establish, by law, the inferior status of
smallholder farmers who breed and do scientific experiments in the
field. It legitimizes the corporate plant breeders' entitlement and
presumed superiority. The normative law translates back into profit
for the corporations benefiting from PVP - plant variety protection.
This constructed distinction between two different types of breeding
becomes a "ritual of truth".
Aesthetics of segregation
UPOV91 legitimizes the view that "real plant breeders" wear white
coats and work in a sparkling laboratory with the latest
instruments, while projecting that farmer breeders working in the
soil are inferior. Because they cannot produce DUS (distinct,
uniform, stable) seeds, they are not breeders. The Gates
Foundation's Program for African Seed Systems (PASS) call farmers'
seeds "weak" and "recycled", "used for decades". Like apartheid
benches "for whites only" in the parks and on the beaches, only a
breeder of DUS seeds can sit on the laboratory stool as a recogn1zed
seed breeder; farmer breeders do not qualify.
Legal enforcement of apartheid
The pass laws, restricting the movement of Africans at all times,
became a core impetus for organ1zing against apartheid from the
Defiance Campaign (1952) through "making the townships ungovernable"
(1980s). Any "non-white" without a pass could be detained for 90
days, or more, without trial or notification of any lawyer.
Farmer breeders will not be summarily detained, but Canada has
already made violation of its UPOV-based law a criminal act, not a
civil offense. The U.S. courts have upheld Monsanto's allegations
against hundreds of farmers that they stole a "Monsanto gene", when
most often, pollen carried by wind fertilized the farmers' crops.
With these precedents, the economic apartheid of UPOV91 will most
likely be strictly enforced by the courts.
Resistance
Civil society and farmers across the African continent are
organizing against UPOV91, but the threat of the looming European
trade agreements (EPAs) remains. Just as civil society resistance in
the North changed the context for domestic apartheid, the
international community needs to voice and organize rejection of
this apartheid seed law.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization recognizes two seed
systems: the formal one and farmers', because all breeders are
essential to cultivate new food varieties in this time of climate
change. Further, farmers are more advanced breeders because their
new seeds are already "field tested", whereas laboratory-bred seeds
often fail during field trials, not expressing the traits desired.
Let us not allow UPOV to gain any "sensibility of normalcy" in
segregating and denigrating farmer seed breeders:
The international community's vociferous and sustained rejection of
this new economic apartheid would protect the future of food for us
all.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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