Plant patents sow fear among small growers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is terrible for diversity because as the climate change get worse, some tomato varieties might thrive better than others in heat, or drought, or have different disease resistance... but because they are illegal to sell the seeds it's difficult to keep the different species alive and we could run into trouble in the future when we realise these government approved varieties don't work in warmer or colder climates.
There is some valid reasoning for the law... because you don't want a farmer to purchase 100,000 bad seeds and have his whole yield fail on his farm.
Those laws may not exist in other countries but the patents could stop diversity in the same way, but long term it's important to keep these weird varieties of seeds around for diversity.
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...
Will the right honorable gentleman next propose that we create a list of twelve permitted stocks, so that an investor will not purchase 100,000 risky shares only for the company to fail?
[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330...
(that the UK has been free to ignore since Feb 2020 and legislate however they wish)
I don't know how the directive came about, but it smells like heavy commercial lobbying.
The UK government has been too busy campaigning against itself since Brexit, to reverse the UK implementation. It's high time.
There are several companies that sell 'heritage' seeds, and they exist as a seed swapping 'club'. A penny of your purchase is for club membership. Here is a rather fine example scroll to 'Our Seed Club'. Lovely company to deal with too
That for sure can't be the reason, insurance exists, and the market exists, next year nobody would buy those seeds. Also since there's so many types and farms it's not like whole country production would go to zero for that year.
The negative effects are, that the selected characteristics not necessarily are what is good for humans, i.e. taste and nutritional values.
And it leads to genetic impoverishment.
The positive effects dominate only some decades. We are now in a phase, where the negative effects begin to get dominant. It will cost a lot of effort and money to alter course.
Well that depends on whether there is any evidence at all to support that the current procedures actually help protect against that. Is there any such evidence or are you just baselessly speculating?
> Goldman Sachs Asks 'Is Curing Patients A Sustainable Business Model?'
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/goldman-sachs-curing-pa...
It's a matter of gatekeeping health for a profit and how quickly it becomes infinitely corrupt. We're allowing society to degrade to protect the profit.
Your statement isn't really saying anything. "infinitely corrupt"? What does that even mean?
The companies leading this charge are global, not just US-based.
It’s a mistake to try to pin this on one country.
Agribusiness companies are deploying digital on farms everywhere in the world in a very clear effort to gather data on all aspects of farming: soil health, labor, weather, inputs, etc, and specifically including genetics on the world’s most critical crop seeds and livestock. They are quietly vacuuming up and locking up the knowledge of farmers.
All the data then gets to be owned and controlled by corporations, analyzed with AI and proprietary algorithms, and then sold back to farmers with “prescriptions” for how to farm and which products to buy. This all happens with very little transparency or explanation.
The massively hyper-consolidated food and agriculture systems is a massive issue and I don’t think people realize just how extensive it’s become in just the last 5-10 years.
But to call it a “US sickness” denies the very global nature of the companies doing the work. It’s not US specific unfortunately, though certain there is plenty of US company involvement.
Of course I may be misremembering, anyone have a citation?
[0] Bible.
And what would the legal status be if the new crop becomes the dominant species in the wild?
and, "dominant species in the wild": Domestic crops are so pampered, so dependent on our adding nutrients, keeping predators and competitors at bay, that they stand very little chance of surviving long enough in the wild to be able to propagate. Dominant species? Not a chance.
Are you talking about this case? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
In that case the farmer was also specifically selecting for the contaminated seeds. That makes the "his crops got accidentally contaminated and monsanto sued him for it" narrative very misleading.
>As established in the original Federal Court trial decision, Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[5] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. Schmeiser then performed a test by applying Roundup to an additional 3 acres (12,000 m2) to 4 acres (16,000 m2) of the same field. He found that 60% of the canola plants survived. At harvest time, Schmeiser instructed a farmhand to harvest the test field. That seed was stored separately from the rest of the harvest, and used the next year to seed approximately 1,000 acres (4 km²) of canola.
https://www.uspto.gov/patents/basics/apply/plant-patent#head...
https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/formats/plant-patents/patents
Europe:
https://www.epo.org/en/news-events/press-centre/fact-sheet/4....)
> So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner.
> "They are essentially just doing obsessive-compulsive descriptions of plants and laying claims to those traits, so if anyone else has those traits, they are in violation"
It's a sick system, perpetuated by sick people
There’s plenty of universities, cooperatives, and passionate growers who have developed crops and seeds in the past and will surely continue to do so in the future.
The patent system is useful to address very specific market failures in very specialized industries where the above systems fail, not to turn the whole world into a rental unit.
The patent system doesn't prevent those entities from developing their own crops and releasing it for free.
When a company is granted a utility patent on a type of seed, it doesn’t just own the seed. It also owns its traits (color, texture, disease resistance, the way it was grown), future generations of that seed and all of the rights to research.
So, if a plant breeder like Morton develops his own variety of lettuce and the lettuce matches any of the traits of a patented variety – whether it be color, the curliness of the leaf or a trait that makes it conducive to a particular climate – the breeder is technically in violation of patent law and risks getting sued by the patent owner.
So according to the article, the patent system actually does place heavy restrictions on research in this area.
First off, a year or two before the patents on a variety expire, they simple patent some other feature of the variety. Problem solved (from their perspective).
Second, several years before the patent expires on a variety they'll have a "new, improved" variety (often bred from the first) that their sales-people push hard onto farmers so that by the time the patent expires the variety basically has very little/no commercial value - it's been superseded by the "improved" variety in commercial use.