Comment by k4runa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by k4runa | Hacker News Reader

I spent some time working on a seed swapping startup idea a couple years ago, and it's a fascinating topic. In the UK there is also a law which states you can't sell seeds unless it's registered [1], and out of maybe 4000 tomato varieties the government has approved only a handful.

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...

>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.

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?

Well, the government ordered the SEC to have a look. It’s not like the stock market is free capitalism.

This is basically want public equity markets are. You have to be an "accredited investor" (the only requirement is having a lot of money) to invest in all the extra risky things.

That's a US thing. In the UK there's a KYC type form you fill out, self-certifying that you know what you're doing. And then you can trade CFDs, which are illegal in the US accredited or not. (Or not approved by regulators I suppose I mean, I assume professional US desks trade them OTC 'in' Europe. But I think probably European brokers even can't market them to or allow trades by US retail customers?)

The US has options and futures markets

Yes, contracts for difference are neither.

They are very similar. They were different when options and futures are settled by delivery of the underlying. Without, that not so much.

It is a law, but one for which there is a simple work around, thankfully.

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

https://www.realseeds.co.uk/terms.html

Note: If you're thinking of dealing with Real Seeds this year, get in early - they produce limited amounts of seed, and they do sell out.

These kinds of laws are literally inhumane. In this case, I strongly believe the government should be ignored or outright defied. Spread your seeds.

I agree, civil disobedience is the correct thing to do here.

That's actually an European directive, and each member state has its own adjacent laws, such as Germany [1]. The German seed protection laws and authority is pretty old, predating the EU - the founding year is 1953 [2].

[1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/saatverkg_1985/BJNR016330...

[2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundessortenamt

EU Directive*

(that the UK has been free to ignore since Feb 2020 and legislate however they wish)

I was furious when this directive was implemented in UK law. The only plant/seed varieties that could be traded were those on an official list, whose contents would inevitably be dominated by a few huge companies.

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 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

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.

Such laws exist for animals, too. They have the fast effect, that within a few reproduction cycles after the introduction of the law, the agriculture of a whole country (or like in the case of the EU a whole super-country) concentrates on the production of species with some defined positive characteristics, predominantly yield.

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.

As a layman putting zero effort into looking at this law, is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere? I mean more than what already happens.

> is there no validity in the reasoning that letting commercial interests sell any kinds of seeds can lead to crises with invasive species everywhere?

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?

Of course it's UK. The longer I live here the more I find out this country is like the North Korea of western civilization.

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