It’s too late to turn back the clock in North America or Europe.
But the National Farmers Union is campaigning to try to prevent intellectual property rights from being applied to the seed industry in Africa, Asia and Central America.
“It’s highly unlikely it can be stopped in the North American context,” NFU executive member Terry Boehm said last week.
“But in many other areas of the world it certainly can.”
The NFU is part of a broad coalition of non-governmental organizations that wants to prevent private companies from using patent laws to tighten their grip over the world’s genetic resources.
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The groups held news conferences around the world in late June to publicize their campaign against ongoing international negotiations on trade-related intellectual property rights, or TRIPs. Included in that would be the patenting of biological and microbiological processes.
In an interview after the NFU’s news conference in Saskatoon, Boehm said that while intellectual property rights apply to a broad range of business activities, the issue has extremely serious consequences for agriculture.
“TRIPS and plant breeders’ rights are privatizing the fundamental building blocks of nature and nature itself,” he said.
The NFU and its allies in the campaign say genetic material should be considered the common property of everybody on the planet, and not a commercial commodity to be exploited for profit by powerful corporations.
Boehm said the application of intellectual property rights to seed threatens the biodiversity that is vital to successful farming, especially in harsh climates where self-sufficiency is crucial to survival.
The last thing struggling farmers in Africa or Asia need is to have a commercial monoculture forced on them by multinational agribusinesses that own and control seed supplies.
Boehm said farmers in Western Canada should support the international campaign because they’ve seen what plant breeders’ rights have done.
A publicly funded research system resulted in the widespread availability of inexpensive varieties that benefitted all farmers and society in general. It has been replaced by a plant breeders’ rights system in which small independent seed growers have been driven to the point of extinction, seed prices have increased and private companies make ever-increasing profits.
“It’s been a net negative,” said Boehm.
He said the trend toward genetically modified crops has increased the pressure from industry for protection through intellectual property rights, but governments are failing to address the liability issues that will result from their wholesale introduction.
