Farmers and Others Organize to Preserve Our Right to Breed New Seed Varieties

There is a movement in the United States within the business community to patent life. Americans have known about this for a while. About 20% of the human genome has been claimed by US patents. Many plant varieties are being patented as well by corporations and universities. These patent on seeds allow corporations to limit non-owners from breeding their seeds.

The United States, according to Jack Kloppenburg, Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been an American tradition. His wonderful book First the Seed talks about the long history of independent plant breeding in the United States. Individuals did not start patenting plants or seeds until 1873, when Louis Pasteur patented yeast.The Plant Patent Act was passed in 1930 and in 1975 the first utility patent was issues on a seed. These patents limit the farmers from crossing the material with other varieties to produce new breeds and save the seeds for future years.

But, things are changing in the United States. As more and more farmers are finding that they cannot produce their own new varieties of seeds, they are joining a movement called the Open Source Seed Initiative. The initiative started in 2014 and consists of farmer's who take a pledge that commits the seeds they produce to remain available for others for breeding in the future.

The network of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) is growing. Organizations in the United States (mostly smaller plant breeders), Germany, India and Holland are promoting the concept of open source seed sharing and saving and promoting the pledge among plant breeders and the wider community. These people all contend that the open source idea promotes creativity and competition in business as opposed to limiting it via the patent system.

Monsanto works to preserve genetic diversity because the people at the company understand that their business depends on it Monsanto maintains four seed banks, and Monsanto and other wealthy Americans invest in seed banks, including the Svalbard Seed Bank (the Doomsday Seed Bank) to preserve diversity. The problem with this is that The Gates Foundation is tied to Monsanto through its philanthropy and its hiring of past Monsanto staff. It is troubling that a company that owns almost 25% of seed genetic diversity has a significant amount of control over our living seed material of last resort. See http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/303/seeds/seed-banks for more information.

Right now, there is a limit to how long a patent lasts in the United States of 20 years for seeds. Companies like Monsanto are able to sue small farmers for attempting to violate its patent rights by saving or breeding seeds. Instead of encouraging competition and diversity, the seed patenting process has encouraged the formation of international monopolies and the propogation of lawsuits against smaller breeders. ARFEP is hopeful that the Open Source Seed Initiative can inspire small breeders to grow, breed and preserve their seeds using in situ methods.