GRAIN NEWS RELEASE

NEW GLOBAL PUSH FOR RESTRICTIVE SEED LAWS: IMPOSING AGRICULTURAL APARTHEID

GRAIN, 18 July 2005

There is a new phenomena spreading around the world - the spread of
extremely restrictive seed laws. A new series of articles, in the
latest issue of GRAIN's Seedling magazine, has found that many
countries are being pushed into embracing some of the world's most
repressive laws: seed laws.

Back in the 1960s "seed laws" referred to rules governing the
commercialisation of seeds: what materials could be sold on the market
under what conditions. From the 1960s through the 1980s, agencies like
FAO and the World Bank played a very strong role in getting developing
countries to adopt seed laws. The main idea, officially speaking, was
to ensure that only "good quality" planting materials reach farmers in
order to raise productivity and therefore feed growing populations.
However, the marketing rules, that the FAO and the World Bank
effectively pushed, came from Europe and North America, the very place
where the seed industry is in place. And the seed industry produces
seeds by specialised professionals and no longer on the farm by
farmers themselves.

It is clear that these seed laws have very little to do with
protecting farmers at all and a lot to do with creating conditions for
the private seed industry to gain and control markets worldwide. Seed
laws are all about repression. They're about what farmers can't do.

In Asia and Latin America, the laws are being rewritten to accommodate
new trends in the seed industry and the seed trade. This translates to
increased integration with intellectual property rights legislation,
new linkages to biosafety regulations to facilitate the marketing of
genetically-modified (GM) seeds and, in some countries, a scary shift
towards Europe's mandatory approach. In numerous countries, from
Bolivia to India, farmers groups, social movements and NGOs are trying
to get a grip on these new legal changes and sort out appropriate
strategies to work around them.
In Africa, seed industry hacks plus the US and some European
governments are working hard to construct new regional seed markets
based on new regional seed laws. Africa has perhaps least been hit by
seed laws up to now, but these new regional systems could make life
very tough for small scale farmers trying to build or reinforce local
seed autonomy.

In Eastern Europe, many countries are adopting the EU system in the
name of harmonisation and eventual integration in the Union. In
Western Europe, countries are struggling on the one hand to
accommodate the biotech industry and the new policy of coexistence
(between conventional, organic and GM agriculture) and on the other
hand, ironically, pressure to create new legal space for traditional
and local varieties. In many respects, Europe has been hardest hit by
seed laws all these years and the
e are a lot of groups and activists working to pull crop diversity out
of its economic and legal ghetto and into daily farming and food
markets again.

Farmer-controlled seed systems have to thrive if we are to have any
hopes for autonomous, culturally meaningful and socially-supported
forms of agriculture in our different countries. It may seem a given,
with a whopping 70% of the developing world's seed supply coming from
farmers today. Not at all. That 70% is increasingly vulnerable to
full-scale absorption by the global seed industry as we've seen
already happen in Europe, North America, Japan and Australia. That is
the very agenda of the seed laws.

This news release is an extract of the Editorial. Visit
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=337 to read the full text.

The Seedling magazine articles are all available on the GRAIN website:
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=45