The Avalon Organic Gardens, Farm, and Ranch Report

A new report from GRAIN* reveals the new lobbying offensive from the global seed industry to make it a crime for farmers to save seeds for the next year’s planting. At least two-thirds of the global crop area is currently planted with farm-saved seed every year. In many developing countries, it represents 80-90 per cent of all seed used, but even in developed countries it commonly accounts for a large share (30-60 per cent). If farmers were legally forced to plant all of this area with commercial seed, it could easily mean a doubling of seed industry turnover, that is, an extra US $20 billion annually all taken out of farmers’ pockets and delivered to transnational giants such as DuPont, Bayer, Syngenta, and Monsanto.

The seed industry has every reason to fear competition from farm-saved seed and more innovative independent breeders. Even individual farmers can often match or beat the performance of commercial varieties by simple on-farm selection. With constantly stronger monopoly rights and increasing consolidation into a few giant conglomerates, seed companies have produced fewer and fewer products of value to farmers. The big strides in yield and resistance improvement were made early in the 20th century, before any monopoly rights were available on seeds. And those improvements came mainly from selecting and crossing the very best of the thousands of farmer varieties which had been developed over centuries, not from any industry-sponsored research.

The failure of commercial plant breeding has left global agriculture badly prepared for the challenges of the near future, such as climate change and the need to wean ourselves off dependence on fossil fuels. It is now time to start rolling back the monopoly privileges of the seed industry, not to strengthen them further.

*An international non-governmental organization (NGO) based in Barcelona, Spain which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge.