“Free Trade” Agreements Are
Criminalising Farmers’ Seeds for the Benefit of Multinational Corporations, Posted on November
19, 2014 Written
by globalresearch.ca
FA Note: GRAIN
is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support
small farmers and social movements in their struggles for
community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.
What could be more
routine than saving seeds from one season to the next? After all, that is
how we grow crops on our farms and in our gardens. Yet from Guatemala to
Ghana, from Mozambique to Malaysia, this basic practice is being turned into
a criminal offence, so that half a dozen large multinational corporations
can turn seeds into private property and make money from them.
But people are fighting
back and in several countries popular mobilisations are already forcing
governments to put seed privatisation plans on hold.
GRAIN has produced
an updated dataset Trade
agreements privatising biodiversity (plain text) on how so-called
free trade agreements are privatising seeds across the world.
Guatemala’s trade agreement with the US
obliges it to adhere to the UPOV Convention. But popular
resistance forced the government to repeal a national law passed for this
purpose.
Trade agreements have
become a tool of choice for governments, working with corporate lobbies,
to push new rules to restrict farmers’ rights to work with seeds. Until some
years ago, the most important of these was the World Trade Organization’s (WTO)
agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
Adopted in 1994, TRIPS was, and still is, the first
international treaty to establish global standards for “intellectual property”
rights over seeds.1 The goal is to ensure that companies like Monsanto
or Syngenta, which spend money on plant breeding and genetic engineering,
can control what happens to the seeds they produce by preventing farmers
from re-using them – in much the same way as Hollywood or Microsoft try to stop
people from copying and sharing films or software by putting legal and technological
locks on them.
But seeds are not
software. The very notion of “patenting life” is hugely contested. For this
reason, the WTO agreement was a kind of global
compromise between governments. It says that countries may exclude plants
and animals (other than micro-organisms) from their patent laws, but they must
provide some form of intellectual property protection over plant varieties,
without specifying how to do that.
In Costa Rica, the fight against the Central American Free
Trade Agreement was very much a fight to prevent the patenting of the
country’s unique wealth of biodiversity and against UPOV
– the Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties.
Trade agreements
negotiated outside the WTO, especially those initiated
by powerful economies of the global North, tend to go much further. They
often require signatory countries to patent plants or animals, or to follow
the rules of the Geneva-based Union for the Protection of New Plant Varieties
(UPOV) that provide patent-like rights over crop varieties.
Whether in the form of patent laws or UPOV, these rules generally
make it illegal for farmers to save, exchange, sell or modify seeds they
save from so-called protected varieties.2 In fact, in 1991 the UPOV
convention was modified to give even stronger monopoly powers to agribusiness
companies at the expense of small and indigenous farming communities.
This 1991 version of UPOV now gets widely promoted through
trade deals.
Onslaught
of FTAs
The North America
Free Trade Agreement – signed by Mexico, Canada and the US,
at about the same time TRIPS was being finalised – was one of
the first trade deals negotiated outside the multilateral arena to carry
with it the tighter seed privatisation noose. It obliged Mexico to join the
UPOV club of countries giving exclusive rights to seed
companies to stop farmers from recycling and reusing corporate seeds.
This set a precedent for all US bilateral trade agreements
that followed, while the European Union, the European Free Trade Association
and Japan also jumped on the same idea.3
A nonstop process of
diplomatic and financial pressure to get countries to privatise seeds
“through the back door” (these trade deals are negotiated in secret) has been
going on since then. The stakes are high for the seed industry. Globally,
just 10 companies control 55% of the commercial seed market.4
But for these corporations,
that market share is still not enough. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America,
some 70–80% of the seeds farmers use are farm-saved seeds, whether from their
own farms or from neighbours or nearby communities. In these unconquered
territories, the agribusiness giants want to replace seed saving with seed
markets and take control of those markets. To facilitate this, they demand
legal protections from governments to create and enforce corporate monopoly
rights on seeds. This is where free trade agreements come in as a perfect
vehicle to force countries to change their laws.
Latest trends
GRAIN has been tracking
how trade deals signed outside the multilateral system are coercing countries
to adopt the industry’s wish-list of intellectual property rights for seeds,
and ratchet up global standards in that process, since 15 years. A recent
update of our dataset shows that this trend is not letting up. In fact, there
are worrisome signs on the horizon.
The most important
recent gains for Monsanto, Dupont, Limagrain and Syngenta – the world’s top
seed companies – have come from new trade deals accepted by Latin American
states. In 2006, the US (home to Monsanto and Dupont)
closed major deals with Peru and Colombia forcing both countries to adopt UPOV
1991. The EFTA states (home to Syngenta) did the same in 2008 and
the EU (home to Limagrain) in 2012.5 In Central America, a
similar pattern occurred. The US secured a very powerful
Central America Free Trade Agreement in 2007, forcing all countries to
adhere to UPOV 1991. EFTA did the same
last year.
March Against Monsanto in Accra, Ghana – Under a clause
included in an interim Economic Parternship Agreement concluded with the EU,
Ghana’s government will have to negotiate rules on intellectual property,
including traditional knowledge and genetic resources.
An important step
towards stronger proprietary seed markets was recently taken in Africa.
After ten years of talks, Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) were concluded
between the EU and sub-Saharan African states in
2014. Most of them “only” liberalise trade in goods for now, but also contain
a commitment to negotiate common intellectual property standards with
Brussels. The expectation is that those standards will be based on what the
Caribbean states already agreed to in their 2008 EPA:
an obligation to at least consider joining UPOV.
This is significant because until now African states have been under no
obligation to adopt UPOV as a standard, and actually
tried to come up with their own systems of plant variety
protection.6 And while it’s true that African entities like the anglophone
African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO)
and the francophone African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI)
are already joining UPOV, under the EU
trade deals, countries themselves would be the ones to join. Further towards
the horizon, Africa is harmonising within itself as its subregional trade
blocs merge and unite to form a single continental free trade zone, supposedly
by 2017. This is expected to bring with it an internal harmonisation of
intellectual property laws across the continent, likely tightening the
noose even further.
The Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) agreement is possibly the
scariest FTA under negotiation right now in terms of what it
may do to farmers’ rights to control seeds in Asia and the Pacific. This is
because the US, which is leading the talks with
11 other Pacific Rim countries, is playing hardball. Leaked negotiating
text from May 2014 shows the US calling not only for UPOV
1991 to be applied in all TPP states but also for the outright
patenting of plants and animals. We don’t yet know whether these demands will
also appear in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
currently being negotiated between the US
and the EU, as the text remains inaccessible to the public.
While the extent of
what has to be privatised expands, so do the penalties for disrespecting
these norms. Under numerous FTAs, countries like the US
require that farmers who infringe on these new intellectual property rights
on seeds face punishment under criminal law instead of civil law. In some
cases, like the recently concluded EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and
Trade Agreement (CETA), the mere suspicion of
infringement could see a farmer’s assets seized or have their bank accounts
frozen.7
Big battles heating up
Solidarity march in Melbourne, Australia: even Colombians
far from home were shocked to learn how the US
and EU trade deals have pushed Bogotá to criminalise farmers’
seeds.
The good news is that
social movements are not taking this sitting down. They are becoming very
active, vocal, bold and organised about this. In 2013, Colombians from all
walks of life were shaken up when they saw firsthand how US
and European FTAs could result in their own government violently destroying
tonnes of seeds saved by farmers who did not know what the new rules were. The
outrage, breaking out in the midst of a massive national agrarian strike,
was so strong that the government actually agreed to suspend the law temporarily
and re-examine the issue directly with farmers’ representatives.8
In 2014, it was
Guatemala’s turn to be rocked when the general public realised that the government
was pushing through the adoption of UPOV 1991 without proper
debate because of trade deals like CAFTA.9People were furious
that indigenous communities were not consulted as is required, especially
when the purpose of the law – ultimately – is to replace indigenous seeds
with commercial seeds from foreign companies like Monsanto or Syngenta.
After months of pressure, the government backed down and repealed the
law.10 But – as in Colombia – this retreat is only temporary while
other measures will be looked at. In yet other parts of Latin America, like
in Chile and Argentina, new laws to implement UPOV
91, often dubbed “Monsanto Laws”, are also being intensely and successfully
resisted by social movements.
In Africa too, waves
of public protest are rising against the plant variety protection regimes
which countries are now going into. In Ghana, a vibrant campaign is under way
to stop the country from adopting UPOV 1991 legislation.11
September 2013 protest against FTAs: in Thailand, popular
movements are resisting the possibility that talks over a free trade agreement
between Thailand and the EU will result in UPOV
being imposed on the nation’s farmers.
Elsewhere, civil
society networks like the broad based Alliance for Food Sovereignty in
Africa are filing appeals to stop ARIPO from adopting UPOV-based
legislation and joining the union.12
Corporate interest
groups have pushed too far trying to privatise what people consider a commons.
This is not limited to seeds. The same process has been going on with land,
minerals, hydrocarbons, water, knowledge, the internet, even important
microorganisms, like avian flu a few years ago or the Ebola virus today. People
are fighting back to stop these things falling under the exclusive control
of a few corporations or defence ministries. A good way to take part in
this battle is to join the campaigns to stop important new trade deals like TTIP,
CETA, TPP and the EPAs – and to get
old ones like the US and European deals with Mexico,
Central America, Colombia or Chile rescinded. Trade deals are where a lot of
these rules do get written and that is where they should be erased.
For a closer look at
the status of trade agreements that impose seed privatisation, download GRAIN’s
November 2014 dataset, “Trade agreements privatising biodiversity” Trade
agreements privatising biodiversity (plain text).
Going further
GRAIN, “Seed
laws in Latin America: the offensive continues, so does popular resistance”, December 2013. (EN,
ES, FR)
Biodiversidad, “Leyes de semillas y otros pesares”, September
2014. (ES only)
Daily updates on
trade deals at http://bilaterals.org or @bilaterals_org or https://www.facebook.com/bilaterals.org (EN,
ES, FR)
Notes
1 “Intellectual
property” is a government enforced monopoly right. It serves to ensure that
people pay for the right to use something for a certain period of time, so
that whoever invented it can recoup his or her investment. “Plant variety”
means seeds which will grow into a specific kind of plant with specific characteristics.
2 Under the UPOV system, farmers can sometimes save seeds from protected varieties to use them again. It depends on which version of the UPOV Convention a country signs and whether the government exercises this option. Sometimes it is restricted to farmers’ replanting the seeds on their own farm or to only certain crops or to payment of a licence. Under the patent system, it is simply illegal to use patented seeds without paying for them – even if a bird drops them onto your field!
3 EFTA is composed of Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
4 ETC Group, “Who owns nature?”, 2008.
5 Ecuador is also now negotiating with the EU, based on the text signed with Colombia and Peru.
6 For example, the Organisation of African Unity drafted its own model law on plant variety protection based on community rights.
7 See National Farmers’ Union, “CETA + Bill C-18 = too much power for seed companies”, June 2014.
8 GRAIN, “Colombia farmers’ uprising puts the spotlight on seeds”, September 2013.
9 Perhaps not very visible to the public eye was the 2013 EFTA-Central America FTA, which makes the same demands as CAFTA.
10 See EFE, “Guatemala repeals plant breeder rights law”, 5 September 2014.
11 See the websites of Food Sovereignty Ghana and Panafricanist International.
12 Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, “AFSA appeals to ARIPO, AU and UNECA for protection of farmers’ rights & right to food”, 2 July 2014.
2 Under the UPOV system, farmers can sometimes save seeds from protected varieties to use them again. It depends on which version of the UPOV Convention a country signs and whether the government exercises this option. Sometimes it is restricted to farmers’ replanting the seeds on their own farm or to only certain crops or to payment of a licence. Under the patent system, it is simply illegal to use patented seeds without paying for them – even if a bird drops them onto your field!
3 EFTA is composed of Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
4 ETC Group, “Who owns nature?”, 2008.
5 Ecuador is also now negotiating with the EU, based on the text signed with Colombia and Peru.
6 For example, the Organisation of African Unity drafted its own model law on plant variety protection based on community rights.
7 See National Farmers’ Union, “CETA + Bill C-18 = too much power for seed companies”, June 2014.
8 GRAIN, “Colombia farmers’ uprising puts the spotlight on seeds”, September 2013.
9 Perhaps not very visible to the public eye was the 2013 EFTA-Central America FTA, which makes the same demands as CAFTA.
10 See EFE, “Guatemala repeals plant breeder rights law”, 5 September 2014.
11 See the websites of Food Sovereignty Ghana and Panafricanist International.
12 Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, “AFSA appeals to ARIPO, AU and UNECA for protection of farmers’ rights & right to food”, 2 July 2014.
Related Posts
-
Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/11/free-trade-agreements-criminalising-farmers-seeds-benefit-multinational-corporations/#more-3799
No comments:
Post a Comment