Europe’s seeds are being privatised by patents - and it could threaten food security
Europe’s seeds are being privatised by patents - and it could threaten food security
A silent battle is brewing over the control of our food supply's very foundation: seeds.
Europe has one of the most diverse seed industries in the world. In Germany, the Netherlands and France alone, hundreds of small breeders are creating new varieties of cereals, vegetables and legumes.
Relying on decades of careful selection to improve desired traits like yield, disease resistance and flavour, they adapt seeds to local environments through methods like cross-breeding.
This legion of plant breeders help maintain Europe’s biodiversity and ensure that our food supplies stay plentiful. But their work is under growing threat from the patent industry.
Although it’s illegal to patent plants in the EU, those created through technological means are classified as a technical innovation and so can be patented.
This means that small-scale breeders can no longer freely plant these seeds or use them for research purposes without paying licensing fees.
What's the point in making something illegal to patent if you can just side-step it by a technicality and enforce a patent anyway?
If the point was to protect food security, then make it illegal to patent regardless of how the breed was created - sorry if you spent more breeding them artificially, food security for the people should be more important than money.
But if we didn't allow evilcorp to profit off the suffering of others, that would be communism, and as we all know communism is the devil.
That's politics: one side tries to do the right thing and manage to get law written. The other side then hire lawyers to find a way to bypass this law. A judge get to choose who wins until the next law is voted. It means the first law wasn't well written in the first place.
Same just happened in Canada as well. Our feds quietly enacted legislation that allows corpos to own it all. We homestead less than an acre and grow most of our own food. Our seed order price tripped this past year and we don't use anything that is patented, modern GMO's or even F1's. They'll be coming for seed cleaners and savers next.