Yesterday the EU Court of Justice made a ruling in the Kokopelli case. I posted about this earlier here.
It’s not great news I’m afraid.
I’ll leave the full interpretation to others out there, but on the surface Kokopelli seems to have lost most of their arguments.
The good news is that farmers cannot themselves categorically be prevented from growing saving and selling their own seeds — but this is not really completely clear in the ruling. This would appear to legalize what companies like Kokopelli do, but not make it much more likely traditional varieties will become more widely grown or slow the erosion of agricultural biodiversity in Europe.
This is perhaps a small step in the right direction, but far from a complete scrapping of the DUS related marketing rules that’s needed.
The fight goes on!
