Due to come into force Jan 2021, and replace the existing organic legislation, if anything the new EU Organic Regulation is a step backwards. Together with the CBD, the red tape will be too much except for large or established businesses.
A meeting took place in the EU Parliament on 16 October 2018 that confirms this. Other than watching this meeting over the Internet, I haven’t been following this legislation, so I may be missing some details.
The EU already has seed legislation that dates back to WWII. Many other countries, like the US, Australia and New Zealand don’t have any comparable legislation. In these places, seeds are only regulated according to rules on packaging and phytosanitary issues. The EU has a well established seed industry, that seeks to keep it’s dominance and destroy competition. It’s become well known for the loss of biodiversity that’s taken place since WWII, as agriculture has been transitioned to large monocultures.
The rules for organic food, for legal reasons, needed to be updated and some seed people were invited to join the discussion. A so-called ‘trialogue’ took place between the EU Commission, Parliament and Council. In order to provide good publicity and entice some people working with biodiversity to join, some proposals were made along the lines of ‘agroecology’, farmers saving their own seeds, no more registration for organic varieties, ‘heterogeneous material’ and so on. In the end very few meaningful positive developments remained, and most of these are subject to ‘delegated acts’, meaning they can be administratively abolished later.
While I don’t want to discourage anyone who wants to make use of these changes in the legislation to start a business or otherwise make money, I doubt many small farmers or other operators will be able to make good use of the new legislation.
I talked about this earlier, but my advice is if you are a consumer to refuse to pay more for organic varieties and give preference to non organic varieties. I’m going to spell out a few specific drawbacks below.
This outcome is really a disaster for efforts to use agriculture as a tool to combat climate change.
Seed Saving without Seed Saving
One of the promises was farmers’ would be able to save their own on farm seeds for replanting. Yes, seed replication will be allowed under the new legislation, but in almost all cases this will involve registered varieties in which royalties will have to be paid or contractual restrictions. If a farmer does their own breeding or makes crosses, these have to be registered variety by variety, and non-varieties like combinations of varieties or anything without identifiable phenotypes will not be allowed. This isn’t likely to be of a lot of benefit, because this sort of seed replication can mostly be done cheaper in other ways.
Permaculture without Permaculture
Also called non-permaculture or agroecology. This is where we need high genetic variability for specific geographic locations or variable weather conditions possibly caused by global warming.
In this new regulation, this will have to be implemented with specific varieties. While some varieties will have some variability, this won’t be enough variety to make full use of biodiversity.
An industry spokesperson at this meeting emphasized the legislation needed to facilitate large, high performance monocultures, so mostly we seem to be talking about non-permaculture in monocultures.
Protect Old Varieties
There was a tired old mantra repeated several times at the meeting, on how this legislation was going to protect old varieties. It’s true, in many cases this legislation will allow old varieties to be sold straight out of a genebank or private collection, but this isn’t nearly as interesting as being able to easily bring these varieties up to date with breeding efforts, and create more biodiversity by combining them with other varieties into a mix.
Organic will have Priority over Conventional
It’s the intention that, because seeds in the new organic regulation will be cheaper and easier to register, this will provide a conduit for more varieties in conventional agriculture. That is, once a new organic variety exists, seeds can legally be sold to a conventional farmer who could grow them at a later date. There are still discussions taking place over if all organic seeds can legally be sold for conventional farming, and in any case there will be a delay before new varieties become available to conventional farmers.
More Varieties is not Biodiversity
There was a lot of discussion about the shortcomings of the current system with national seed lists. Even though these lists have thousands of varieties, somehow biodiversity is going to be increased by creating lists of even more varieties. Biodiversity involves making use of genes, and this is promoted by eliminating the administrative burden of variety registration and by increasing the variability of the seeds used. This has nothing to do with how many seeds are on a list.
Conclusion
This is just another EU political train wreck. After 18 trialogue sessions, and lots of work by lots of people, very little was accomplished.
Like I said above, I don’t mean to discourage anyone who wants to try anyway, but I don’t think many people are going to be motivated to work supporting biodiversity in this context.
It’s almost time for elections. It’s time to let EU politicians know what we think.
