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Changes Underway with Dutch Farming

There have been some announcements over the last few months regarding changes to Dutch agriculture. These are not only important to people living in the Netherlands, but all over the world, since The Netherlands is the second largest agricultural exporter by value in the world, after the United States.

The goals of these changes have partly been to transition for agriculture based on as high production as possible, to more sustainable methods with fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less impact on the environment. The need to increase farmers’ income is also being addressed.

The politics of these types of changes is they often start in The Netherlands, then get adapted into EU legislation. After this, they often require countries exporting to the EU to comply with the same regulations, so the changes propagate around the world via EU trade agreements. On the surface these changes seem very positive, so this might be a very good thing.

Environmental Changes

Money is being made available to farmers who work in sensitive areas to take care of their own environments. Money is also being made available to experiment with more sustainable methods. In addition, the number of pigs in the country is being reduced.

More Money for Farmers

Of course the emphasis on farmers earning more money is being placed on consumers being willing to pay more. This is of course true, but there are many other aspects. In addition to possible higher prices for consumers:

  • There should be reasonable direct subsidies available to farmers paid for by higher taxes on wealthy individuals.
  • Subsidies for wealthier farmers should be capped.
  • There should be fewer taxes on the consumer.
  • Farmers should have complete sovereignty over their seeds. They should have no administrative burden. They should be free to choose any seeds they want. Unless they purchase commercial seeds and come to an agreement with the breeder or seller, there should be no royalty payments or restriction on their use, including saving, breeding and regrowing the seed.
  • Farmers should be free from unreasonable regulations and inspections.
  • Farmers should provide more quality, artisan made products, with a high regard for nature and biodiversity.
  • There should be more opportunities for the consumer to purchase directly from the farmer, or through less formal channels like street markets.
  • There should be more emphasis on local, regional and seasonal products.

If we have these things, I think many consumers would consider paying more for what they buy.

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A Seed for Change

In the wake of the 2008 worldwide economic crisis, filmmaker Alexandros Ikonomidis watches his optimism and income fade away as he comes to the realization that he is unable to sustain himself anymore. Overwhelmed with worry about things he used to take for granted, like the shrinking size of his grocery list, he spends most of his time sitting in isolation to avoid spending any money at all.

After extensive research, he is convinced that growing his own food, without the need of a financial income, is the key to a viable solution for the global depression that was detracting from the modern lifestyle – everything linked back to agricultural seeds.

As seeds have become patented, genetically locked, and in the hands of very few private companies, Ikonomidis embarks on a journey to look for lost reproducible seeds and the know-how for growing his own food for free—a simple individualistic solution that soon proved to be a very complex global problem.

Directed by Alexandros Ikonomidis
Produced by Alexandros Ikonomidis
Written by Alexandros Ikonomidis
Country – Greece
75 mins.
Subtitled

http://schedule.sbiff.org/films-events/2016475046

Independent Greek film maker Alex Ikonomidis sent me an email about a screening for his new film A Seed for Change. I have posted about this before. As far as I know, the film can only be seen if you’re lucky enough to live near one of the screenings. If you live in southern California you can see it at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on the 5th and 6th of February. The Facebook event is here. Also his Facebook page has more information.

I haven’t actually seen the film, and so can’t vouch for the contents. If any readers of this blog get a chance to see it, I hope you’ll report back here and let us all know what you think.

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More on OSSI, Clarity and Risks

Real Seed Catalogue in the UK

I have been looking at some of the seed offerings coming out for 2019. I came across this listing, and it’s given me some thought. If you compare it for example to this:

Adaptive Seeds, Oregon

I would assume both these varieties are what they are labelled. I don’t think either Ben or Andrew and Sarah have any reason to lie or misrepresent what they sell.

At the same time, there are lots of questions in my mind about these mixes. For example, lettuce will not normally cross when saving seeds unless hand pollinated. Ben specifically mentions his mix contains crosses. I do not see the exact variety name of the Real Seed Lettuce on the OSSI website, but see several similar ones. The description also mentions some varieties have been added, but by who is not completely clear. It is labelled as an OSSI variety, but is it possible some non-OSSI seeds have been mixed in and not crossed? This could mean the OSSI status is mixed, and some of the seed grown will be OSSI and some not. If I cared if this was an OSSI variety, this would be very important.

What about the mix from Adaptive? It’s not labelled as OSSI, nor is it listed on the OSSI website. Andrew and Sarah live a few hours drive from Frank Morton, and I’m pretty sure they all know each other. Is it possible some of the seeds from Frank’s OSSI lettuce have found their way into the Adaptive mix? If I was looking for non-OSSI seeds this would be really important to know.

If I wanted to buy either of these seeds, and I wanted OSSI or non-OSSI seeds, I could sort this out with an email or two. I’m sure both seed companies know where their seeds came from and could give me an answer one way or another.

What about 10-20 years from now? Suppose some of this lettuce, possibly with a different variety name, ended up in a completely different seed company? A DNA test could show where the seeds came from, but there probably wouldn’t be any other way. There’s also no guarantee there would be enough public DNA records to establish this conclusively.

OSSI seeds are threatening to contaminate seed collections all over the world in this way. This is just like Monsanto’s GMOs contaminating a neighboring farm, and the victim being sued by Monsanto for stealing their genes. The only difference is these genes are being spread by seed savers.

As much as I believe that both Adaptive and Real Seeds sell perfectly fine seeds, if I was trying to collect non-OSSI seeds, I would probably buy them somewhere else so there could be no confusion.

Lies and More Lies

Everything I’ve been able to establish about OSSI is that it’s a lie. I’ve written about this before, but it has nothing to do with open source software. Seeds are living things and not computer software, they just work differently and the laws governing them are different. It’s very unlikely Jack Kloppenburg just dreamed this up, or is doing it out of the goodness in his heart. There’s billions of dollars behind this in Europe and elsewhere, and everything is meticulously planned.

If some of you have been promised money, or think that profits are going into some sort of benefits fund or a not for profit organization, this is not very likely. I know very little about the organization behind the OSSI in Europe, but it isn’t driven by anyone in the seed movement here. It’s controlled by unknown people, and their intentions are not clear. Historically benefit sharing in relation to seeds has taken place in the form of a fund that loans money to farmers and is intended to itself make a profit. There have been other cases of farmers being paid a very small amount of money to breed a seed variety, that gets patented and the farmer themselves no longer has the right to grow that variety without purchasing seeds. It’s generally the intention to maintain the poverty of the person receiving the benefit. It’s very unlikely any meaningful amount of money will get paid out in any useful way. There’s certainly lots of money involved, but none of us are likely to see it.

It’s unlikely OSSI will be useful to protect against patents or other IPR. In theory it should not be possible to patent seeds in Europe, but it does sometimes still happen. In the US I don’t know of any legal mechanism to prevent seed patents with OSSI. The situation with patents in general is very messed up, both in Europe and worldwide. While there’s an urgent need for reform, it needs to include all seeds not just those protected by OSSI, and it needs to include many other sectors of the economy.

The only reason for OSSI is because outside of the US there is now full privatization of seeds, and there’s a rush to own the biological diversity in the US.

In the US all biological diversity is already in the commons. The OSSI is not necessary to establish this. There are exceptions to this however, according to some treaties: If the breeder makes known his or her wishes, like with the OSSI, ownership can be established outside of the US.

It can be deposited into a genebank and covered by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). When a material is requested from a genebank, the ownership of the material itself remains with the genebank and is not transferred to the requester. The US joined this treaty on 13 March 2018, so all material received from USDA genebanks after this date is owned by the genebank.

If you signed an SMTA when receiving the material, the genebank also retains ownership.

All other genetic material in the US is owned by the person owning the seeds!

It’s really a travesty that president Trump authorized the US joining the ITPGRFA.

If you have seeds that aren’t obtained directly, or are progeny from, seeds from a US genebank after 13 March 2018, and you haven’t signed an SMTA, and aren’t directly from an organization like the Seed Savers Exchange who has submitted their collection under the terms of the ITPGRFA, and are not OSSI or similar, you can probably sell ownership of them in other countries. Don’t give up this right without a good reason.

There are no labeling rules on seeds however, so it’s really important you get your seeds from a trusted source, and you know where they came from. There is a very real possibility of intentional contamination of public domain seeds in the US, and everyone should be on the lookout for that happening.

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Bayer Needs an Aspirin

Bayer 1-year share price
One year share price of Bayer

Bayer seems to be wrapping up their purchase of Monsanto, but investors are not impressed.

$289 Million Verdict

The first in a series of lawsuits over Monsanto’s glyphosate based weedkiller Round Up has resulted in an award of $289 million for the plaintiff.  Like Bayer is quick to point out this is only one jury and one verdict, which is subject to review and appeal.  There are many reasons to believe this amount could be reduced or eliminated altogether.  It’s clearly enough to make investors nervous, but might not be a serious issue for Bayer in the long run.  We’ll have to wait and see how this develops.

Divestment of Assets to BASF

Bayer themselves identify the unexpectedly large sale of $9 billion in assets to BASF as one of the reasons for falling earnings.   In part this probably comes out of their ‘fake news’ Glyphosate ECI here in Europe.

In the lead up to Monsanto-Bayer merger, a suspiciously funded European Citizens’ Initiative was launched to remove glyphosate as an unpatented product from the EU market.  Through the ways I describe in the link above, I was able to see it was completely staged.

The issue was Bayer had a competing patented product called glufosinate, marketed under the name Liberty or Basta.  Bayer was trying to remove glyphosate because it was cheap and generic formulations were available.

I wrote some letters to Dutch and EU politicians, alerting them to these things.  After I wrote these letters, the EU launched an investigation into the then pending merger between Monsanto and Bayer.  As a result of this investigation, it emerged Bayer had an entire agricultural chemicals unit dedicated to making chemical analogues of glyphosate, and glufosinate was one of these.  Bayer was clearly planning to combine Round Up Ready technologies of Monsanto with their own chemical variations of Round Up, and create even more herbicides and herbicide resistant crops.

The EU then required Bayer to sell it’s entire agricultural chemical unit to BASF, as a condition of the merger between Monsanto and Bayer.  The US justice department later required even more assets be sold to BASF.

The announcement that glyphosate was to be removed from the EU market was also pretty sudden, and farmers did not have enough time to plan for this.  This would have created an unusually high demand for Bayer’s alternative patented herbicide products.  It was agreed to extend the licensing of glyphosate for a few more years, in order to reduce the impact on farmers and allow competing organic products to be developed.

This is really how politics is supposed to work.  It’s an example of politicians being responsive to citizens, and doing what they can within the rule of law to make things better.  It’s the kind of thing that happens behind the scenes, that we don’t always hear about.  We should all be very happy with the way this turned out.

Bayer’s Shareholders

What reason do the Bayer shareholders give for loss of confidence in the company?  Some are pointing to a lack of direction in the company.  Bayer has been unable to give a clear statement on the way forward, and what their new products will be.  It seems at least in the short term their business model has been disrupted.

Other Comments

EU Parliamentary elections are around the corner.  Everything that transpired above was with ‘normal’ politicians.  If I had to deal with politicians from populist parties, it would have probably all been a lot harder.  I think mainstream politicians in Europe have learned a hard lesson from the last parliamentary elections, Brexit and the populist parties that are coming into power around Europe.  I think they are trying harder now.

I want to work constructively with whomever comes to power, and never choose one party over another.  I hope however that when readers of this blog vote, they choose candidates with a constructive agenda.

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The War on Seeds

Nagoya Protocol Article 15.1:

“Each Party shall take appropriate, effective and proportionate legislative, administrative or policy measures to provide that genetic resources utilized within its jurisdiction have been accessed in accordance with…”

The world hasn’t faced something like this since the War on Drugs.

In other words, if you live in one of the more than 100 countries that have implemented the Nagoya Protocol as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), you are subject to potentially unlimited penalties for misuse of genetic resources.  Use of genetic resources can include seed saving or amateur plant breeding.  Misuse can include improper administration of the ownership of the seeds, if you are following the appropriate terms and conditions of use, and if you have paid the appropriate royalties.

It’s also widely accepted that the administration that goes along with maintaining or transferring seeds and other genetic resources between two parties is so legally complex, it’s often beyond the capabilities of an average person.  I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to Wikipedia, but in their explanation of the Nagoya Protocol (text subject to change), as a criticism, they mention:

Criticism

Many scientists have voiced concern over the protocol, fearing the increased red tape will hamper disease prevention and conservation efforts, and that the threat of possible imprisonment of scientists will have a chilling effect on research. Non-commercial biodiversity researchers and institutions such as natural history museums fear maintaining biological reference collections and exchanging material between institutions will become difficult.

In other words, even natural history museums aren’t completely sure how to exchange material with one another anymore, and this uncertainty is backed up with possible imprisonment for getting it wrong.  This is likely to impact a large number of scientific disciplines.

In addition, every time genetic resources change hands a new set of administration is generated, and in the case of breeding work involving crosses the administration of the parent lines is passed on to the progeny.  Restrictions, terms and conditions get passed on in their entirety, and royalties are divided proportionally according to the percentage of genes in the resulting crosses and their respective ownership.

In order to continue to work with biodiversity, seed saving, plant breeding and so on, for most people, it will be necessary to do it as part of a larger organization or cooperative that can manage the administration and commercial negotiations surrounding it.

If anyone does continue working on their own, the most likely scenario is that they will not want to trade seeds with others.  This means they will not be able to use material like OSSI seeds, because legally these must be shared with others on request.

Winners and Losers

The profit potential is clear.  If you own genetic material, you own the building blocks for agriculture.  It’s like owning real estate, everyone needs a place to live, and there’s lots of profit to be had in speculating and being a landlord.  Those who are successful stand to make a lot of money.

The devastation is also clear.  We saw what happened to the US Seed Savers Exchange.  Some scientists are also stopping or changing their areas of work.  With respect to this blog, I can also see a sharp decrease in interest in biodiversity and seed saving over that last several years, especially in Europe.  A lot of people are simply moving on to doing other things.

Scenario One:  The implementation of the CBD and Nagoya Protocol is successful.

In this case, if seed saving is going to survive in the countries covered by these treaties, it’s going to have to evolve and become more business oriented.  Everything is going to surround private collections of genetic resources and coalitions of collections.  It’s likely a group or groups of seed savers will come together and try to organize an alternative to what’s been collected in Svalbard and genebanks worldwide.

There are countries who are members or non-members of the different treaties.  For example the US is a member of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), but not CBD.  Mexico is a member of CBD but not ITPGRFA.  The link above shows what countries are a member of the Nagoya protocol.  Over time it will be possible to work out the different combinations of membership, the consequences and possibly some loopholes.  There will also be court cases, and the treaties themselves may change.

There is a lot of work here for those who are inclined to do this.  Be sure to read what I wrote a few days ago over this.

Scenario Two:  These treaties fail or partly fail.

Many things are not going well for those trying to implement CBD and Nagoya.  There is a shortage of funding and a lot of opposition.  The CBD was conceived about 30 years ago, and the world has changed a lot in the meantime.  I think there is a real possibility of everything falling apart.

There are some pretty serious consequences that go along with this scenario too.  Svalbard and the global network of genebanks is already having funding issues, and has not been generating as much income as expected.  If these treaties actually fail, there’s no obvious alternative funding.  The worldwide seed movement is really going to have to pick up the pieces and start from the beginning.  Not just seed saving, but all disciplines impacted by the CBD.

This could be made a lot worse, if there was a long period of uncertainty or a prolonged failure.

What You Can do to Help

It’s bad timing that we seem to be having a lull in interest in biodiversity and seed saving.  Regardless of which of these two scenarios we have to deal with, we all need to mobilize in the right way as quickly as possible.  It’s important we stay motivated, and keep doing whatever it is we are doing.

Whatever you can do to stimulate interest in biodiversity would be a good thing.  If you have a blog, write about it on the Internet.  If you have a garden, then grow, save and share heirloom seeds.  If you want to learn something, then teach yourself or find someone who can help you.

Even if you’re just a consumer or another unrelated professional, just talking about biodiversity and spreading the word can really help a lot.