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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.

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Seed Exchange Art Exhibition

Temporary Fieldsclick on image to view full size

I received an email today from Tamer and Armand.  If participating in an art project or screening their film appeals to you, they can be contacted via the email address in the image above.

Dear Pat and Steph,

We’re writing to tell you about an art project we are working on based in the US on seed exchange and to see if you would be interested in participating.

In 2013, when we began making the film Accession, we came across a small box of letters while visiting a seed company in Virginia, in which each letter accompanies a tiny envelope of seeds. This marked the beginning of our collecting family histories, stories of particular varieties and mundane details of everyday life. The film is now finished and we’re starting to show it at film festivals. We’ve also been invited to show the film in an art gallery in Chicago and we’re contacting you to see if you would be interested in participating in the installation.

In addition to screening the film, we are inviting people to send seeds, letters (either ones you’ve saved or specifically written to us for the installation), and any other ephemera such as photographs, seed slips, etc., to display in the gallery. We are wondering if you would be interested in sending us some seeds you’ve saved for the exhibition. If you feel inclined to write something, or include any other material, to accompany any seeds you send us we could include that in the exhibition as well.

We are interested to see what happens when we bring these various materials together in the same space and put disparate histories in conversation with each other. At the end of the exhibition we will send materials back to the senders, or in the case where materials are addressed to us, we will bring them home with us. We intend for the temporary site-specific nature of the installation to reflect how seeds are being kept in a state of transition, adapting to historic interactions and migrations, by an informal network of seed keepers. Since we don’t have land to plant the seeds ourselves, we are thinking of passing the seeds along to other seed savers who would participate in the exhibition and who could better take care of them.

We’ve attached a small flyer that people have been using to spread the word. Feel free to share our project with anyone you think would be interested. Please let us know if you have any questions and we hope you or people in your networks will be interested in participating.

Tamer and Armand

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OSSI Follow-up, Seed Movement in General

In the past few weeks I’ve had some more thoughts about OSSI.  What I wrote about OSSI before was pretty stark, and I want to offer some ideas for the way forward for everyone.  No one has to read this blog, and no one has to do what it says.  I’m just trying to lay out the situation as I see it, so please do what you want with the information.

CBD and ITPGRFA

These two treaties, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) are causing a lot of problems now, especially as provisions of the CBD and associated Nagoya Protocol are coming into force.  The inherent greed of these treaties are causing problems for almost everyone.  If you’re in the US you’re in a special situation because the US is not a party of the CBD and Nagoya Protocol, meaning your seeds are very sought after.

The problems with the US Seed Savers Exchange were in part because the US was not a party to the ITPGRFA (the US is now a party to this treaty).  The ITPGRFA basically allows seeds to be stolen without the owners permission.  Because the US wasn’t a party to this treaty, it wasn’t as simple as just becoming an SSE member and requesting all the seeds, they either needed the permission of all the individual members or they needed permission of the management.  Kent Whealy refused to give this permission, so he was pushed out of the way.  He didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time, but was trying to explain it the best he could.

The CBD establishes rights of ownership over seeds.  It is the privatization of biodiversity.  If you live outside the US and buy a package of seeds you only have the right to plant and grow those seeds, not the right to save seeds or use the plants in breeding projects.  The situation is very different if someone who owns the seeds ‘gives’ them to you.  For this reason it’s now almost a requirement to transfer seeds with a contract, either attached to the package of seeds or buried in the terms and conditions of sale.

Exclusive ‘ownership’ of seeds is a valuable commodity, also in the US.

I’m not a lawyer, and the contents of these treaties are very complicated.  The largest private collections of seeds are owned by Kokopelli and Arche Noah in Europe, and they have lawyers busy working out all the consequences of the treaties on their collections.  I would guess over time these organizations and others will come up with some solutions.  In addition, I’m sure there will be court cases and other reinterpretations of the treaties, and the situation will change.  There is certainly a big fight ahead of us.

What Can you Do?

I hope very much these treaties will fail, and I believe they will eventually.  The issue is more how to manage the fallout and damage and, in the meantime, continue to work on saving biodiversity.

The cohesion of organizations supporting seed saving efforts is critical, and in many ways it’s hard to imagine the absence of this, but I think these days are gone.  Every organization of more than a few people will just be target for infiltration.  Every collection of seeds will be impossible to protect without the efforts of a dedicated lawyer.  I think it’s important to go back to the days of seed lists informally traded between friends, and in the US possibly seed companies offering their seeds over the Internet.  We probably have to explore the need for seed companies to have terms and conditions for their seeds, I don’t have a good answer for this now.

Written contracts, terms of use, SMTAs and pledges are all extremely important.  It’s very important you not sign anything, or otherwise accept any restrictions on any seeds you receive or give.  The OSSI seed pledge seemed innocent enough at the beginning, but turned out to be a problem.  It’s very important you don’t offer your seeds in any sort of exclusive manner.  If seeds do have restrictions or contracts, it’s important to keep track of these.  If there are future court cases, it’s important to know exactly how seeds have changed hands and what terms and conditions apply.  DNA analysis can easily establish pedigree, and can be compared to other seeds.  You aren’t doing anyone any favors for example by just ignoring the fact that seeds are OSSI or if you signed an SMTA, because this can be established with a DNA test.

Outside of the US, not keeping track of these contracts or the ownership of seeds is punishable on the level of the War on Drugs.  The CBD simply says the level of punishment should be sufficient to ensure compliance, limited only by your national constitution.  You have to wonder if their intention was to promote biodiversity or make profits.

Don’t willingly submit your seeds for DNA testing.  The fact is they will do this anyway, and there’s not much you can do.  I know of several examples in Europe where seeds are stolen for DNA analysis.  This usually results in the people or organizations involved paying the same price the Seed Savers Exchange did.

Avoid the resources of genebanks, and don’t pay more for biodiversity.  Already problems are occurring because people are not accepting SMTAs, and royalties are not being paid for the use of seeds.  Even requesting genebank resources as an individual contributes to this, because they are counting on you to use their seeds and pass them on to others without the knowledge that an SMTA was signed.  If not enough royalties are paid, the CBD and Svalbard will collapse.

Keep any seeds you have, and keep doing what you’re doing.  Being able to fight what’s going on depends on the information about seeds, and what sort of contracts have been signed, not the seeds themselves.  There are no bad seeds!  Hopefully we can fight these changes, and fully legalize all seeds again.  The best tactic for now is non-cooperation with authorities.

Be wary of Sociologists and Social Scientists.  Of course there are all kinds of people and not all of them are bad, but be particularly concerned if they ask you to give them all of your seeds.  There has been a lot of research in the last few decades concerning farmers and seed savers, and they know exactly how you think and what you expect.

Some Conclusions

If you gave your seeds to OSSI and they have been registered and DNA sequenced, they have been stolen.  You can possibly rectify the situation a bit by doing another final selection if you have some earlier generations.  If there is not an exact DNA match, you can release a new version of your variety to replace the old one.  In any case we should accept the situation and move on.

Certified Organic is not going to be a solution to global warming, and it’s not going to be the small, community or family farmer regenerative agriculture we need.  If your income or livelihood depends on certification, great go ahead, but you aren’t doing anyone any favors by otherwise promoting or participating with it.  Organizations like the Organic Seed Alliance and LIVESEED have some great people, but many of the fundamental principles behind them are flawed.  Work with the people, not the organizations.

At it’s peak Europe had about 50 seed saving organizations.  There are a couple of bad apples, but in general these all have great and dedicated people.  Kokopelli and Arche Noah are the largest, and both deserve your support.  If you live in the US, you can really help out by sharing your seeds with them on a non-exclusive basis, both the organizations and members.  Be sure to communicate with them any SMTAs, contracts or terms and conditions you are aware of.

I would be happy to facilitate a European organization that allowed seed savers in the US to try to market their seeds in Europe on an exclusive basis.  Along the lines of what OSSI was planning to do, but instead of being owned and controlled by the seed industry, and based on lies and fake news, one that was controlled and worked for the seed savers themselves, based on honesty and voluntary contributions.  If anyone is interested, get in touch.  In the meantime, you could look at Kokopelli and Arche Noah, and consider anything they might organize.  Anything like this is going to be problematic to say the least, but I would be happy to give advice and my opinions on it.

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EU Organic Regulation a Ridiculous Farce

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.