Open letter: The proposal on the marketing of plant reproductive material is a setback for already recognised farmers' rights

Dear members of the permanent Representations of Member States to the EU,
Dear Ministers of Agriculture,

On 27 and 28 May, the Working Group on Genetic Resources and Innovation in Agriculture will meet on the legislative proposal on the marketing of plant reproductive material (PRM), to discuss several key articles linked to farmers' rights on seeds (1). The respect of these rights is an essential condition for the renewal of agrobiodiversity, on-farm breeding, and dynamic management performed by farmers to adapt PRM to their agroecological practices, and the adaptation of plants to a great diversity and variability of cultivation and climate conditions. On behalf of the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC), which represents 28 European peasants’ organisations, we would like to draw your attention to several key elements for maintaining these rights:

Exchanges of PRM between farmers at risk, even though they are already recognised in several countries

On-farm seed breeding and dynamic management and exchanges of PRM between farmers are traditional practices that are essential in the current context of an alarming decline in agrobiodiversity. For this reason, PRM exchanges between farmers have been formally recognised in several EU countries (France, Italy, Austria, etc.), or are considered as informal exchanges and tolerated in many other countries. However, the new PRM regulation aims to end the recognition of these rights by considering these exchanges as marketing, and the farmers who practice them as professional operators.

Although Article 30 of the proposal (seed exchange between farmers) offers a derogation allowing the exchange of seeds not covered by plant breeders’ rights (PBR), it is largely insufficient: the exchanges are considered to be marketing and are therefore subject to the bureaucratic and plant health rules applying to seed companies which market PRM on a large scale. These rules are completely unsuited to on-farm dynamic management practices and are also very costly and impossible to afford for small farmers, which is completely at odds with the stated objective of Article 30 to contribute to the dynamic management of PRM. As it stands, the text of the PRM proposal therefore aims to ban such exchanges, which would have catastrophic consequences for agrobiodiversity and European food sovereignty.

ECVC therefore asks to take inspiration from the French legislative framework (Article L325-1 of the Code Rural), which considers these exchanges not as marketing but as mutual aid between farmers: on-farm production of PRM and exchanges of PRM between farmers, which are carried out on the farm as part of their agricultural production, - with a view to dynamic management and breeding, and not with a view to marketing (public sale offer)-, must be regarded as mutual aid and therefore excluded from the scope of the Regulation. Exchanges will thus be subject to the bureaucratic and plant health rules of agricultural production. Exchanges must concern all types of PRM and allow for the compensation of costs.

Without a ban on GMOs/NGTs and patents, non-DUS commercial categories lose their purpose, and threaten the right to reuse farm-saved seeds

ECVC welcomes the maintenance of organic heterogeneous material, as well as the possibility to market other PRM outside the distinct, uniform, stable (DUS) varieties (new conservation varieties, PRM for final users, preservation mixtures, etc.). However, their main purpose is threatened without a ban on patented GMOs/NGTs in these commercial categories. Indeed, if the objective is to provide farmers with material that can adapt to their local cultivation and climate conditions, it is absurd that they are patent-locked and cannot be reused from one year to the next.

The presence of patented GMOs/NTGs threatens the right to re-use farm-saved seed for the 21 exempt species covered by the ‘farmer’s exception’, which is a widespread practice in the European Union. Today, with a few exceptions, the seed industry does not have the technical or legal means to collect licence fees for the use of farm-saved seeds, which ensures the economic sustainability of a significant part of European agricultural production. However, molecular markers on patented genes would allow seed companies to recover them easily, at the expense of the economic balance of farms and the practices of local adaptation, on-farm dynamic management and breeding, which are the main purpose of these new seed categories. In addition, farmers will not even be informed of the presence of a patent in the seeds they buy, since the PRM proposal does not provide for transparency on intellectual property rights (IPRs). Risk of infringement lawsuits, which could lead them to bankruptcy, will push farmers to abandon these practices permanently. Euroseeds, the European seed Association, has already welcomed this, without realising that it is threatening the economic means by which European farmers can buy and use the seeds of its members.

Given these considerable risks, ECVC calls on the one hand for heterogeneous material to remain organic only, and on the other hand for all new non-DUS varieties to be subject to a ban on GMOs/NTGs, patents, and other IPRs. Finally, for all PRM marketed, transparent and clear information must be indicated on the label and in the register, indicating: IPRs that cover the PRM, its genetic parts or components, as well as all the breeding or genetic modification techniques used to obtain it.

[1] These rights, formally recognised by the National Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Agriculture and Food (ITPGRFA) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), include the collective rights of farmers to use, reuse, save, exchange and sell their seeds, as well as to participate in decision-making in seed-related policy processes. These rights are complemented by the obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which provide, for access to unregistered seeds and possibly their registration in the catalogue, to obtain the free, prior and informed consent of communities, including peasants, which have participated in the breeding or development of the seeds concerned.