This emerging industry is rapidly growing. Already, the same four mega-corporations that dominate the seed and pesticide industries (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDuPont, Syngenta-ChemChina and BASF) are moving to gain control of digital agriculture and outpace the growth of competitors.

Currently, these “Big Four” platforms are Bayer-Monsanto’s Climate FieldView , DowDupont’s Granular, Encirca and AcreValue, Syngenta’s AgriEdge Excelsior and BASF’s Xarvio and Maglis.

The rise of digital agriculture can further foreclose paths for farmer innovation, serve as a powerful gatekeeper of farmer information and transform farmers from independent business operators to captured users. For example, digital agriculture services can provide exact prescriptions for seed planting and pesticide use. With corporate control over these algorithms, companies can tell farmers exactly where and how to treat their land. That same company has an incentive to direct farmers to use seeds and pesticides that they manufacture.

For example, BASF’s Grow Smart Rewards program offers cash back when farmers use its digital agriculture platform and buy certain pesticides manufactured by the company instead of competitors’ products.

Additionally, digital agriculture platforms are enabling major agribusiness corporations to gain access to tremendous amounts of farm data. Farmers own all of the individual data produced from their farm. The digital agriculture company owns all of the data aggregated from multiple farmers to recommend decisions. This is especially important when considering data portability.

In order to have complete control over their data, farmers must be able to transfer it to a different platform while deleting it from the old platform. While a farmer provides data through Climate FieldView to Bayer-Monsanto, they also receive recommendations based on a collection of data from other farms. In other words, the farmers’ collective data benefits all who have “invested” data into the platform.

However, Climate FieldView’s privacy policy shows a farmer can only delete data that isn’t currently being aggregated with other farmers’ data.

Five neighboring farmers all growing the same crops could submit soil moisture measurements to a digital platform. The platform may view their measurements, compare them to yields, then offer all five farmers specific irrigation plans. All farmers would benefit from their contributions. Yet if one of those farmers became dissatisfied and decided to change platforms, the farmer cannot delete their soil moisture data from the database.

On the surface, this may not matter. But now, that farmer’s neighbors are benefitting from his or her data. The neighbors might have a competitive advantage, while the farmer who left receives no compensation for their competitor’s gain.

These data practices are anticompetitive: they allow a few dominant platforms to grow their databases and profit from farmers’ data while offering nothing in return for the farmers that leave the platform. In order to be truly competitive, digital agriculture needs to allow farmers to freely remove data and transfer it to a new platform, or delete it entirely.

Especially with a robust startup culture in the technology sector, there should theoretically be room for smaller companies to find their niche and offer their own digital agriculture platforms that give farmers more choices. These theoretical platforms would lack the conflict of interest inherent in the platforms of the Big Four companies who can use digital agriculture to push sales of their own products. However, In order to limit competitors from entering this market, the Big Four are utilizing a number of tactics, some of which are unique to the agriculture industry.

Bayer-Monsanto’s design of Climate FieldView gives a perfect example of the ways in which tremendous resources can quickly lead to market dominance in a burgeoning industry. At this stage, Bayer-Monsanto’s first priority is growth, measured in the number of acres on which Climate FieldView is paid for and deployed.

In 2017, Monsanto announced that it surpassed its goal of having Climate FieldView on 25 million acres and reached 35 million acres instead. Agriculture retailer incentives drive much of this growth.

Prior to the completion of the Bayer-Monsanto merger, a CoBank report predicted that the largest impact of the current wave of mergers (Bayer-Monsanto, DowDupont and Syngenta-ChemChina) would be on rebate programs. These programs have become extremely important for retailers, who are required to sell a certain amount of a given product in order to receive cash back. The now-completed mega-mergers will primarily affect rebates in two ways.

First, larger companies have the power and capacity to push for higher sale volumes, which will increase the number of units retailers are required to sell to receive a rebate. Second, these new mega-corporations have more complicated portfolios than ever before.

Digital agriculture is one important piece of the new, complicated platforms and portfolios. In January, CropLife magazine reported that Monsanto was significantly increasing the rebate requirements for Climate FieldView. The author, Paul Schrimpf, speculated that it could be beneficial for some retailers to simply give Climate FieldView to farmers for free, just to reach the rebate requirements.

This control over retailer practices allows companies like Bayer-Monsanto to mass-distribute its digital agriculture platform — to the detriment of smaller, independent companies without a network of retailers profiting off of rebates.

Immense control over retailers has not been enough to stymie tech startups wanting to provide their own individual digital agriculture tools.

Many farmers use Climate FieldView for one or two very specific features. Therefore, there is certainly a market for startups to provide very specialized products that may be cheaper than a large platform and only offer what a farmer may find useful.

In 2016, Monsanto recognized this trend and decided to invest in the Microsoft playbook from the 1990s. Hence, the modern Climate FieldView platform was born.

Similar to how Microsoft turned Windows into a one-stop shop for computing needs, Monsanto expressed the desire to build a “centralized and open data platform.” In this platform, Climate FieldView acts as a sort of “App Store” for agriculture. Startups place their digital agriculture products within the Climate FieldView program for users to choose which ones they like. The startups gain increased access to customers while Bayer-Monsanto gets a share of the profit and access to all of the data.

Climate FieldView is the ultimate power play in a still-forming industry. Since the platform is rapidly growing, it has become a gatekeeper for other digital agriculture products. As a gatekeeper, Bayer-Monsanto gets to pick winners and losers, influencing the path the entire industry will follow.

The Big Four have almost complete control over conventional agriculture across the globe, and these corporations will increase dominance through digital agriculture. These aggressive practices and the potentially disastrous consequences are concerning for small family farmers. Digital farming only addresses the needs of industrial scale farmers and could be used to further lock farmers into a system of chemically intensive agriculture, where they are forced to use the seeds and chemicals the companies manufacture.

This agricultural technology could be a force for good, but it is already on pace to become as anticompetitive as the rest of the agriculture industry and simply another tool for corporate control over farmers — and our food system. It is important that we question how this technology will affect the future of farming and farm labor. Digital agriculture shifts farmer data ownership to mega-corporations so that these corporations can micromanage large sectors of farmland and limit farmer choice and competition — all for the benefit of their bottom lines.

To address this, policy must catch up to this emerging technology and offer farmers control over their data rather than leaving the issue to individual corporations to decide. In the meantime, farmers interested in utilizing data analysis can look to platforms provided by companies not manufacturing seeds and pesticides to ensure they receive unbiased advice.

The digital agriculture revolution does not have to follow the patterns of the past. Farmers’ access to their own farm data must be protected to ensure it can be used to bolster the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture. Digital agriculture must bolster farmer independence rather than increase corporate control over farmers and our food system.

For more information regarding digital agriculture, see Friends of the Earth (US) full report, Bayer-Monsanto Merger: Big Data, Big Agriculture, Big Problems. The report details the myriad ways in which digital agriculture has the potential for gross corporate abuse of farmer data and how the combination of seeds, chemicals and data into combined platforms will increase corporate control.

Jason Davidson is the Food and Agriculture Campaign Associate at Friends of the Earth (US). He supports the Bee Action Campaign. Jason worked on the campaign as an intern before joining Friends of the Earth as staff.

Prior to Friends of the Earth, he interned at Climate Reality Project and served as a research assistant in the Geography Department at George Washington University.

He holds a B.A. in Geography with a minor in Geographic Information Systems and American Studies from George Washington University.

The post AgtechTakeback | Digital Consolidation – Entrenching Agrichemical Companies & Industrial Ag? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the video description:

Jointly produced by 8 Latin American organisations and edited by Radio Mundo Real, the documentary “Seeds: commons or corporate property?” draws on the experiences and struggles of social movements for the defence of indigenous and native seeds in Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, Argentina, Colombia, and Guatemala.

The main characters are the seeds – indigenous, native, ours- in the hands of rural communities and indigenous peoples. The documentary illustrates that the defence of native seeds is integral to the defence of territory, life, and peoples’ autonomy. It also addresses the relationship between indigenous women and native seeds, as well as the importance of seed exchanges within communities. Exploring the historical origins of corn, and the appreciation and blessing of seeds by Mayan communities, this short film shows the importance of seeds in ceremonies, markets and exchanges.

Local experiences of recovery and management of indigenous seeds demonstrate the significant and ongoing struggles against seed laws, against UPOV and the imposition of transgenic seeds. Whilst condemning the devastation that such laws bring, this film captures the peoples’ resistance to the advancement of agribusiness.

The documentary is available in Spanish; with English, Portuguese and French subtitles. We invite you to watch it and to share it widely in order to continue defending the seeds which have become both peoples’ heritage, and which serve humankind on the path towards food sovereignty.

The post Seeds: commons or corporate property? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last month, an interesting article on Jean-Luc Danneyrolles was published (in French) on the site Reporterre. Danneyrolles is the founder of “Potager d’un curieux” (The Curious One’s Garden), a place in the Vaucluse region of France which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of free seeds. In particular, the article explains the obstacle course this farmer had to cross in order to have his activities accepted by administrative authorities. Fortunately, he has been able to stabilize the situation more or less, but one point continues to create friction: the marketing of the seeds produced.

When Jean-Luc is asked the simple question of the right to sell all his seeds, he reverses the question. “By what right would we not have the right to produce good seeds and to market them? It is the reappropriation of this heritage that I defend. We do not have the right, we take the right” To take a right is not to steal something, he explains. “I never imagined that the police would come to arrest me because I sell my seeds. We are supported by civil society, that is to say that there are plenty of people who encourage me to continue and that is enough for me.”

Prohibition on the marketing of free seed?

As I have already had occasion to mention on SILex, seeds can be the subject of intellectual property rights in Europe through Certificates of Plant Production (VOCs) which protect varieties obtained by seed producers. Moreover, in order to legally market seeds, they must be registered in a catalog based on criteria excluding by definition old varieties, as explained in the article by Reporterre:

For the marketing of seeds or seedlings, Decree No 81-605 of 18 May 1981 requires the inclusion of varieties in the official catalog of plant species and varieties. To be registered, the varieties must undergo two tests: DHS (for “distinction, homogeneity, stability”) and VAT (for “agronomic and technological value”). First hitch, the old, peasant, terroir varieties, call them as you want, are essentially unstable. They are expressed differently according to biotopes and climatic conditions. So, they are checked by the catalog entry tests.

The varieties which respect the DHS criteria are generally “F1 hybrids” produced by the large seed companies, which yield plants with identical characteristics, whatever their environment. They also degenerate from the first reproduction, which prevents farmers and gardeners from reusing the seeds and obliges them to repurchase seeds each year from the same manufacturers. Thus, the system has been designed to mechanically privilege varieties protected by intellectual property rights, while so-called “free” seeds (those belonging to the public domain) are disadvantaged, specifically because they can not be marketed.

The regulation has, nevertheless, been relaxed somewhat at the European level since 2011, with the introduction of a list complementary to the official catalog based on criteria of less drastic homogeneity, which makes it possible to include old varieties. But this margin of maneuver remains insufficient to cover all seeds in the public domain, which means that militant peasants such as Jean-Luc Danneyroles remain largely illegal when they want to market seeds that they produce. They risk fines imposed by the repression of fraud, which can be high (even if they are rarely applied in practice). A French association called Kokopelli decided openly to brave these aberrant prohibitions, claiming as a right the possibility of marketing free seeds, to defend it before the courts. Last year it was believed that the situation would change with the Biodiversity Act, an article of which explicitly allowed non-profit associations to market seeds belonging to the public domain. However, unfortunately, the French Constitutional Council declared this part of the text to be annulled, on the very objectionable ground that it entailed a breach of equality towards commercial companies.

Ambiguous links between enclosures and commodification

What I find interesting with this story told in Reporterre, but more broadly with the issue of free seeds, is that they illustrate well the complex relationships that exist between the common goods and the market. Indeed, free seeds are considered to be a typical example of “common” resources. They have reached us through a process of transmission from generation to generation of farmers, which has led the process of selection and crossing necessary to develop the varieties and adapt them to their environment. The so-called “old”, “peasant” or “traditional” varieties are not protected by intellectual property rights: they are in the public domain and are therefore freely reproducible. That’s why they are very interesting for farmers, especially to rid themselves of their dependence on the seed industries.

Since these seeds are in the public domain, they should also be free to be sold on the market as physical objects. It is clear that this is a prerequisite for activities such as “The Vegetable Garden of a Curious One” or Kokopelli to be sustainable and develop. Even if these structures generally adopt associative forms oriented towards non-profit or limited profitability, they need a connection with the market, at least to cover the costs incurred by the production and distribution of seeds. However, this is precisely what is now theoretically prohibited by regulations, which has been organized to exclude traditional seeds from the market, notably via the registration requirements in the official catalog.

We see here that the specific enclosure that weighs on seeds consists of forced exclusion from the market, and it is somewhat counter-intuitive, in relation to the general idea that one can make of the phenomenon of common property. Historically, enclosures first hit certain lands that were collectively used by the distribution of private property rights to convert them into commodities. Landowners have been recognized in several waves of the right to enclose land that was previously the subject of customary collective rights of use. This is particularly the case in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. In France, the dismantling of the Commons took the form, in the French Revolution, of a process of “sharing the Communals”, which consisted in the sale in certain regions of these lands so that they became private properties. In both cases, enclosure takes the form of a forced inclusion in the market of goods that previously were “protected” and it can even be said that enclosure is then explicitly aimed at the commodification of the good.

In this regard, we must re-read the analyses of the historian Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation” in which he explains how “market society” has been constituted and generalized by producing three kinds of “fictitious goods”: the Land (and more generally nature), labor (human activity) and money. In his vision, it was the forced inclusion of these three essential goods in the market mechanisms that allowed the latter to “disentangle” the rest of society and become a self-regulated system that allowed the rise of capitalism.

Exclusion from the market as an enclosure

From the foregoing, one may have the impression that enclosure is thus intimately linked to “commodification”. Moreover, many of the social struggles carried out on behalf of the Commons demand that certain goods be excluded from the market or subject to a specific regulation which protects them from the most destructive excesses. This is the case, for example, for the fighting on water, in particular in Italy, which has gone through opposition to the privatization of water management by large companies.

Nevertheless, the case of seeds shows us that the issue of enclosures is much more complex. In order to grasp what happens to the seeds, we must understand them in two different ways: in their immaterial dimension, through the plant varieties that the seeds express and in their material dimension, through the physical objects that are the seeds produced by the peasants. Old plant varieties do not (and have never) been subject to intellectual property rights, unlike the F1 hybrids produced by the seed industry. As such, these varieties are actually ‘de-marketed’, in the sense that they can not, as such, be subject to exclusivity subject to authorization and transaction. But the seeds produced by the peasants constitute rival physical objects, which are the object of property rights and can be legitimately sold on the market. Except that the legislation on seeds has been organized to prevent these seeds from entering the market and being able to be marketed, unlike proprietary varieties. The enclosure of the common good which constitutes traditional seeds, therefore, does not have the same nature as that which has struck land or water: it consists of a forced exclusion from the market.

Indeed, it could be said that free seeds are subjected to a double process of enclosure, both working in opposite directions. It is known that some large companies like Bayer or Monsanto are working to file abusive patents on some of the characteristics of old plants, such as natural resistance to diseases. They do this to reserve rights over the “immaterial dimension” of plants, by creating new GMO varieties in which they will inject the genes carrying these particular traits. In such cases, they use an intellectual property right to induce a forced entry into the market on an element which previously belonged to the public domain and was freely usable. One of the best known examples of this phenomenon known as “biopiracy” has, for example, concerned a patent filed by a Dutch company on an aphid resistance of a lettuce, allowing it to levy a toll on all producers’ seeds for these salad greens.

Enclosure may therefore consist of forced entry into the market and is often the effect of the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Another example which could be cited in this sense is that of scientific articles. The vast majority of these products are produced by researchers employed by public universities. They are collected by private publishers through the transfer of copyright granted by the same researchers at the time of publication. They then resold at very high prices to universities. They are then obliged to buy back with public money what had originally been financed by public funds (salaries of researchers). To use Polanyi’s vocabulary, we are here in a caricature of “fictitious goods”, created by the artificial application of intellectual property rights on goods in order to forcefully include them in a market.

But conversely, there are also intangible goods which undergo, like seeds, phenomena of enclosure by forced exclusion from the market. If one takes for example the case of free software, one knows for example the problem of tied selling (sometimes also called “forced sale”) which means that one can not generally buy computers without proprietary software pre-installed, which conditions users to the use of protected software to the detriment of free software. Last year the Court of Justice of the European Union refused to consider that the tying of PCs and proprietary operating systems constituted an unfair commercial practice. The seed analogy is not perfect, but there is a link as long as the problem of tied selling prevents free software from reaching the consumer under the same conditions as proprietary software. The machinery market would be important for their distribution and adoption by the greatest number. In the end, the consumer is deprived in both cases of the choice of being able to opt for a free solution, radically with regard to the seeds and relatively for the software.

For a complex approach to the links between Commons and the market

To be able to grasp the phenomenon of enclosures in its complexity is, in my opinion, important, in particular to avoid misunderstandings on the question of the Commons. It is sometimes said that the Commons constitute a “third way between the market and the state”, but this way of presenting things is rather misleading. It would be better to say that the Commons, with the State and the market, constitute a way for humans to take charge of resources. These three poles can, depending on the moment in history, have more or less importance (today we are going through a period of overwhelming dominance of the mechanisms of the self-regulated market, resulting in a marginalization of the Commons and a weakening of the State). But the Commons are always articulated to the State and the market: they never constitute a completely autonomous sphere. In particular, they may need market opportunities to exist and weigh significantly in social relationships. This is clearly illustrated by the example of free seeds.

Of course, there are also cases where we have to fight for a “de-commodification” of certain goods and many struggles for the recovery of the Commons go through this confrontation with the market to “snatch” from the essential resources. But there are also cases where, on the contrary, it will be necessary to fight for the right to have resources joining the market to be traded. At first glance this may sound confusing, but it seems crucial to keep this in mind so as not to sink into a romanticism that would lead us to believe that the goal is to “get out of the economy”, as one can sometimes read … There is also a struggle to lead “in the economy”, as Karl Polanyi rightly said, in order to “re-integrate” this sphere within the processes of social regulation and in particular in the logics of reciprocity.

That is what Jean-Luc Danneyroles expresses in his own way at the end of the article by Reporterre, referring to the question of barter and the commons. One senses at the same time his reluctance to consider the seeds as goods “like the others” and his need to connect yet to a market:

Quietly, in his open kitchen, at the time of the coffee, as almost every day, Jean-Luc receives the visit. A curious one looking for Roman chamomile for skin care. Jean-Luc gives him advice, names of plants and methods of cultivation. She will leave with her sachets of seeds, in exchange for soap and toothpaste that she has made. Jean-Luc always has a little trouble with getting paid. “The ideal is barter, I like the idea of common goods, which one does not pay for what belongs to nature. Utopian, yes, but feet on the ground. “Every work deserves salary,” he knows, and his seeds are his means of living.

Photos used by permission, Éric Besatti/Reporterre

The post Forced market exclusion as an enclosure of the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In short, seed patents have become a tool for privatizing seed from the pool of open and commonly owned plant genetic resources: an insidious enclosure of seed commons.

This scenario is eerily similar to the consolidation of software for personal computers some twenty years ago. Microsoft used its market dominance to incorporate all sorts of software programs into its Windows operating system, a strategy sometimes referred to as “embrace, extend and extinguish.”  As Microsoft exploited its de facto monopoly over common software systems, programs for word-processing, spreadsheets and other functions began to go out of business.

From OpenSourceSeeds website

The Open Source Seed license, recently released by a group called OpenSourceSeeds, is trying to “make seeds a common good again.” The license amounts to a form of “copyleft” for new plant varieties, enabling anyone to use the licensed seeds for free. Like the General Public License for free software, the seed license has one serious requirement: any seeds that are used, modified or sold must be passed along to others without any legal restrictions.

This is the “share-alike” principle, which is also used by Creative Commons licenses.  Its purpose is to prevent the privatization of a common resource by requiring any user to share it freely and forever.

The Open Source Seed license directs any users:

You will in particular refrain from making any claim to plant variety rights, patent rights or any other statutorily possible exclusivity rights of the seeds or their propagation and enhancements.

Simultaneously, the licensing provisions oblige you, in turn, to subject any seeds or enhancements of the seeds obtained from the present seeds to these licensing provisions, and only to pass them on to third parties on these conditions (“copyleft”). Should you infringe the obligations arising from this licence agreement, you will forfeit your rights of use of the seeds or any seeds or enhancements obtained therefrom.

By acquiring or opening the packet of these plant seeds you accept, by way of an agreement, the provisions of a licence agreement where no costs shall be incurred to you. You especially undertake not to limit the use of these seeds and their enhancements, for instance by making a claim to plant variety rights or patent rights on the seeds’ components. You shall pass on the seeds, and propagations obtained therefrom, to third parties only on the terms and conditions of this licence. You will find the exact licensing provisions at www.opensourceseeds.org/licence. If you do not wish to accept these provisions, you need to refrain from acquiring and using these seeds.

The open source seed license was released on April 25 in Berlin by the Association for AgriCulture and Ecology (AGRECOL e.V) and the German NGO Forum on Environment and Development. They also released the first two open-sourced seeds, the tomato “Sunviva” (Lycopersicon esculentum L.) and the spring/summer wheat known as “Convento C.”  (For more on this event, see this story by Intellectual Property Watch.)

OpenSourceSeeds hopes that plant breeders will use its license to protect access to new crop varieties, eventually producing a new sector of open source seed production.  The group’s website invites breeders and seed distributors to register on its database so that buyers can discover where they can purchase open source seeds.

OpenSourceSeeds explains that its agenda is to promote food security through seed diversity; restore crop seeds as a common good; and assure free access to seed (meaning, no legal restrictions on use; seeds can still be sold).

It envisions a more ecological approach to farming rather than the monoculture crops of industrial agriculture. It wants to develop and promote a diversity of crop types, and promote varieties with ecological potential for niche locations and landscapes. All of these goals require a non-private, commonly owned seed sector where private profit is not the primary goal.

If you’d like to explore this topic further, here is an informative background essay, “Liberating Seeds with an Open Source Seed License,” by Johannes Kotschi and Klaus Rapf, of AGRECOL, the Association for AgriCulture and Ecology, in Germany.

Bravo, OpenSourceSeeds, for this ingenious initiative!  May your new license and ethic of seed stewardship produce many bountiful harvests in the future.

Cross-posted from bollier.org

Photo by timlewisnm

The post New Open Source License Fights the Enclosure of Seeds appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Biodiversity is not a new idea. Humans were advocating for biological diversity decades ago.

Hivos, and advocacy and development organization, combined these concepts in its Open Source Seed Programme. They were not the first to do so.

The story of the Open Source Seed Programme provides contemporary illustration of the challenges in changing policy, commerce and culture.

The Open Source Seed Programme and biodiversity excerpts below date to 2014 and 2015. The maize infestation posts are from 2017.

Extracted from: https://www.hivos.org/why-open-source-seed-systems

Global challenge

The world’s agrobiodiversity, crucial to maintaining food security, is under pressure. While there are some 120 plant species cultivated for human food, it is estimated that just 30 crops provide 95 percent of human food-energy needs.

Most agrobiodiversity is maintained on-farm, and its fundamental role in income generation, adaptation to climate change, nutrition and food security is widely acknowledged (Padulosi, Bioversity International 2012). The main cause of genetic erosion is that modern varieties are replacing local farmer varieties (The State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture). In addition to this trend, the patenting of plants and seeds further restricts experimentation by individual farmers or public researchers, while also undermining local practices that enhance food security and economic sustainability by adding a price tag to every seed (or cultivar) that used to be saved, shared and sown again the following year.

According to the FAO (The State of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture), conservation of species in gene banks has made considerable progress. A number of global initiatives exist that focus on safeguarding diversity, such as the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership. Other initiatives like “Access to seed index” aim to bridge the gap between the world’s leading seed companies and the smallholder farmer.

But inadequate policies that remain focused on high input agriculture offer few options to the majority of resource-poor farmers to bolster resilience, improve nutrition and enhance their own livelihoods.

Extracted from: https://www.hivos.org/focal-area/open-source-seed-systems

Open Source Seed Systems

Hivos believes in the importance of farmers’ access to diverse and ecologically adapted seeds and the need to prevent exclusive and monopolistic rights on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture and associated practices and knowledge.

Hivos’ Open Source Seed Systems (OSSS) programme aims to reverse this trend by promoting the freedom to use seeds and stimulate breeding, diversification and resilience. We support concrete initiatives, learn what works and use the results in our lobbying and advocacy for change.

Open source seed approaches

Increasingly, Hivos together with breeders, farmers, and others concerned with seed systems, has felt the need to develop an alternative system, based not on exclusive intellectual property rights claims, but on protected commons that subvert the IPR system. Inspired by the open source software movement, several initiatives around the world have established variations of open source seed systems. Breeders declare their seeds open source, and farmers and consumers support the search for well-adapted varieties and tasty crops suitable for current cultivation technologies.

The distinctive feature of “open source seed” is an express and explicit commitment—legal and/or ethical—to maintain freedom to use the seed and any of its derivatives. This commitment accompanies the seed and its derivatives through any and all transfers and exchanges.

Strategy

Three strands of activities are central to the programme:  building viable business models for open source seed systems; strengthening an emerging global alliance of breeders, farmers, gardeners and consumers through joint research and learning; and accelerating a shift in public policy orientation through showcasing the strength of national open source seed initiatives that create alternatives.  We invite governments and other stakeholders to join in this global development of open source seed systems .

In East Africa, we work with Bioversity International to enable resource-poor male and female farmers to increase food security and mitigate climate change.

We build global alliances with like-minded organisations such as Open source seed initiative US and Apna Beej India. With them and others we are building capacity and promoting open source seeds in Africa and globally, going against the current ‘exclusive rights’ stream.

Extracted from: https://www.hivos.org/blog/why-media-matters-sustainable-food-zambia

Hivos Southern Africa is currently implementing the sustainable foods programme in Zambia aimed at fostering a radical rethinking of food production and consumption that recognises ecosystems as the foundation of societies and economies.

The existing food system in Zambia, built on large-scale mono cropping of maize, is eroding ecosystems and crop diversity and reducing diversity on our plates. In our view, we need to put citizens centre stage to build a new food system that is sustainable, nutritious, diverse and healthy.

Sustainable diets are respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable, nutritious, safe and healthy. A diverse food system builds on the productivity and nutrition potential of agricultural biodiversity in food systems.

It enables women and men to use and develop their knowledge to further improve the diversity in production and consumption systems. Diversity on the farm is diversity on the plate. As Hivos Southern Africa Hub, we firmly believe that a sustainable food system can contribute to sustainable diets that are key to realizing the goal of a healthy nation

Extracted from: https://www.hivos.org/blog/armyworm-maize-attack-case-sustainable-food-production-strategy-zambia

Maize – Zambia’s most favoured crop – is under attack from alien armyworms. The pest has already invaded more than 10 percent of farms in the country. The army worms are caterpillars that “march” across the landscape in large groups feasting on young plants, leaving devastation in their wake.

In Zambia, maize is the primary staple crop, and over 90 percent of smallholders rely on it for food security and income. As with other countries in the region, maize dominates production.

Despite being a beloved crop in Zambia and other countries in the region, maize is proving a costly crop both at production level and to the dietary needs of Zambia.

Maize, which is suffering the most from the armyworm attack, is referred to as a ‘politicised crop’ because of government interventions to support it. Zambia’s government has promoted maize more than other crops such as cassava, millet and sorghum. Since 2007, it has spent on average eighty percent of its agricultural budget supporting the production of maize.

The inadequate production of alternative staple crops, climatic shifts, and poverty is contributing to widespread food insecurity in Zambia. Within the last 20 years, prolonged dry spells and shorter rainfall seasons have reduced maize yields to only 40% of the long-term average. Furthermore, the culture of maize monocropping is diminishing the diversity of foods in the fields and on the Zambian plate. The culture of mono diet is born from monocropping food production, which is heavily slanted towards maize.

The latest attack of the maize crop by armyworm highlights the urgent need for Zambia to diversify its food crops.  An investment in sustainable food diversity is urgently needed to combat hunger and micronutrient deficiencies as well as cushion millions of Zambia people from the unknown threat of climatic change.Photo by CIFOR

Link to an Open Source Seed Programme video: https://vimeo.com/189777328/483c1ddf0b

The post Project Of The Day: Open Source Seeds Programme appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Uhuru wa Mbegu za Wakulima captures the testimonies of farmers whose customary rights to save, share and exchange seeds, are threatened by seed laws designed to replace traditional varieties with commercial hybrids and handover control to the global seed companies. The 28-minute film follows a local seed producer, Mathias Mtwale, as he meets with farmers, researchers, seed suppliers, regulators, and legislators to understand the issues, and to make the case for a fair deal for the farmers.

“We have met different stakeholders in the seed system, especially farmers, to see how policies and laws marginalise them, while empowering large companies and those with economic power to own the system of seeds production,” says Mr. Mtwale.

The film exposes the reality of the seed system in Tanzania. Farmers in Morogoro, Dodoma and Lushoto tell their inspiring stories of traditional seeds passed down through generations. Researchers explain why the commercial seed system of imported hybrids is not meeting farmers’ needs. Farmers’ organisations clarify how the new legal framework means disaster for the rich agricultural biodiversity nurtured by the nation’s smallholder farmers.

“These seeds are our inheritance, and we will pass them on to our children and grandchildren. These too are quality seed and a pride for Tanzania. But the law does not protect these seeds.” emphasises Janet Maro, director of Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT).

Joseph Hella, a Professor from SUA, also insists, “Any effort to improve farming in Tanzania depends primarily on how we can improve farmers’ own indigenous seeds.”

The film, which has been produced by award winning Swedish film director, Lars Johansson and Tanzanian veteran filmmaker, Suleiman Kissoky, goes on general release today, Wednesday 10^th August. The film was produced with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung with funds from German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

Additional Resources:

For more information and interviews, please, contact:

• Abdallah Mkindi, TABIO Coordinator, [email protected], +255 784 311 179
• Anatory Gabriel, TOAM Information & Communications, [email protected] +255 768 909 055

Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement is the national umbrella organization for the organic sector in the country. www.kilimohai.org

Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity is an alliance of civil society and private sector organizations concerned with the conservation of agricultural biodiversity for livelihood security and food sovereignty. www.tabio.org

The post Seeds of Freedom in Tanzania appeared first on P2P Foundation.

According to a recent United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization report, due to human ecological malfeasance we have only 60 harvests left on this wasting planet. That’s it: 60 more years of food and then the industrial agribusiness frenzy is over. And it might actually be far worse: the just-­issued report of the Environmental Audit Committee of the British House of Commons warned that:

“Some of the most productive agricultural land in England is at risk of becoming unprofitable within a generation through soil erosion and loss of carbon, and the natural environment will be seriously harmed.”

Indeed, in some places it’s already happening. Food systems around the world are breaking down, and the resulting food shortages have led to wars and revolutions. Starving people are risking everything as they flee to areas where there is still food. Why is this happening?

On one level, it’s quite simple. Business interests chasing enormous short-­term profits have waged war against the productive topsoil of the planet, and we’ve already lost between 50-­75% of life-­sustaining soil worldwide. Using chemical pesticides and fertilizers, industrial agribusiness is burning through 10 tons of soil per hectare per year of cropland, which is soil loss that is up to 20 times the amount of food being produced on that land. And what do we get for that? We get food fit for factory farming and factory nations.

Why would humans destroy the very soils that have long sustained civilizations? The First Nations of North America have an explanation for this form of cannibalistic self-­consumption: the wetiko psychosis. Wetiko, also known by some First Peoples as wendingo, is a cannibal spirit that devours the flesh of humans or, ecologically, eats the flesh of Mother Earth. The wetiko psychosis, then, is the mental derangement that leads our species to consume life-­giving soils, and some will say that the psychosis is caused by spirit possession.

Others might say it’s caused by governments under the control of sociopathic corporations that enslave and crush the spirits of the free. And others might say it’s the result of clever marketing or meme warfare. it’s the wetiko psychosis we’re seeing: the diagnosis is clear.

Just like families that suffer with deranged family members, the family of life on this planet suffers from our collective wetiko psychosis. Eighty percent of life, as measured by the biomass of all organisms alive today, finds their home in the soil. Earthworms, nematodes, fungi, protozoa, bacteria, and more work together to create a “soil food web” that delivers water and essential nutrients to the plants that we see growing atop the land. They form the life bridge between the inert chemistry of the planet and the biological processes that make Earth a living planet – that make our planet Gaia. Wetiko-­deranged humans, however, rip apart and poison the soil food web – dismantle the life bridge – thereby diminishing the complexity and vitality of the nutrient-­delivery system. Want to see what that looks like? Consider these two photos, taken by the authors on the same day in a field near their farm in Costa Rica.

These two fields were part of an experiment comparing industrial/chemical agriculture with regenerative organic agriculture. The fields were planted side-­by-­ side with the same crop – cassava – and the fields were essentially identical at the start of the trial. Same starting soil, same farmers, same crop, same water, and same sunlight. At the time of planting an unprecedented drought hit the region: even though the test sites were in a rainforest region, there was no rain for six weeks.

As the photos reflect, one field survived while the other suffered massive plant death. The field that survived was the regenerative organic field, so neither chemicals nor pesticides were applied to it. The other field – the dead zone – was treated with agrochemicals in accordance with agricultural “best practices” in Costa Rica.

As the drought occurred immediately after planting the first crop in the experiment, we could not attribute the failure in the dead zone to diminished soil organic matter. If anything, the dead zone started with slightly better soils, and even slightly better populations of soil microorganisms. After the chemicals were applied, however, the microorganism populations in the dead zone – both bacteria and protozoa – plummeted, while in the regenerative site those microorganism populations rose. Those were the only differences between the fields, and it appears that the health of the soil food web in the regenerative field was enough to protect plant life during the severe drought.

Drought is the new normal. Farmers must now contend with weather extremes powered by climate change, which is of course is created by our carbon-­spewing, growth-­at-­all-­costs economic system. We need all the help we can get, and the unseen trillions of microorganisms in a healthy field are one of our most critical allies to help weather the storm and regenerate productive soil. Unless, of course, we kill them off through the ongoing process of wetiko agriculture that values short-­term gain and corporate profit over the livelihood of the world’s majority. It seems we are at a civilizational crossroads: cannibalism or regeneration. The goods news is that if we choose life, we all benefit.

By Steven Farrell and Tom Newmark, co-­owners of Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, a regenerative farm and teaching center in Costa Rica. Tom is also the board chair of the Greenpeace Fund USA, The Carbon Underground, and the American Botanical Council, and is a Steering Committee member of Regeneration International.

Photo by Ecoagriculture Partners

The post Seeing Wetiko: Agriculture: Soil, Seeds and Sanity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

A group of scientists and food activists is launching a campaign Thursday to change the rules that govern seeds. They’re releasing 29 new varieties of crops under a new “open source pledge” that’s intended to safeguard the ability of farmers, gardeners and plant breeders to share those seeds freely.

It’s inspired by the example of open source software, which is freely available for anyone to use but cannot legally be converted into anyone’s proprietary product.

At an event on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, backers of the new Open Source Seed Initiative will pass out 29 new varieties of 14 different crops, including carrots, kale, broccoli and quinoa. Anyone receiving the seeds must pledge not to restrict their use by means of patents, licenses or any other kind of intellectual property. In fact, any future plant that’s derived from these open source seeds also has to remain freely available as well.

Irwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, helped organize the campaign. It’s an attempt to restore the practice of open sharing that was the rule among plant breeders when he entered the profession more than 20 years ago.

“If other breeders asked for our materials, we would send them a packet of seed, and they would do the same for us,” he says. “That was a wonderful way to work, and that way of working is no longer with us.”

These days, seeds are intellectual property. Some are patented as inventions. You need permission from the patent holder to use them, and you’re not supposed to harvest seeds for replanting the next year.

Even university breeders operate under these rules. When Goldwin creates a new variety of onions, carrots or table beets, a technology-transfer arm of the university licenses it to seed companies.

This brings in money that helps pay for Goldman’s work, but he still doesn’t like the consequences of restricting access to plant genes — what he calls germplasm. “If we don’t share germplasm and freely exchange it, then we will limit our ability to improve the crop,” he says.

Sociologist Jack Kloppenburg, also at the University of Wisconsin, has been campaigning against seed patents for 30 years. His reasons go beyond
Goldman’s.

He says turning seeds into private property has contributed to the rise of big seed companies that in turn promote ever-bigger, more specialized farms. “The problem is concentration, and the narrow set of uses to which the technology and the breeding are being put,” he says.

Kloppenburg says one important goal for this initiative is simply to get people thinking and talking about how seeds are controlled. “It’s to open people’s minds,” he says. “It’s kind of a biological meme, you might say: Free seed! Seed that can be used by anyone!”

The practical impact of the Open Source Seed Initiative on farmers and gardeners, however, may be limited. Even though anyone can use such seed, most people probably won’t be able to find it.

The companies that dominate the seed business probably will keep selling their own proprietary varieties or hybrids. There’s more money to be made with those seeds.

Most commercial vegetable seeds are hybrids, which come with a kind of built-in security lock; if you replant seed from a hybrid, you won’t get exactly the same kind of plant. (For this reason, some seed companies don’t bother getting patents on their hybrids.)

John Shoenecker, director of intellectual property for the seed company HM Clause and the incoming president of the American Seed Trade Association, says his company may avoid using open source seed to breed new commercial varieties “because then we’d … have limited potential to recoup the investment.” That’s because the offspring of open source seeds would have to be shared as well, and any other seed company could immediately sell the same variety.

The initiative is probably more significant for plant breeders, especially at universities. Goldman says he expects many plant breeders at universities to join the open source effort.

Meanwhile, two small seed companies that specialize in selling to organic farmers — High Mowing Organic Seeds in Hardwick, Vt., and Wild Garden Seed in Philomath, Ore., are adding some open source seeds to their catalogs this year.

The post Open Source Seeds to keep new vegetable and grain varieties free for all appeared first on P2P Foundation.