Re-blogged from On the Commons:

Jonathan Rowe writes: “In Indonesia, small-scale corn farmers have been hauled into court for exercising their traditional right to produce their own seeds.  The facts of the cases are somewhat complicated.  But according to a report in Grain  the story basically is as follows.

In one case, a farmer by the name of Tukirin, along with a number of others, was enlisted by the local government to take part in a seed-breeding project with a major Indonesian seed company called PT BISI . Tukirin was told only that he would be taught how to breed seeds.  He bought seeds from a local supplier while PT BISI provided male counterparts.

The company bought the new seeds that resulted and sold them under its own label.  The farmers never signed a legal agreement.

The project lasted about four years.  Several years later Turkirin decided to breed seeds on his own. Farmers make a very small profit, if any; thus any savings in input costs is important.  He bought seeds in shops, used his own improvised methods and produced enough new ones that he could sell some to neighbors for less than the going rate. The seeds were not as good as the ones from PT BISI but they were adequate.

Soon thereafter, PT BISI dragged him into court and accused him of marketing seeds without certification. The government was complicit in the case and helped at every turn. Turkirin didn’t have a lawyer and didn’t understand the law; he ended up getting a six month prison sentence, which the judge suspended.  He was not permitted to plant his own seeds for one year.

Turkirin is not the only farmer who has been sandbagged in this way. Others have as well. It seems clear the government is working with the seed companies to strong-arm farmers into buying seeds instead of producing them themselves.  So doing, it is paving the way for GMO seeds and the jackboot legal regime that comes with them.  (In the U.S., Monsanto has sicced its lawyers on hundreds of farmers for “patent infringement”, often when the patented seeds in question simply blew into their fields.)”
Some additional background here.