Laws protecting industrial seeds

Farmers have protested against a 2001 PVP and Farmers’ Rights Act penalising farmers’ seed exchanges. For the past 10 years, they have also stalled a Seed Bill that would penalise the local marketing of seeds by farmers and force them to register all varieties.

Farmers have been active against the establishment of local biodiversity registers, to be set up by the government under the Biological Diversity Act of 2002.In theory, establishing a Peoples’ Biodiversity Register could be a good idea to support local communities in efforts to preserve knowledge about their local seeds and the uses of them. However, many farmers see problems with the registers, citing the focus on documenting farmers’ knowledge and their seeds without their control and on putting the use of electronic databases in the hands of ‘experts’ outside the villages.

The Biodiversity Act also includes a controversial rule about access and benefit sharing. It says that farmers who give their seeds or the plants that they use to researchers, for further development and commercialisation, may claim payments.