Small European breeders, the keepers of agrobiodiversity with its potential to help farmers withstand the effects of climate change, are having to face up to an increasing number of patents requested by multinationals to the European Patent Office (EPO), a huge obstacle to the freedom of research and therefore innovation that benefits all but the agrochemical giants.
How does this work?
Patents can be requested to protect technological innovation, offering the innovator a competitive advantage on the market. With regards to seeds, patents can only be asked on plant characteristics that were defined through technological means, that is genetic modification and its latest equivalent: new GMOs, aka New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) or New Genomic Techniques (NGTs).
Previously falling under European GMO laws, the latter techniques are up for deregulation. Thanks to heavy lobbying by the multinationals in fact, the European Parliament voted earlier this year to deregulate NGTs, some of which might be even considered the equivalent of conventional breeding techniques.
Legal loopholes from such developments would enable multinationals to privatise, through patenting, more and more of the genetic material for plant breeding that has so far been available to researchers, material – we should point out – with traits that have been developed through generations of conventional breeding efforts. There are precedents already of EPO granting patents on plants from conventional breeding.
An article on euronews.com summarises the issue, quoting insigts from ECO-PB member and Dutch breeder Frans Carree, as well as from No Patent on Seeds.
For German speakers, an article is available on republik.ch too.
