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Press Release from the Food Sovereignty Campaign

On 15 May South Africa’s Portfolio Committee on Agriculture held public hearings on two Bills that protect and regulate the commercial seed industry; the Plant Breeders Rights (PBR) Bill and the Plant Improvement Bill. The PBR Bill aims to stimulate innovation in plant breeding by awarding extremely strong intellectual property rights to breeders and the Plant Improvement Bill allows only certified seed to be sold on the commercial market. Several NGOs and smallholder farmers made submissions to the committee, saying that the laws will entrench inequality and deepen the hunger crisis in the country because the Bills are oblivious to seed systems that support smallholder farmers and ecological forms of farming. These laws do not recognise or protect farmer-managed seed systems or agricultural biodiversity but undermine the rights of farmers, including their right to re-use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds.

South Africa is one of the few African countries that is Party to the 1978 International Union for Protection of Plant Varieties (UPOV) - an intergovernmental organization that was established to reward breeders for their new plant varieties by granting intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the basis of a set of clearly defined principles. This has resulted in highly industrialised seed sectors where commercial breeders have strong protection, while farmers are restricted from sharing or selling seed that is protected under this regime. The South African PBR Bill (like its current Act), is based on UPOV 1991 and not UPOV 1978. UPOV 1991 has been slammed world-wide for giving private breeders excessive protection; criticisms include that UPOV 1991 protects private breeders IPRs but does not protect farmers’ varieties from misappropriation; that it promotes genetically uniform seed suited to industrial chemical-dependent agricultural systems that are environmentally harmful, that it does not exempt crops that are important for food security from exclusive property rights and critically, that it outlaws the age-old practice of exchanging seed which has resulted in the agricultural diversity that we know today. Seed exchange also provides safety nets amongst communities for food sovereignty. The second Bill, the Plant Improvement Bill, could also outlaw the sale or exchange of seed that does not meet stringent and higly industralised certification standards set out in the Bill, and these standards apply to commercial seed, not farmers’ varieties or seed appropriate for ecological agriculture. This creates a deeply troubling and inequitable situation where only certified corporate seed is allowed on the market.