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Seed Activism

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Seed Activism

Patent Politics and Litigation in the Global South (Food, Health, and the Environment)

MIT Press,

15 min read
8 take-aways
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Groundbreaking Intellectual Property rights lawsuits in the Global South raise questions regarding the agricultural biotechnology industry (agbiotech), farmers’ rights and global food security.

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The advent of genetic seed engineering in the 1980s triggered disputes between the corporations assuming proprietary control of seeds and those advocating for issues such as farmers’ rights and affordable food that would last decades. Given today’s existential threats, such as climate change, Karine Peschard argues that people must gain a better understanding of the global food supply and the corporations controlling food production. She reveals how the lawsuits against corporate giants such as Monsanto challenge the global agbiotech hegemony.

Summary

A few agricultural biotech corporations control the world’s proprietary seed market.

In 2018, four corporations – BASF, Bayer-Monsanto, Corteva and ChemChina-Syngenta – held oligopolistic control over 60% of the world’s proprietary seed market. Monsanto alone controls 20% of the market. Corporations such as Monsanto have patented genetically modified seeds, thus expanding corporate intellectual property (IP) to erode farmers’ rights in the Global South. Devising and implementing systems that surveil farmers and collect royalties on seeds, Monsanto takes aggressive actions against farmers. It sometimes sues its own customers for saving and replanting seeds without paying royalties. 

Farmers worldwide have fought back to protect their livelihoods. In Passo Fundo, Brazil, for example, a farmers’ union filed a lawsuit against Monsanto regarding its charging royalties for Roundup Ready seeds. The patent on Roundup Ready’s herbicide tolerance trait expired and entered the public domain in 2015. In the biodiverse regions of Brazil and India, farmers have recently found themselves embroiled in global negotiations...

About the Author

Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights research fellow Karine Peschard is an associate researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.

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