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Just 20 years ago, over 350 people, including representatives of farmers’ movements and unions, organic and biodynamic farming organisations and NGOs, came together for the first farmers’ seed meetings in France. These meetings marked the birth of the Réseau Semences Paysannes (RSP), a group of collectives working to promote cultivated biodiversity. Twenty years on, where […]

The autonomy of peasant seed systems is a founding element of the agro-ecological shift. Guy Kastler and Antonio Onorati, members of La Via Campesina, use examples to demonstrate the importance of peasant seeds in this movement. Farmers’ seed systems are not a vague aspiration of the ”custodians” of local varieties. Nor are they the aspiration […]

In a world where biotechnologies are developing at lightning speed, it is essential to think on about the way they are regulated by law and how the legislator anticipates their impact on the ground. This dossier explores the various aspects of this issue, from the battle over patents in the agro-industry, particularly around the Crispr-Cas […]

Patents and plant breeders’ rights (PBRs) are the two main IPRs for living organisms, but other suis generis systems are also possible. Patents, the most powerful tool, applies to biotechnological inventions, modified plants, their cells, their genes, etc. The PVC covers plant varieties via their phenotypic (observable) characteristics, provided that they are distinct, uniform and […]

The PBR is an intellectual property right granted on a plant variety according to four criteria: distinctness, uniformity and stability of its characteristics, as well as novelty compared to known plants. These criteria, as analysed by H. Tordjman in 2008, have historically been preceded by a prior artificial definition of the seed as an object […]

Patents on “new genomic technologies” (NGTs) cover all areas of life, from fundamental research to its applications. The ownership of these patents is shared between the public and private sectors. For the industry, the profit potential of NGTs is considerable, and patents are the major guarantors of this. Crispr-Cas 9, the subject of the main […]

Developments in biotechnology over the last twenty years have been spectacular, as have those in other high-tech areas such as information science and nanotechnology. In all these fields, intellectual property issues are crucial to the development of what is essentially a scientific and technical activity. The particularity of biotechnology is that it involves living organisms […]

On 20 March 2024, the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC) celebrated a victoryi : the failure of the European Commission to push through its plan to deregulate GMOs/NGTs, in particular because the issue of patents blocked discussions between governments. The Commission justified – and still justifies – its proposal for deregulation on the grounds that […]

The 1998 court case between the Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser and Monsanto paved the way for other legal actions in the United States and Europe. Today, farmers, plant breeders and peasants – the “small farmers” – are more than ever at the mercy of legal action by the industry and its patents. A historic dispute […]