Explained | What is the open-source seeds movement? Premium
The Hindu
Farmers have innovated and shared seeds without any intellectual property rights claims for centuries. Farmers also haven’t sought exclusive rights over seeds and germplasm to prevent others from innovating on the seeds.
Open source software like Linux is well-known and widely used. The origin of this concept can be traced to the ‘Free Software Movement’, which emphasised users’ right to the source code, to share, to modify, and to distribute modifications.
Richard Stallman, the U.S. programmer who pioneered this idea, also developed the General Public License (GPL), the first of the ‘Free and Open Source Software’ licences: it used copyright law to protect users’ rights and prevent misappropriation. If a piece of code is licensed GPL, then modifications to it should be GPL as well; this requirement also furthered the use of the licence.
Software and seeds seem as different as chalk and cheese – but as programmers have done for decades, farmers have innovated and shared seeds without any intellectual property rights (IPR) claims for centuries. Farmers also haven’t sought exclusive rights over seeds and germplasm to prevent others from innovating on the seeds. In this regard, software and seeds actually have a strong parallel.
But in stark contrast to GPL’s effects on the programming community, the advent of hybrid seeds, the growth of the commercial seed industry, scientific plant-breeding, and some other factors conferred plant breeders and developers of new varieties with the so called plant breeders’ rights (PBR). In this regime, farmers’ rights were limited while rights-holders could demand royalty on seeds and legally enforce PBRs. In some countries, the PBR regulations allow rights-holders to restrict the unauthorised use of seeds to develop new varieties.
In 1994, the establishment of the World Trade Organisation and then the Trade-Related IPR Agreement cast a global IPR regime over plant varieties. TRIPS required countries to provide at least one form of IP protection while consolidation in the seeds sector raised concerns about the freedom to innovate.
The Green Revolution was spearheaded by public-sector breeding institutions and seeds were available as ‘open pollinated varieties’, or as reasonably priced hybrids with no restrictions on farmers to cultivate, reuse and share. But the genetic revolution in agriculture was led by the private sector, with seeds mostly made available as hybrids and/or protected by strong IPRs.
In effect, there are now two forms of IPR protection in agriculture: plant-breeders’ rights and patents. Together, they restrict farmers’ rights and the freedom to develop new varieties using germplasm from IP-protected varieties. They have thus further consolidated the seed sector and increased the number of plant varieties covered by IPRs.