Category: Breeding

Andre Heitz trained as an agronomist at the Ecole nationale supérieure agronomique de Montpellier, France and spent most of his career in intellectual property with several international organisations, with a particular focus on plants and seeds. He left the following as a comment to a recent post here which followed up an earlier one on an IIED press release which came out just ahead of the World Seed Conference, and has kindly agreed to our suggestion to elevate it to post status.

I recently discovered this blog, and will be an assiduous reader, and more.

The bottom line here is that an entity supposed to, or pretending to, work for development has shot against an international conference whose purpose was to promote improved access by farmers to quality seed and thereby improve their livelihoods. It has done so using the tricks that are standard tools for the many non-governmental organisations, private businesses incorporated as non-profit organisations and academics who profess, in the final analysis, that the future lies in the past.

In this particular instance there was scaremongering based on the reference to GURTs. Yet the IIED cannot ignore that there are no GURT varieties on the market and that they are the subject of a moratorium under the CBD. Furthermore, if the IIED had a minimum of understanding of agriculture and agricultural socio-economics, they would not ignore that GURT varieties are unlikely to be taken up by poor farmers (as a matter of fact, a GURT variety must incorporate an enormous improvement over ‘conventional’ varieties for the GURT system to be profitable for the breeding and seed industry and acceptable to farmers; and even then, it will have to compete with non-GURT varieties showing the same improvement).

There was also a deliberate lie with the “Western governments and the seed industry want to upgrade the UPOV Convention”, for there is no plan to tinker with the Convention.

Continue reading “A reply to IIED”