Category: Policy

According to a new research paper from the Quaker UN Office, those seeking positive policy change around seeds should look to progress in the “access to medicines” problem for inspiration. The paper identifies several similarities in context and recommends priority areas for action at the national, international and multilateral levels. We thank the author, Patrick Endall, for the following post summarizing the paper.

Governments’ ability to ensure citizens’ access to medicines is heavily dependent on the legal framework governing their production and distribution. Similarly, the way farmers acquire and use seeds is increasingly contingent on laws governing the use of plant genetic resources. The expansion of intellectual property (IP) rules in these areas has had significant impacts on both public health and agriculture.

Farmers’ freedom to experiment with, save, re-use and sell seed has underpinned thousands of years of agricultural innovation, including the development of locally-adapted varieties and the maintenance of on-farm biodiversity. Worryingly, the tightening of rules around varieties ‘protected’ by IP rights has been linked with reduced rates of seed-saving and a simultaneous increase in the price of seeds that farmers are then required to purchase.

For medicines, the expansion of IP rules (particularly through trade agreements) has restricted the production of less costly, generic versions of patented drugs. Collectively, these circumstances leave both the public health and agricultural sectors vulnerable to shocks. One such shock was the HIV/AIDS crisis, which came to a head in the late 1990s, catalysing a substantial global debate around medicines. When pharmaceutical companies filed a lawsuit against a South African government seeking to reduce the cost of medicines to HIV/AIDS sufferers, global public opinion turned on them — and by extension their government supporters. This level of scrutiny lent force to a coalition of less powerful countries negotiating at the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose efforts culminated in 2001 with a Declaration in which states asserted the primacy of public health needs over private IP rights.

Vitally, this has provided governments with the policy space to undertake a number of practices that allow their citizens to access medicines more affordably. Unfortunately, the same level of public awareness of the increasing restrictions on farmers’ freedom to experiment with, save, re-use and sell seed has not yet been achieved. Nor have the negative effects of such restrictions been reduced to the kind of easily comprehensible profits vs lives equation that access to medicines advocates successfully popularised. It is therefore an area where more work could be beneficial.

Greater public scrutiny of agriculture could give governments more confidence in using the flexibilities that already exist in international law for the purpose of supporting farmers’ various uses of seeds and the environmental benefits that accrue from these activities. WTO members are obliged to provide some form of plant variety protection (PVP) to commercial seed breeders, but have the option of developing systems tailored to the national context (“sui generis” systems). To ensure that PVP laws strike the necessary balance between the interests of rights holders and those of the public, it is extremely important that states make use of this option, though limited institutional capacity and external pressures may make this a considerable challenge.

The task would be easier if the governance framework for plant genetic resources were clearer. At present, states must pick through a complicated, overlapping and occasionally contradictory set of treaties and other agreements on the subject. The “access to medicines” debate kick-started a lengthy collaboration between the World Health Organization, WTO and World Intellectual Property Organisation with the aim of enhancing a mutually supportive implementation of public health and IP policies. Similar collaboration is required between the numerous institutions responsible for agriculture, trade and intellectual property. Farmer livelihoods, future food security and global biodiversity depend on it.