The National Farmers Union warned when Canada passed the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act that someday farmers would be banned from planting seed from their own harvests.
That is exactly what has happened, it said about a regulation recently posted in the federal government’s Gazette.
“It is now illegal for farmers who purchase these PBR-protected varieties to use seed, cuttings, tubers or bulbs they harvest to grow future crops on their own farms,” the NFU said.
It said this benefits six multinational seed companies (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, BASF, Limagrain and KWS) who control 64 per cent of the global commercial seed market.
It said most vegetable seed used by Canadian farmers is bred and sold by these corporations, grown abroad, and imported.
“Eliminating Farmers’ Privilege on hybrid varieties indicates how excessive industry demands are – they feel the need to legally eliminate the practice of seed-saving which is already accomplished biologically,” said Terry Boehm, former NFU president.
At the same time, after decades of budget cut-backs and austerity measures, the drastic cuts to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) research capacity announced in January directly attack public plant breeding that has been the backbone of Canada’s agricultural economy for 140 years, the NFU said.
If the government does not reverse these plans, the cuts will eliminate key scientific positions and destroy the network of specialized plots of land with representative soil types and growing conditions needed to test potential varieties in the real-life conditions farmers face, it said.
Eliminating critical parts of our public plant breeding capacity hampers development of high-quality, lower-cost publicly bred seed and further concentrates power over Canada’s seed system in the hands of large private seed companies, it said.
“It appears that the AAFC cuts and this regulatory change go hand in hand,” said Boehm. “The government is dismantling a public plant breeding system that has served Canadian farmers for generations to make Canada’s seed sector more profitable for large private companies.
“The result will be fewer farmer-focused varieties, higher seed costs, and greater dependence on foreign-owned seed corporations whose priorities are profit, not the long-term resilience of Canadian agriculture,” Boehm said.
AAFC usually has its expensive public relations machine crank out a news release to announce such important changes.
Not this time. Perhaps they're ashamed of this sell-out of farmers and the Canadian public.
