Farmers Upset over Seed Industry’s Indifference to Climate Change, Farmers’ Rights

Published on September 5, 2009

The UPOV convention protects the profits of powerful private corporations while failing to recognize and protect the rights and knowledge of poor farmers, said Swiderska, which conducted a research on this convention.

“This will further undermine the rights of farmers and promote the loss of seed diversity that poor communities depend on for resilience to changing climatic conditions,” she said.

“We strongly denounce the patenting of seeds. It is our campaign that there should be no patent to life and to plants. Seeds are part of nature, why should one be given a patent to nature when not one person owns nature?” Catarata asked.

“The farming communities that have developed and sustained a rich diversity of seeds over the millennia urgently need incentives to continue sustaining them,” said Ruchi Pant of Ecoserve in India. “They need the same rights over their traditional seed varieties and associated knowledge as corporations have over modern varieties that they develop and patent. The new seed laws being introduced in developing agrarian countries are posing a threat to the rights of small farmers to save, sow and exchange their traditional varieties.”

Catarata said the solution to the problem brought about by the seed patenting frenzy of multinational companies like Monsanto is to simply teach farmers to go back to the basics. This would mean the promotion of sustainable farming methods that use traditional seeds and organic inputs.

She, however, recognizes the fact that because of the wide promotion of the use of “modern” seeds, most traditional seed varieties have been lost, and that most farmers, who are already addicted with the promise of “modern” seeds, are reluctant to use traditional seeds.

Yet, this did not stop Fardec to push for sustainable farming as a key program to be implemented by its members.

“One of the important components in our program is community seed banking, because we believe that farmers should be controlling the seeds,” she said. “We encourage them to collect and preserve traditional varieties of seeds, especially for rice and corn because these are our staple food.”

Catarata said traditional seeds are endowed with qualities that would help mitigate the effects of climate change on crop production.

“We have 2,000 varieties of traditional rice seeds, both upland rice and lowland rice. The upland rice varieties are drought resistant so they don’t need as much water. We have many traditional seeds that are adaptable to the changing climate, and our farmers have their own mitigating measures against climate change,” says Catarata. “For us, sustainable agriculture is one of our responses to the issue of climate change.” (Bulatlat.com)

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