FOR millennia, crop seeds have been regarded as a common good, bred by farmers into a rich diversity of cultivars. Over the past 70 years, however, genetic resources in agriculture have been increasingly privatised, made possible by intellectual property rights such as patents and plant variety protection.
Today, three corporations control more than 60 per cent of the global commercial seed market. This creates uniformity in agricultural production, stifles innovation and makes society increasingly dependent on just a few companies, with diminishing choice and rising costs.
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All this is diametrically opposed to what is required to cope with global agricultural challenges: adaptation to climate change, increased production to feed an expected 11 billion people and transformation of agriculture based on agrochemicals into an organic form. For this, we need a great diversity of crops with manifold cultivars. The private seed sector cannot supply this. Instead, we need a commons-based seed sector.
With the Open Source Seed (OSS) Licence and the newly established service provider , the German NGO Agrecol offers plant breeders a chance to maintain seeds as a commons. The first OSS licensed cultivar, the tomato Sunviva, was presented in 2017.
鈥淒iversity is essential for maintaining food security, ecosystem services and cultural landscapes鈥�
The OSS Licence sets three rules. Anyone may use the seed, multiply it, enhance it, breed with it and pass it on within . No one may privatise the seed and any further developments. And each recipient assigns the same obligations to further developments.
Plant breeding must be seen as a societal task rather than an economic activity. If cultivars are developed for small, site-specific purposes, revenues from patent royalties would be insufficient to finance plant breeding.
Seed diversity is essential for maintaining food security, ecosystem services and cultural landscapes, but most of all for enhancing our capacity to adapt to climate change.
