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October 2005 ( 2.7 Mo)
Type: Whole issue
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

The latest issue of Seedling further explores what we have come to call 'convergence': the ways in which people are resisting the push for monopoly rights over information in different sectors. The main feature is a panel interview from people working in different sectors in the fields of free and open software (FOSS), access to medicines, seeds, communications and the media. There is also an article about the synergies between the movements fighting for free seeds and free software, and some other convergence-related and -unrelated pieces.

IPR epicenters – a geography of intellectual property (165 kb)
Type: Editorial
Auteur: Peter Drahos Date: octobre 2005

Where is intellectual property policy made? Governments make intellectual property law, but where does the policy thinking that lies behind the law come from? More than a decade ago I, along with my colleague John Braithwaite, set out to answer this question.

Traductions: français  

Convergence (673 kb)
Type: Interviews
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

Seedling approached a number of people working in different sectors and from different perspectives and get their views on the possibilities for convergence. Our ten-person panel includes people working in the fields of free and open software (FOSS), access to medicines, seeds, communications and the media. (large page - on slow connections, may take a while to download)

Software and seeds: lessons in community sharing (331 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: Roberto Verzola Date: octobre 2005

In many countries, control over information has become a big issue. An underlying aspect of this control has been the use – or threat of use – of force to establish control. The aim is often to prevent information from being freely exchanged, creating an artificial scarcity that keeps information prices high. The fight to protect such freedoms is being fought out in many different arenas. Roberto Verzola explores the synergies, similarities and differences between those trying to protect the freedom of innovators in the worlds of software and seeds.

The FAO seed treaty: from farmers’ rights to breeders’ privileges (272 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture – sometimes called the ‘seed treaty’ – was adopted by UN Food and Agriculture (FAO) member states in 2001 and came into force in 2004. Governments that signed on are now working out implementation details. Far from its roots in the struggle to assert farmers’ rights as a counterforce to breeders’ rights, the Treaty has ended up being mainly about granting new privileges to industry. It will give seed companies free access to most of the world’s public genebanks without any obligation to share their own materials in return.

Traductions: français   Español

Blue fishers, blue genes: fishy undercurrents in post-tsunami Asia (238 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

At the same time as Asia’s fisherfolk are urging their governments to help re-establish artisanal fisheries after last year’s tsunami, an international ‘tsunami-recovery’ consortium is suggesting that they should abandon their livelihoods and find employment elsewhere. The fisherfolk also face other challenges – from growing pressures to switch over to industrial aquaculture and fishering, and the introduction of genetically modified fish.

The corporation - psychopathic and immortal
Type: Resources
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

Review and summary by GRAIN of the book and film "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan.

Traductions: français  

Jack Kloppenburg (253 kb)
Type: Interviews
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

Jack Kloppenburg is Professor of Rural Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US. He is well known for his analysis of the emergent social impacts of biotechnology, and for his work on the global controversy over access to and control of biodiversity. His recently-updated book First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology is regarded as a seminal work in this field. It was key in waking many people up to the social implications of biotechnology (including some of us at GRAIN), particularly with respect to the food system. Since then his work has broadened out to include working on ways to counter the growing corporatisation of the food system, focusing particularly on keeping the food supply sustainable, self-reliant and locally produced. He can be contacted at jrkloppe(at)facstaff.wisc.edu.

Traductions: français   Español

Tribal rights (f)or wrongs in India (162 kb)
Type: Sprouting up
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

The rights of traditional tribal communities have been at the centre of many a struggle with the State. But it’s another story when within the State machinery itself there are disagreements on if and how communities ought to control forest resources. So it has been in India.

GRAIN's change of name and award (109 kb)
Type: Homepage
Auteur: GRAIN Date: octobre 2005

July 2005 ( 6.7 Mo)
Type: Whole issue
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

SPECIAL SEED LAW SEEDLING!

This Seedling takes us through a number of experiences and brutal shifts going on with seed laws in different parts of the world today, in the hope of raising further debate and new ideas about how we can support truly autonomous and farmer-controlled seed supply systems.

Available in: English | français | Español

As a compliment, we have uploaded many seed laws from the South to the GRAIN website. Visit http://www.grain.org/go/seedlaws.

Seed laws: imposing agricultural apartheid (368 kb)
Type: Editorial
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

Back in the 1960s "seed laws" referred to rules governing the commercialisation of seeds: what materials could be sold on the market under what conditions. Agencies like the FAO and the World Bank played a very strong role in getting developing countries to adopt these seed laws, the main idea, officially speaking, was to ensure that only "good quality" planting materials reach farmers in order to raise productivity and therefore feed growing populations. However, the marketing rules, that the FAO and the World Bank effectively pushed, came from Europe and North America, the very place where the seed industry is in place. And the seed industry produces seeds by specialised professionals and no longer on the farm by farmers themselves. If we look at them today, seed laws are all about repression. They're about what farmers can't do.

Traductions: français   Español

Seed laws: biases and bottlenecks (604 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: Niels Louwaars Date: juillet 2005

Most countries of the world have some kind of seed law or seed regulatory system in place. In the countries of the South, they are largely patterned after the US or European models. Niels Louwaars, a Dutch researcher with the Centre for Genetic Resources in the Netherlands, has been studying and analysing seed laws in developing countries since 1992. He gives some background on how these systems work and highlights a few key issues related to diversity and small farmers' needs.

Traductions: français   Español

Seed laws in Europe: locking farmers out (723 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: Guy Kastler Date: juillet 2005

In Europe, the commercial seed supply system is highly organised and controlled. European law on seed marketing has evolved over the years to ensure that only uniform seeds for industrial farming can be sold on the market, condemning farmers ' seeds and traditional varieties to the black market if not complete illegality. Together with strong intellectual property rules and the production of hybrids, European seed laws lock farmers out of the seed system. This article is an extract from a longer work by Guy Kastler. Kastler is a French farmer involved with the Réseau Semences Paysannes, the Confédération Paysanne and Nature et Progrès. The article focuses on France which has taken the strictest approach to implementing seed laws in Europe, and perhaps the world.

Traductions: français   Español

Collective rights over farmers' seeds in Italy (707 kb)
Type: Interviews
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

In Italy, eight of the 18 administrative regions have adopted their own laws on local genetic resources since 1997. They generally aim to protect and promote traditional plant varieties and animal breeds in local farming systems as a heritage of the region. Since 2000, when the regional law of Latium was adopted, they also establish collective rights over the local genetic heritage. Below is an extract from an interview with Antonio Onorati, President of the Italian development NGO Crocevia, who has been very much involved in this movement. This segment focuses on the experience with collective rights in Italy and strategy ideas for protecting farmers ' seeds in Europe. The full interview can be accessed on the web at http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=336

Traductions: français   Español

Protecting and promoting farmers' seeds in Europe: Italy's experience with regional laws
Type: Interviews
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

An interview with Antonio Onorati

 In Italy, eight of the 18 administrative regions have adopted their own laws on local genetic resources since 1997. They generally aim to protect and promote traditional plant varieties and animal breeds in local farming systems as a heritage of the region. Since 2000, when the regional law of Latium was adopted, they also establish collective rights over the local genetic heritage. Below is an extract from an interview with Antonio Onorati, President of the Italian development NGO Crocevia, who has been very much involved in this movement.

Traductions: français  

India's new Seed Bill (885 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

A new Indian Seeds Bill in 2004 has been circulated by the government of India to overhaul the seed regulatory system. The stated objective of the proposed law is to regulate the seed market and ensure seeds of "quality". With the proposed changes the seed law would be harmonised with other seed laws around the world and ensure the Indian seed market is open to big business. This article clearly demonstrates that the losers are the millions of Indian small-scale farmers, whilst the winners are once again the transnational corporations. Whilst there is enormous pressure on the Indian government to embrace this new law, it is now time to ensure that voices in protest are heard.

Traductions: français   Español

Africa's seeds laws: red carpet for corporations ( 2.6 Mo)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

Up until the 1990s, seed regulations in Africa were generally organised around public seed programmes, with seed laws, where they existed, mostly limited to import and export restrictions. There was little coordination between countries, with regulations often heavily influenced by the respective donors and very little enforcement on the ground. Indeed, with few exceptions, the vast majority of African farmers have hardly been affected by seed laws or regulations. But out of the larger context of structural adjustment programmes, trade liberalisation, and the consolidation of a transnational seed industry desperate to expand markets, processes have sprouted up over the past decade that are fast-forwarding the implementation of industry-friendly regulations and laws, with scant regard for the impacts on farmer seed systems.

Traductions: français   Español

Latin America: privatising seed laws (579 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

New seed laws are being introduced throughout Latin America. While government intervention in market processes continues to decline in the region, when it comes to seed legislation the states have been laying down some strict laws. These laws vary considerably between each country, but a universal theme that unites them is to provide better protection of private seed varieties developed by companies and sideline farmers’ own seeds. In many cases, farmers’ own seeds are, or will become, illegal.

Traductions: français   Español

Sharing power: learning by doing in co-management of natural resources throughout the world (782 kb)
Type: Resources
Auteur: GRAIN Date: juillet 2005

GRAIN review of "Sharing power: learning by doing in co-management of natural resources throughout the world" by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend, Michel Pimbert, M. Taghi Farvar, Ashish Kotari and Yves Renard

April 2005 ( 4.3 Mo)
Type: Whole issue
Auteur: GRAIN Date: avril 2005

A bumper issue of a Seedling with a diverse number of articles from an editorial on Food Sovereignty, a discussion of the CBD ABS, a highly critical look at environmental services to articles on USAID and Bt cotton in Africa.

Food Sovereignty: turning the global food system upside down (403 kb)
Type: Editorial
Auteur: GRAIN Date: avril 2005

Food sovereignty is a solid alternative to the current mainstream thinking on food production. The struggle for food sovereignty incorporates such wide ranging issues as land reform, territo-rial control, local markets, biodiversity, autonomy, cooperation, debt, health, and many other issues that are of central importance to be able to produce food locally. Food sovereignty also brings together peasants and farmers from the North and South and allows different move-ments to come together in their struggles.

Traductions: français   Español

Re-situating the benefits from biodiversity (828 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: avril 2005

In 2004, the members of the Convention on Biological Diversity started negotiating an "international regime on access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing". Many developing country governments are enthusiastic about this process. They speak about it as something which will put an end to biopiracy and finally realise the "fair and equitable sharing of benefits" derived from biodiversity, long promised by the CBD. In reality, the regime will have very little to do with benefit-sharing at all, much less with fair and equitable sharing. The focus will remain where it has always been in the CBD's discussions: on access to genes for research and commercialisation, and on setting a price for such access. The only new element likely to materialise in the regime is some form of international enforcement for national access legislations, possibly a system of certificates to prove that a genetic resource has been lawfully acquired.

Traductions: français  

Bt cotton in South Africa: the case of the Makhathini farmers ( 1.2 Mo)
Type: Article
Auteur: Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss Date: avril 2005

This article summarises the results of five years of research undertaken by Biowatch South Africa on the socio-economic impact of Bt cotton on small-scale farmers in South Africa. It forms part of a comprehensive research paper on the topic that will be published later this year.

(This paper has been written by Elfrieda Pschorn-Strauss, a researcher with Biowatch South Africa. The research has been done with the assistance of Lawrence Mkhaliphi, Charles Louw, Wendy Forse and Gwendolyn Wellmann.)

USAID in Africa: 'For the American Corporations' (673 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: avril 2005

This article examines how the US government uses the International Agency for Development (USAID) to advance a global agenda for GM agriculture. The focus is on USAID’s major programmes for agricultural biotechnology in Africa.

Traductions: français   Español

No, air, don’t sell yourself … (795 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: avril 2005

The concept of “environmental services” has become popular over the last decade and has crept insidiously into our collective consciousness without setting off the alarm bells it should have done. Environmental services pro-vide the means of taking privatisation to a new level – a means of privatising many things that have as-yet been unavailable for privatisation: air, water and all sorts of other ecological processes. What has been undertaken so far in the name of environmental services, and what are the implications of turning such basic elements into commodities?

A Global Week of Action against GM, in Andhra Pradesh, India (198 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN & DDS Date: avril 2005

Push for GM papaya continues in Thailand and South-East Asia (172 kb)
Type: Sprouting up
Auteur: GRAIN & BioThai Date: avril 2005

January 2005 ( 2.2 Mo)
Type: Whole issue
Auteur: GRAIN Date: janvier 2005

Fiasco in the Field: an update on hybrid rice in Asia (392 kb)
(224 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: GRAIN Date: janvier 2005

A new report from GRAIN follows up on the fate of hybrid rice in Asia. An earlier study in 2000 saw the push for hybrid rice coming from the seed industry as a stepping-stone to genetically modified (GM) rice. The report looks at how hybrid rice has fared with farmers and the shifting dynamics and ambitions of those pushing hybrid rice in the region. Despite continued enthusiastic support from seed companies and international agencies, hybrid rice continues to be viewed by farmers as a pretty useless technology and the area planted has increased little in the last five years .

Corporate conquest, global geopolitics: Intellectual property rights and bilateral investment treaties (481 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: Aziz Choudry Date: janvier 2005

Since the breakdown of World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun in September 2003, there has been much talk of the rise of bilateralism. But bilateral trade and investment agreements aren’t so much replacing the multilateral agreements that have foreshadowed them in the last decade as working with them to create a ratcheting system to increase the levels of intellectual property protection worldwide. Interestingly, and perhaps more significantly, bilateral trade and investment agreements are also proving to be quite effective in pushing the foreign policy goals of the US and EU.

Traductions: Español

Territory, autonomy and defending maize (276 kb)
Type: Interviews
Auteur: Carlos Santos interviews Aldo Gonzalez Date: janvier 2005

Aldo Gonzalez is an indigenous person from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, where community organisations are leading a major resistance movement against the contamination of native maize by transgenic seeds. The movement is guided by the ancestral relationships between people and their natural surroundings. Politically, the resistance movement is linked to the struggle for autonomy by and for local communities, and is rooted in a particular indigenous vision of the world. In Oaxaca and in other Mexican states, defending maize is a cornerstone of defending a community’s autonomy .

Diversa dominates global search for blockbuster microbes (152 kb)
Type: Sprouting up
Auteur: GRAIN Date: janvier 2005

In the last decade the US’ Diversa corporation has expanded its bioprospecting activities all over the globe, placing it very high – if not top – of the list of the world’s bioprospectors.

Uncultivated food: food that money can't buy (347 kb)
Type: Article
Auteur: SANFEC Date: janvier 2005

The presence of uncultivated food in the food systems of South Asia is a survival issue for many of the poorest families, some of whom rely on uncultivated food for 100% of their dietary needs. This article underlines the critical connection between the conservation of the local diversity of food sources and the broader social goals of poverty alleviation, livelihood enhancement and sustainable development.