Farmers' Rights: The crisis every Ugandan farmer needs to know about

FARMERS' RIGHTS: THE CRISIS EVERY UGANDAN FARMER NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT. By Wamusiru Mundaka, Programme Manager Agriculture and Extension

[picture] Small Scale farmers as one above will barely servive if natures 'gifts' are turned into 'properties' The Leipzig NGO declaration on Farmers' Rights in 1996 reads in part: "The central objective of Farmers Rights (FRs) is to ensure control of and access to agricultural bio-diversity by local communities, so that they can continue to develop their farming systems further and sustainably ....' Farmers must have the right to benefit from their biological resources and related knowledge. The right to save, exchange and improve seeds is inalienable.

Ownership and innovation at the local level in Uganda are often of a collective nature. Farmers' Rights should be based on this principle, and should protect and promote such collectively held knowledge systems and resources. Collective knowledge is intemately linked to cultural diversity, land and biodiversity and cannot be dissociated from either of these three aspects. Any definition and implementation of Farmers rights should take this fully into account. Farmers' rights in Africa are not compatible with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) systems based on private monopoly control.

A major problem in the development and saving of agricultural biodiversity is the lack of rights to land. Farmers' Rights should include legal recognition of land rights.

"As Farmers' Rights are an expression of the contribution of farming communities to their innovative capacity as breeders, users and managers of biodiversity, they should include the right to an appropriate and participatory research support ......."

Uganda is rich in biodiversity and even more important the farming communities, comprising more than 90% the total population, have nurtured and developed diversity, and should recover rights over these materials as a basis for sustainable livelihoods. There is need to advocate and take a radical stand to push for the difinition and implementation of these rights in the national and international fora.

Accordingly, between 11th and 12th July 1996, a national NGO Workshop on the convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was held in Kampala, Uganda. A National NGO Working Group on Biodiversity (NGO WB) was formed. A plan of action was developed outlining the goals, activities and mechanisms through which NGOs in Uganda will implement various articles in the CBO. Among their priorities areas of action were ...."Advocacy for protection of local peoples' indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights as well as promotion of equitable sharing of benefits."

It has now been over one year since these deliberations in Kampala were formed. That any progress has been made toward the "the protection of local peoples' indigenous knowledge and intellectual property rights... "is doubtable!

Although the protection of local systems has undoubtedly been the common goal of all civil society organisations involved with the issue, it now seems that many of the alternative regimes being developed actually work against it. Conceptual chaos ensues as soon as an attempt or community equivalent" of basic concepts of the present industrial property system. Thus, "Collective intellectual property" or "just and equitable distribution" are concepts that are not compatible with the western systems of knowledge creation that are currently being investigated and developed.

In Uganda's peasant communities (which is over 90% of the population) the words "mine" yours" or "ours" do not necessarily refer to" property". These words are normally associated with the concept of the gift and thus something which cannot be appropriated, sold or restricted, much less monopolised.

There is an important difference between a "gift" and "property". The right to enjoy a gift (through various means such as use, sharing, celebration or coutemplation) goes to hand in hand with the obligation to protect it, strengthen it, ensure its proper use when needed, share it with others and pass it on as a further enriched legacy. Our people have always understood that weather, land, water, plants, seeds and their corresponding knowledge are a gift, just like family community and the ability to be in touch with God, Nature and life.

The concrete expressions of this cosmology are countless, but perhaps the most common is that seeds and knowledge are shared with pride and given away as a great honour. This part of the "gyamela gyenne"syndrome - a verbal expression used when a white colonialist passed through Busoga and requested to know who planted the huge mivule trees in the sorrounding tropical forest; the native proudly answered "Gyamela gyenne" meaning " they sprouted by themselves"- a gift of nature!!

The high appreciation for nature and this form of sharing is of fundamental importance for the flow and creation of knowledge and for the creation, adaption and dissemination of diversity. It is also of importance for cultural survival. The system of exchange and free flow established by our people enabled them to survive, adapt and "absorb" non indigenous communities.

Two hundred years of cultural resistance was possible because peasant culture derived from it, co-adapted to keep flowing and evolving through any free space that was left for it. One hard blow was in the name of Green Revolution which has been effective against local cultures. This is because it prevents the flow of local knowledge by denigrating and devaluing it. Farmers have been told that to be modern he has to practice row cropping" when the issue is spacing and plant population. Row cropping was developed to facilitate machinery which the peasant farmers don't have and can't afford. Moreover they were discouraged to use traditional methods particularly when peasant farmers were told "that mixed cropping is primitive" and so on! Thousands of peasant farmers and local researchers, elders and healers kept their knowledge locked up in order not to be humiliated. It has taken little more than a generation for much of this knowledge and its associated resources to disappear from lack of use or circulation in modern context. The "gift" of seeds and knowledge has been converted into "property". This conversion is resulting into loss of value as well as sacredness of "gift" seeds.

With central values depreciating, there is profound impact on communities, often affecting their ability to live with dignity and creativity. It is also hard to maintain mechanisms for protection of resources and knowledge once they are converted to merchandise. Any mechanism allowing "property rights" to life and knowledge - no matter how "communitarian" is at best gamble. To protect property rights over knowledge and biotic resource" is infact a powerful weapon to destroy indigenous knowledge and biotic resources (as long as they are viewed from the industrial perspective).

Indeed, it seems that there is a trade off here which needs to be made clear. Proposals which have been made to introduce sui generis legislation to provide means for the recognition and registration of community rights to traditonal knowledge, have the principle intention of protecting indigenous knowledge and bio-technologyfrom being monopolised by commercial interests. A cost may be that they facilitate the commoditisation of indigenous knowledge, albeit in a less exploitative manner. The social implications could nevertheless be serious and need to be confronted.

A defense of the architects of current proposals for sui generis legislation may be that (as one of us delegate retorted regarding Farmers' Right at the May '97 FAO Commission meeting in Rome) the west "does not understand" things which cannot be monetised, (and by exercising their sovereignity rights can legislate patents on life and knowledge) The best we can do is to protest such actions and hope they will change. At the same time the sui generis legislation would protect unregistered appropriation of genetic materials and knowledge by the west and if commercialised should pay due royalties to the originators. The WTO should be refused to impose such commercial activities within our sovereign states. They can commercialise in the US or wherever money is the only thing that can be "understood".

Western cosmology and culture is fake and always works to destroy itself - it is only a matter of time. By imposing "property systems" on life and knowledge the west loses fundemental values and rights as well as possibilities for the creation of knowledge.

Firstly, sacredness of life is an essential part of the beliefs and values which give full meaning to life. Without this, living and life are useless!

Secondly the foundations of our present scientific development were created on the basic assumption that knowledge was a common value created for the common good. However, not only is science manipulated by economic and political interests, but the exchange between scientists -- basic tool for accelarating creation of knowledge - is being systematically broken down.

Thirdly the more landable characteristcs of western values are being violated and eroded with their ensuing problems. For example public science (of free access, free creation and working for common good) is fast going!

There is need to do something about this trend of things. And one can say NO. The next logical step is to exercise our rights and plainly reject intellectual property altogether. We continue to negotiate, however attempting damage control through accommodation and to accept being governed by rules we know to be extremely damaging. The Sui genesis legislation is bad enough and should probably be rejected.

The Integrated Rural Development Initiatives (IRDI) can be contacted at:

The Executive Secretary, Integrated Rural Development Initiatives, P.O. Box 10596, Kampala, Uganda Tel: (256-41) 26 64 92 E-Mail: irdi(at)uol.co.ug