F
ood security is one of those issues that I hear about regularly from constituents. For some, it means access to affordable food, while for others, it is the ability for Vancouver Island to provide more of the food its residents eat.
For others though, food security is having a large number of small farmers growing a variety of crops in a sustainable way, including time-honoured practices like saving seed from the best plants to propagate the next year’s crop.
That is why Bill C-18, an omnibus agriculture bill that will affect many pieces of legislation, is causing great concern among farmers and food security advocates.
Bill C-18 will make it a “privilege” for farmers to save seed and propagate new crops from their saved seed.
The last time farmers had the “privilege” to save seed was during feudal Europe, when aristocratic landowners determined how serfs would farm and how much of their labour they were allowed to keep.
The amendments to the Plant Breeders Rights Act in Bill C-18 are designed to bring Canada into compliance with UPOV ’91, a controversial protocol designed to protect major agri-businesses’ rights on new seed varieties.
It will give them the right to collect “end-point-royalties” in perpetuity because every crop grown from those seeds, including saved seed and crops grown from them, will be charged.
While the plant breeders who are pushing this legislation call it a potential new revenue stream, the farmers who will have to pay those royalties see it as a new cost that will limit their ability to farm as people have done for millennia — by saving seeds and using them the next season. If forced to buy new seed every year, farmers will have to pass that cost on.
As consumers, we should all be concerned. This has the potential to raise the cost of many basic food-stuffs, including the grains we use every day in bread, breakfast cereals and for cooking.
But it isn’t just grains. Every plant that is grown by farmers has the potential to be affected by these changes, including potatoes, salad greens and pulses like lentils and beans.
That National Farmers Union (NFU) is raising major concerns about the changes to the Plant Breeders Rights Act and how it will affect Canadians.
Private plant breeders will have no incentive to produce varieties for local or regional conditions, like the wheat varieties developed in the last century for the Prairie conditions that helped make Canada a breadbasket for the world.
Most of those were developed by public plant breeders. The NFU is arguing that any changes should actually promote plant breeding that is in the public interest, which depends less on other inputs like patent-protected pesticides or fertilizers.
And public breeders are less likely to remove their varieties from registration once the plant breeder rights expire.
To learn more about Bill C-18 and why farmers are concerned, follow the links on my website at www.jeancrowder.ca.
