News

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a Pan African platform comprising civil society networks and farmer organisations working towards food sovereignty in Africa, and representing millions of small-scale farmers, has been shunned by the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO).

Sharing and saving seed is a crucial part of traditional farming all over Africa, writes Heidi Chow. Maybe that's why governments, backed by multinational seed companies, are imposing oppressive seed laws that attack the continent's main food producers and open the way to industrial agribusiness. But Ghana's women farmers are having none of it.

Susanne Gura, APBREBES (May 2015) Working Paper: Global, Profitable, Secret? DNA Fingerprints for Enforcement of UPOV’s Plant Variety Protection

According to the UPOV Conventions, it is up to member states to provide for appropriate legal remedies for the effective enforcement of the Conventions. But UPOV member states are being expected to play a crucial role in providing expensive technical and administrative infrastructure, as well as legally questionable confidentiality arrangements, in order to enable already powerful seed companies to enforce royalty income on the basis of evidence from DNA fingerprints of suspected seeds or plant material.

Today most intergovernmental organisations allow access to proceedings of its meetings. For example, in WIPO, the full report of its various meetings, including interventions and decisions of Member States are publicly available on its website.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) and the Union Paysanne (UP) are marking April 17, 2015, the International Day of Peasant Struggle by joining with other Canadian organizations in denouncing the recent passing of Bill C-18, the Agricultural Growth Act, and calling on the Government of Canada to reverse recent changes to the Plant Breeders Rights Act that put Canada under the UPOV ’91 regime.

Seeds are under attack everywhere. Under corporate pressure, laws in many countries increasingly put limitations on what farmers can do with their seeds and with the seeds they buy. Seed saving, a thousand-year-old practice which forms the basis of farming, is fast becoming criminalised.

A new booklet from La Via Campesina and GRAIN documents how big business and governments are moving to stop farmers from saving and exchanging their seeds, and shows how farmers are fighting back.

KARACHI: Fifty non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from across the country have urged the Senate not to pass an important bill the National Assembly quietly passed last month.

UPOV will be meeting in Geneva for its Spring session from 23-th to 27th March 2015. Its Administrative and Legal Committee (CAJ) will meet on 26th March, the Consultative Committee (CC) on 27th March in the morning while its highest decision-making body, the UPOV Council on 27th March in the afternoon. The meeting of the CC is closed to observers.

The Council

Sangeeta Shashikant (London): An upcoming UPOV meeting in Geneva will consider a proposal to establish a centralized harmonized system for the administration and examination of PBR applications to be known an “International System of Cooperation” (ISC), by way of a simple “agreement” adopted by the Council, UPOV’s highest governing body.