This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture. Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the trade bodies sponsoring the African Continental Free Trade Area seek to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.
contributed reporting for this article.
A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.
This is dystopian as hell. IP law has gone way too far. We need to reform or abolish all IP. The terms are far too generous to their owners, like their wish list was actually put into law. There...
This is dystopian as hell. IP law has gone way too far. We need to reform or abolish all IP. The terms are far too generous to their owners, like their wish list was actually put into law. There needs to be a severe curtailing of these rules. We also need to establish a universal set of fair use and fair sharing rules for people that respects peoples dignity and traditions.
I'm very shocked that it's at all legally possible. What is the wording that allows patenting an unmodified seed variety which is already in common use? How can that possibly be spun in a...
Was it possible, the farmers asked, that Ghanaian police could be empowered to imprison cowpea farmers for trading and refining “unregulated” native seed stocks?
“The law is real,” Pabia explained in the local language.
How was it possible that people continuing to farm in that lineage, some 5,000 years later, could face 15 years in prison for infringing property claims on crop varieties based on the local original?
I'm very shocked that it's at all legally possible. What is the wording that allows patenting an unmodified seed variety which is already in common use? How can that possibly be spun in a reasonable manner?
I was not able to find it with a quick glance at the pdf ( https://www.bilaterals.org/?afcfta-protocol-of-on-intellectual ). Article 8 seems to deal with new varieties only. Article 20 might be relevant but I'm not sure how to interpret it for this context.
Presumably the key wording is in the Annex on Plant Variety Protection which I can't find a link for right now?
contributed reporting for this article.
This is dystopian as hell. IP law has gone way too far. We need to reform or abolish all IP. The terms are far too generous to their owners, like their wish list was actually put into law. There needs to be a severe curtailing of these rules. We also need to establish a universal set of fair use and fair sharing rules for people that respects peoples dignity and traditions.
I'm very shocked that it's at all legally possible. What is the wording that allows patenting an unmodified seed variety which is already in common use? How can that possibly be spun in a reasonable manner?
I was not able to find it with a quick glance at the pdf ( https://www.bilaterals.org/?afcfta-protocol-of-on-intellectual ). Article 8 seems to deal with new varieties only. Article 20 might be relevant but I'm not sure how to interpret it for this context.
Presumably the key wording is in the Annex on Plant Variety Protection which I can't find a link for right now?