Keep Farmers’ Right to use Farm Saved Seed!

The corporate seed industry wants to make farmers pay seed companies for seed every year even when we use farm-saved seed. This could be done by changing regulations under the UPOV ’91 Plant Breeders Rights Act. The seed industry claims that by charging royalties on farm saved seed, private companies would get a better return on investment, encouraging them to do more plant breeding in Canada. Such a system would result in privatization of our plant breeding system, higher seed costs for farmers, seed bred to serve corporate goals such as increased herbicide sales, and more surveillance and control over farmers.

The NFU opposes the UPOV ’91 seed law, which Canada enacted in 2015, because it turns farmers’ age-old right to save and use farm saved seed into a privilege that can be taken away by regulation. We call for keeping farmers’ right to save and use our own seed, and for public funding and farmer-controlled check-off funding to support plant breeding in the public interest.

In 2018 Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) held a series of consultation meetings with farmers in several locations across Canada, asking which system of increasing seed costs and reducing farmers’ ability to use farm saved seed they preferred: End Point Royalties or Trailing Contracts. The End Point Royalty approach would require farmers to pay a royalty on their harvested crop (a per bushel royalty) if they grow a newer variety. The Trailing Contract approach would require farmers get seed company for permission and pay a royalty in order to plant seed saved from previous crop when using a newer variety covered by UPOV 91 Plant Breeders Rights. The seed industry liked the Trailing Contract option best because it would both bring in more money and would involve setting up a comprehensive data collection system to track farm saved seed users. The seed industry calculated they could collect over $100 million of dollars every year from these compulsory payments. This money would go to seed companies such as Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and DowDupont (now Corteva). The system for charging a royalty on crops harvested from farm saved seed would be developed for wheat first, with the intent of applying it to other cereal crops, pulse crops, and other crop kinds later.

Not surprisingly, farmers resoundingly rejected both options. By August 2020 AAFC had officially retreated from this proposal, but the corporate seed lobby is still trying to bring in payment for farm saved seed in other ways, including “Variety Use Agreements” which are modeled after Trailing Contracts, but implemented by the seed companies, not by regulation.

The NFU is opposed to End Point Royalties, Trailing Contracts and Variety Use Agreements. These are simply ways to increase the monopoly power of seed companies by forcing farmers to pay more for seed, restricting farmers’ right to save seed and making us pay them for seed we grow on our farms.