These projects require financial resources to maintain access to land, equipment, and labor. A movement of independent seed companies, breeders, growers, and stewards are focused on maintaining and increasing seed biodiversity to create varieties that can thrive in the coming world. These companies have systematically prioritized crop traits that improve production-traits like uniformity, yield, and agrochemical resistance-at the expense of traits that strengthen plant varieties against environmental pressures-traits like diversity, regional adaptation, and low-resource use.Īs the climate destabilizes, the predictable seasons, soil health, and water availability that once supported monoculture and industrial farming will continue to become more chaotic. Instead, these political and economic forces have created a market structure in which just four companies control 60% of the world’s seed stock. 1Įmboldened by federal laws and legal decisions during the 20th century, major companies and other plant variety developers have tied up seeds and genetic traits with restrictive intellectual property claims, an arrogation of policy that had been conceived to spur innovation in plant breeding and increase the diversity of seeds available to farmers. Over the last 150 years, much of the world’s plant genetic diversity in our food system has been lost, due primarily to the industrialization of agriculture and consolidation of power within the seed industry. The following guide was written by Paulina Jenney and adapted from her professional paper, “ Keeping What You Sow: Intellectual Property Rights for Plant Breeders and Seed Growers,” submitted in May 2022 to the University of Montana.
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