IFOAM Organics Europe welcomes the statement of a large coalition of German organisations representing conventional farmers, organic farmers, plant breeders, and churches, calling policymakers to change the EU legislation to prevent the monopolisation of genetic resources through patents on conventional breeding or genetic engineering. This call is especially relevant for the current negotiations on NGTs.
Jan Plagge, president of IFOAM Organics Europe, commented: “The unusually close alliance of conventional and organic agriculture, breeding, and churches shows that we are dealing with one of the most pressing issues in the agricultural sector. A legally secure solution to the patent issue is indispensable to effectively protect European agriculture and breeding from the increasing patenting of plant and plant properties by corporations. As a broad alliance across all supposed differences, we make pragmatic proposals on how this can succeed and call on politicians to act swiftly.”
In Germany, eight associations, including the Federal Association of German Dairy Farmers, the Federal Association of German Plant Breeders, Bioland, the Association for Organic Food Production, the German Farmers’ Association, the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Catholic Rural Movement of Germany, and the Catholic Rural Youth Movement, have united in a call to effectively and legally restrict patents on biological material for plant breeding. This coalition emphasises the urgent need to protect conventional breeding, including random mutagenesis and genetically modified organisms, from new genetic engineering.
In a joint position paper, the alliance highlights the seriousness of the situation due to the feared relaxation of EU genetic engineering law. Patents on plants, which are essentially prohibited in the EU, have been granted for some time through a lax interpretation of European patent law. The planned EU genetic engineering law would provide seed companies even more legal leeway to patent plant properties of any origin. This flood of patents further restricts free access to genetic diversity in breeding and increases the dependency of agriculture, which a coalition of over 200 organisations has been warning about for a long time.
The central demand of the paper is “a comprehensive restriction on the patenting of biological material for plant breeding, which also occurs in nature, could occur, or has arisen by chance”. The eight associations propose three key instruments to resolve the patent issue legally and securely:
- EU-wide exclusion of products of random mutagenesis from patenting, as already implemented in the Austrian Patent Act, to protect conventional breeding;
- Introduction of a “full breeder’s exemption” by amending the EU Bio-Patent Directive 98/44 according to the proposal of HU Prof. Metzger;
- Implementation of the preceding legal changes also in the European Patent Convention (EPC) and UPC.
- Further information available at www.organicseurope.bio
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