The missed step at COP16
At COP16’s Trade Day, leaders should have recognized the importance of farmer-managed seed systems for protecting biodiversity, and called out the role of damaging UPOV91 trade rules in undermining them.
At the weekend, government representatives from around the world met in Cali, Colombia for the Conference on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference of Parties (COP). For the first time ever, the CBD COP had a dedicated ‘Trade Day’ on the 26th October. This was a significant step, given that the role of trade in biodiversity loss has long been overlooked.
Biodiversity is vital for all life on earth. For humans, it’s needed for food production, clean water, clean air and our general health and wellbeing. Many livelihoods depend on it, particularly agriculture, which employes an estimated 2 billion people.
In recognition of this, in 1993, governments from around the world signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), with three distinct aims:
The conservation of biological diversity
The sustainable use of the components of biological diversity
The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources
The most obvious link between trade and biodiversity loss is the role in driving export-oriented agriculture, such as the vast swathes of the Amazon rainforest cut down for soy and beef production for export to the rest of the world. However, it’s not just trade in physical foodstuffs that’s a problem; trade rules also undermine biodiversity in more subtle- but nevertheless damaging- ways.
A prime example of this is the way that trade rules undermine farmer-managed seed systems. Through trade agreements and international trade rules, governments are often pushed to introduce laws which prohibit farmers from saving, exchanging and re-using protected seed varieties, by complying with the Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV91).
UPOV91 was designed with the primary purpose of shielding the intellectual property rights of plant breeders (often multibillion dollar corporations such as Bayer or Syngenta) to ensure that when their seeds are sold to farmers, they must not be saved or stored, but must be bought new every season to keep the plant breeder company profits going.
Under the UPOV91 system, new plant varieties must be ‘uniform’ and ‘stable’, meaning that their genetic makeup remains the same, year in, year out. As a result, unlike indigenous seeds, they do not evolve and change within the ecosystem in which they grow. This - many argue - means that these crops are predictable and reliable for multiple seasons, so farmers can grow field upon field of one crop without the risk of crop failure.
However as a result, biodiversity has suffered greatly. The UN FAO estimate that between 1900-1990, a staggering 75% of plant genetic diversity was lost “as farmers worldwide have left their multiple local varieties and landraces for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties”. Furthermore, the promise of commercial seeds preventing crop failure from pests and diseases has often proved to be false, as demonstrated by the disaster of genetically modified cotton in India where, after a boom in production in the early 2000s, in 2014 80% of the crop failed.
Conversely, farmer-managed seed systems have multiple benefits for biodiversity by preserving and promoting countless indigenous, climate and pest-resilient crop varieties for local farmers to grow. For example, in just four small seed banks in Jharkhand, India, multiple varieties have been catalogued, cleaned and preserved around. This makes farmer-managed seed systems crucial for the CBD’s first objective: fostering and conserving biodiversity.
Through its third objective on benefit sharing, the CBD promotes the recognition and protection of traditional knowledge associated with seeds and contributes to safeguarding farmers' rights and promoting agricultural biodiversity.
Despite this, many of the countries who gathered in Colombia this week have not gone far enough in recognising and promoting the role of farmer-managed seed systems and ensuring that trade rules do not undermine them. We will keep pushing for progress to be made.