tagged w/ farmers' rights
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NAIROBI: Researchers say farmers in developing countries are losing one of their best hopes to limit the impacts of climate change because of growing corporate control of the seeds they plant.
The warning issued on Monday comes ahead of the World Seed Conference which opens on Tuesday at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
The researchers - from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and partners organizations in China, India, Kenya, Panama and Peru - say the diversity of traditional seed varieties is falling fast and this means valuable traits such as drought and pest resistance could be lost forever.
"Where farming communities have been able to maintain their traditional varieties, they are already using them to cope with the impacts of climate change," says project leader Krystyna Swiderska of IIED.
"But more commonly, these varieties are being replaced by a smaller range of 'modern' seeds that are heavily promoted by corporations and subsidized by governments. These seeds have less genetic diversity yet need more inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers and more natural resources such as land and water."
The researchers say that one reason for this is that while the international treaty on the protection of new varieties of plants - - known as UPOV -- protects the profits of powerful private corporations it fails to recognize and protect the rights and knowledge of poor farmers.
"Western governments and the seed industry want to upgrade the UPOV Convention to provide stricter exclusive rights to commercial plant breeders," says Swiderska.
"This will further undermine the rights of farmers and promote the loss of seed diversity that poor communities depend on for their resilience to changing climatic conditions."
The researchers also point out that in order to continue conserving and adapting their varieties, farmers also need to be allowed to freely save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds.
Technologies which restrict these customary rights -- namely Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTS) -- pose a very serious threat to genetic diversity, seed quality and the livelihoods of poor farmers.
"The farming communities that have developed and sustained a rich diversity of seeds over millennia urgently need incentives to continue sustaining them," says Ruchi Pant of Ecoserve in India.
"They need the same rights over their traditional seed varieties and associated knowledge as corporations have over modern varieties they develop and patent. The new seed laws being introduced in developing agrarian countries are posing a threat to the rights of small farmers to save, sow and exchange their traditional varieties."
end of excerptNAIROBI: Researchers say farmers in developing countries are losing one of their best... more
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