“Plant Breeders’ Rights” Bills: The Root of Seeds as Property

Both Tanzania and Pakistan have recently passed laws that ban individual farmers from saving seeds, or using one harvest’s produce to plant the following year. These bills are only one piece of the global seed privatization crisis related to the Green Revolution, neoliberalism, debt cycles, and shrinking biodiversity. This article explores the rationale behind these two countries’ laws to highlight the unfair legal and economic structures at play, namely the international bodies whose policies Tanzania and Pakistan are enforcing and whose interest those policies serve. Ultimately, farmers’ security is jeopardized by their own governments to increase corporate profits under the guise of ensuring development aid. 

In 2014, Tanzania passed the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act, which imposes criminal penalties on farmers who save their seeds (these are non-corporate family farms, which compose the largest share of the Tanzanian economy). The phrase “plant breeder’s rights” in this legislation refers to the rights of agribusinesses to protect and patent seeds as their own intellectual property. Making seeds intellectual property ensures that corporations have full legal control over them, including the sole right to profit from their use. Anyone who violates a corporation’s intellectual property protections will be fined 2-10 million Tanzanian shillings ($860-$4290) or receive a prison sentence of 1-3 years. Violations of breeders’ rights include the production, reproduction, selling, marketing, and stocking of protected seeds. In cases where a farmer produces a harvest in violation of these corporations’ rights, the corporation exercises authority over their harvest. The law does not directly mention the measures a corporation can take to test if a farmer is violating these rights. 

Pakistan passed a similar bill in 2015, the Seed (Amendment) Act. The legislation prescribes that no one conducts business with seeds that are not registered with the government – a process that is both time consuming and expensive. Penalties range from a 200,000 rupee ($900) fine or three months in prison for the first offense to more severe penalties of 600,000 rupee fines or six months in prison for subsequent offenses. The phrase “plant breeders’ rights” is not used in the Pakistani bill, but the legislation’s objective is still to protect and ensure seed companies’ intellectual property rights.

In both countries, farmers stand to lose their entire livelihoods if they plant their own seeds or seeds they lack formal access to. They are effectively coerced into buying seeds from corporations every year because planting patented seeds saved from the prior year constitutes theft. If they continue planting local, generational seed varieties, they cannot sell their harvests. Farmers who are fined, imprisoned, or unable to sell their produce are additionally at risk of losing their land. 

Why were these acts passed if they so clearly harm civilians? The governments of both Tanzania and Pakistan are using the bills to enforce international agreements, particularly the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (New Alliance) and the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). 

The New Alliance is a 2012 arrangement between the G-8 and nine African countries, with the stated goals of improving community health, increasing agriculture, and “rais[ing] 50 million people out of poverty in the next ten years.” In practice, this agreement aims to solve a nonexistent problem. The food security crisis after 2008 was not an issue of supply, but of price. Roughly half the world’s population at the time was food insecure because prices for key crops rose 37% the preceding year. There was plenty of food, people simply could not afford to buy it. 

The New Alliance is a framework imposed by the West on Africa that attempts to address hunger by increasing capital flow and modernizing agriculture. The project’s mechanism is a hallmark of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the idea that free markets will enable economic growth necessary for human progress, yet many neoliberal policies encourage cutting spending on social services and ignore individuals’ well-being for the sake of gross domestic product. The power dynamic of the New Alliance is also – problematically – comparable to colonialism and continuing patterns of rich, Western countries exploiting the poorer Global South. 

In practice, the New Alliance provides developmental assistance with a catch – to receive this aid, countries must pass intellectual property protections for seeds. Tanzania is a member of the New Alliance, and it was thus required to pass the 2014 bill to receive this development aid. 

The New Alliance is not alone. The WTO, an unelected bureaucratic international body that regulates trade, has a series of requirements for intellectual property protections known as TRIPS. Member countries need to adopt these requirements to access the benefits of the WTO network, which primarily entail access to free international markets for countries to sell their products and import what they need at lower costs to their citizens. Furthermore, the WTO is very specific about copyright, patent, and trademark protections. 

Both Tanzania and Pakistan are WTO members, while Tanzania is also in the New Alliance. Their membership explains – to an extent – why they each passed plant breeders’ rights laws. The question remains, though, of who those laws are designed to benefit under the layers of political and legal jargon. One tempting answer is the countries themselves, since enforcing WTO or New Alliance regulations is a prerequisite to development aid. That aid, though, often takes the form of corporate investment: entities seeking returns that they rarely reinvest in local communities. 

Furthermore, the bills in question codify corporations’ ability to patent seeds and own them as intellectual property and prohibit farmers from saving local or corporate seeds from one harvest to the next. Farmers are thus required by law to buy new corporate seeds year after year, which expands agribusiness’ markets and profits. And, these businesses are consolidated into one extreme oligopoly. By 2018, only four companies controlled 60% of the global seed market: Bayer, Chemchina, Corteva, and BASF. 

This legal issue can boil down to one question: how does anyone own a seed? Seeds are living organisms necessary for agriculture and human life, but this fact is not reflected in the global food system. The legal and economic structures examined here (national laws, international partnerships, and international regulations) all codify seeds as tools for corporate profits. Agribusinesses like Bayer and Corteva are thus growing at the expense of individual farmers – who risk imprisonment or losing their land – and their expansion is directly enabled by the law. 

Leo Worthington is a first-year staff writer interested in history and can be contacted at leo_worthington@brown.edu.