When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take two great lines of maize that share relatively little genetics, cross them at the last step, and enjoy the hybrid vigour that results. This is one of the most important practical advancements we have for getting good yields from crops: the yields are dramatically better for this seed then if you plant the seed kernels that are made by the hybrid. When you plant saved seed (which many poor people are forced to do through not being able to afford hybrid seeds) you get dramatically worse yields and often even doing things like using fertilizer doesn't make economic sense (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-ret... is frequently cited.)
However, to the naked eye, there's basically no distinction between a hybrid seed and stored seed. A lot of seed companies sell seeds that are coated to help protect the seeds from pests/blights, but seed counterfitters have learned how to copy this. To distinguish them, you either need to run genetic testing or plant them and wait a season. If you get scammed, the result can be devestating for a smallholder farmer's family.
I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.)
Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Apollo Agriculture and still serve on the board, which operates in Kenya and a few other countries trying to help smallholders get access to better agtech (which includes hybrid seeds and fertilizer and other high roi agricultural tools.)
Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones? Is it because those get counterfeited the most?
Edit: (I personally know basically nothing about the law or how it’s been implemented.)
Imagine if 90% counterfeit electronics caused house fires, the harm is way beyond the purchase price.
/s
That is very hard to believe.
EDIT: I see now I was too quick to judge and that my knowledge on the topic was insufficient. Read the excellent comments below , they helped me understand how OP makes sense.
Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.
This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.
Absolutely. The first generation of a hybrid seed will produce several times more than either traditional seeds or the second generation. You can't reasonably grow your own hybrid seeds as you need to keep your fields to grow those seeds well separated from any other fields.
Now not all plants can be hybridized, and even of those that can I won't state with confidence that all of them have that property. However Maize (corn in US) which is a major world crop does act like this.
> Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable
Not exactly. There is some of that for sure, but there is also that if you are a seed producer you want to ensure your customers get your good seed and not counterfeit that looks just like yours (if you cannot examine cell DNA you can't tell the difference between a first generation hybrid and any other seed).
However the law was written is clearly too broad. It should protect the hybrid seeds - nobody wants any seed claimed as hybrid that isn't a first generation hybrid. However it shouldn't affect any traditionally saved seeds (though where hybrid is available nobody wants them except museums)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_seed
To state once again, I don’t know much about this law or how the government believes it’s preventing counterfeit seed, but bad seed is a huge problem for farmers. I personally want farmers to be able to do whatever they want to with their farms!
Would you care to answer the questions I posed? They were not rhetorical, I would like to be proven wrong and learn.
PS: I really admire what you are doing with your company, I don’t want to discount that.
> So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well?
For a lot of crop systems, yes! There are obviously crop systems where you can do clones and some exceptions are always present in biology, but basically yes. Yes for all the big staple crops except Canola.
> And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal?
I probably wouldn’t make it illegal, I think farmers should be allowed to do whatever they want to! (My completely out of the loop guess is the government is trying to help small holder farmers who are reporting that they’re being scammed by these groups and that they lack the resources to do genetic testing to prosecute them for the fraud.)
> That is very hard to believe. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.
It’s not really an IP protection thing, it’s an extremely difficult many year process to recover genetics on most hybrid crop systems. I don’t think most seed companies care about folks using saved seed, they know almost all farmers will buy good seed if they can.
> This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.
I think well answered by a parent comment, but the book The Wizard and The Prophet is pretty good reading on Borlaug and the green revolution. If you look at global food capacity vs population, it’s probably the single most important life upgrade for everyone of modernity.
(Small Edit: I should note that I’m not an agronomist, I’m just a guy who codes okay sometimes and that I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time talking to agronomists and smallholder farmers trying to make agriculture for small farmers work better.)
F1 and F2 are commonly accepted terms for first generation and second generation seeds from hybrid plants. Because these hybrids are created from two stable lines, they are themselves unstable and will produce, at best, seeds of varying quality and at worst entirely sterile plants.
https://www.parkseed.com/blogs/park-seed-blog/understanding-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/botany/comments/wq3heg/question_why...
https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+first+and...
If you're going to pay more for a hybrid seed, it should be only for a first generation, otherwise you don't know what you're going to get. For some crops, like tomatos, that's survivable. For others like corn, that could easily be devastating. It's like playing russian roulette the slow and expensive way.
Note that OP didn't say the seed banks themselves should be illegal, but when you can't identify by visual inspection, it's very high risk for fraud if they're selling what they claim are premium products but are really F2 seeds.
I'm guessing these hybrid seeds you are talking about are probably the reason for the counterfitting to begin with. I don't imagine them being sold at a reasonable price, but with this law maybe you have less competition?
Of course you have to pay for the seeds up front and get the reward at the end of the year. Investments are like that, a lot of poor farmers could spend 4x their current annual income on modern technology (seeds, fertilizer, tractors) and at the end of the year have more money left over than they had the previous year - but of course they need to get to harvest to get all the money. Worse there will be bad years where they lose money - it works out on average over 20 years but the individual years can be a killer if you start in the wrong year.
$$$.
Then you talked about the counterfeiting of seeds by imitating a coating, a concept completely unrelated to a law banning sharing seeds, and unlikely to be hindered by it at all.
Unless I am missing something.
I assumed that there was unwritten context where some seed vendor with genetically enhanced seeds was corrupting the legal process to try and protect their IP.
I don’t know the answer, but the op’s answer does point to corruption. This reminds me of early 20th century reforms in the meat industry in the United States a hundred years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
That is why this is a big deal and for more context on why interfering with agricultural sytems at this scale is a doomed excercise; The gates foundation tried this shit in Zambia, and it worked they produced more till covid hit, supply chains were cut and they are still dealing with a famine
Think about that for a second in a economy where approximately 40-50% is subsistence agriculture.
Basically a ploy to force the small farmers off the land and leave it to plantation and multicorps.
Its really sad but KE is in the grip of one of the worst neoliberal experiments since post Soviet in the early 90s. See recent news where all the country's healthdata has been auctioned off to the US big pharma for 25years for 1B.
If seed counterfeiting is "a big problem", then banning seed sharing is "an even bigger, worse problem". What context justifies causing a bigger, worse problem to address a smaller problem?
Occam's razor suggests that the primary motivation was protecting corporate profits anyways, not addressing seed counterfeiting.
That's because if the true context in support was given, it would be: "because seed sharing reduces our rate of sales, and our resulting profits".
That's like saying backhanding your kid is a human right. Every human on the planet practiced it forever.
The comment before could have said "should be a human right".
imo it's very frustrating having people say "thing I want is a right". What gives them that right? Are all laws not violation of rights if you extend that
Encourage you to look into this issue more.
That's not the same as human rights. I think it's a silly practice lately to start proclaiming all these things are human rights. Particularly (not this case) when those things have to be given to them by other humans.
What's actually a human right and what isn't will depend on who you ask, but just "Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others." seems to be applicable (UN Charter §17)? It doesn't feel like "random thing I think is important is a human right" at all?