April 8, 2025
Since 2013, two Working Groups of the FAO Plant Treaty (ITPGRFA) tasked with enhancing the functioning of its Multilateral System (MLS) for facilitated access to plant genetic resources (PGRFA) and sharing the benefits of their use have met 23 times in total. The most recent meeting ended in Rome on Friday 4 April, still facing the same stumbling blocks: the refusal of the biotech industry from countries of the «global North» to pay farmers and Indigenous Peoples for the development and conservation of the world’s seeds, which are industry’s only raw material, and its refusal to renounce the confiscation of these seeds through its patents.
Since 2005, access to PGRFA conserved in the national and international collections of the 153 countries that have ratified the Treaty has been operating smoothly, but the mechanism for sharing the benefits arising from their use is still being circumvented by the seed industry, which is taking advantage of the lack of traceability of the origin of the PGRFA used to develop its new commercial seeds. Payment of a contribution to the Benefit Sharing Fund is only required after the commercialisation of a product incorporating a plant genetic resource taken from the Multilateral System. Commercialisation can happen after years, after the genetic resource has changed hands several times and after several crosses incorporating plant genetic resources of multiple origins. The industry claims that this makes traceability impossible, and the Treaty has no means of enforcement. Only States could do so, but they don’t. What’s more, although the USA joined the Treaty in 2017, access to the immense US collections is still free for US citizens and companies without any signed benefit-sharing commitment. Only a few voluntary donations from a handful of countries, foundations and seed companies maintain a semblance of benefit sharing at a much lower level than what is due, to the detriment of developing countries and farmers who have provided more than 90% of the PGRFA in the MLS.
The Working Group is therefore proposing a new mechanism, consisting of a payment proportional to the sales turnover of companies that make a «subscription» for unlimited access to the PGRFA of the MLS. Unfortunately, the rich countries will only accept this new mechanism if the Treaty also retains the current «single access» mechanism, which will still be as easily circumvented as it has been since 2005, regardless of the amount of the payments required, which will be no more than they are at present. Between the easily controlled payment for «subscription» and the uncontrollable payment for «single access», the shareholders of the seed companies have an easy choice, paying a ridiculous symbolic alms to buy themselves a positive public image.
For the past ten years or so, there has also been a new problem: digital sequence information (DSI). For most countries, DSI is simply the digitised representation of the genetic components of PGRFA, which are not patentable under the Treaty if they come from the MLS. For the wealthy countries of the «global North», on the other hand, they are «research products» that have been freely available on the Internet for the past decade, and can be patented as long as they are of economic interest. The powerful electronic search engines of the largest multinationals cross-reference the immense DSI databases and the many publications on farmers’ and small breeders’ knowledge about the traits of commercial interest in PGRFA in order to identify such associations. Their geneticists describe a patentable process likely to incorporate these traits into new commercial seeds, and intellectual property laws then prohibit farmers and small seed growers – who have supplied their seeds and knowledge to the MLS – from continuing to use them as soon as they contain DSI patented through this process. This new digital biopiracy is growing despite international laws do not allow patenting a simple discovery of a product of nature.
The Convention on Biological Diversity recently itroduced a new opportunity for the development of biopiracy. It has decided to appropriate Treaty’s powers on the MLS PGRFA, by setting up a competing mechanism for sharing the benefits arising from the use of DSI based on the payment of a small percentage of profits or revenue of all seed companies and other economic sectors likely to use DSI. Unfortunately, these payments will remain optional, or «voluntary» in diplomatic language. In what world have shareholders ever agreed to make a large voluntary payment, beyond perhaps the few dollars needed to buy a positive image?
Will dematerialised biopiracy replace the gunboat piracy of the past? Or will the vast majority of countries in the global South be able to turn the tables and re-establish an honest sharing of the use of seeds and other natural biological resources, without legal or technological barriers?
Only one meeting of the Working Group of the Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources remains to find a solution before the next Governing Body (GB). Given how far the positions are today, it will not be easy to bring a compromise decision to the next GB, unless the countries of the South bow to the overwhelming power of a handful of multinationals. This is why we, the IPC, will be present and will continue to make our voice heard, ready to mobilise all over the world to defend farmers’ rights on seeds.