For some context on why the original law was introduced:
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.)
Haha very important disclaimer there, because reading your post sounds a lot like a person who works for big ag.
The other reason these laws exist is a long history by Big Ag (Monsanto, Cargill) doing the following, and has been done in the states for a while:
1) gmo/patented seeds in field on the left, community non-big ag seeds on the right field.
2) Cross-pollination occurs because we’re talking crops. Variations on this.
3) Monsanto sues Farmer John and Jane into the ground next season for stealing tech via the crops he’s growing.
Add in a little bit of fear (encryption backdoors for the children, laws to prevent dangerous counterfeit seeds!), and you have monopoly on farming run by big corps.
Also, US corps have a long history of POC’ing underhanded approaches in Africa.
What could be going on here!?
Edit - Man, rereading, “forced to plant [dangerous] saved seeds,” guess it’s Big Ag + tech startups now pushing this. Maybe… those farmers just want to control their “IP” (saved seeds) so they don’t have to buy them from a cartel of seed providers? This is such a well known problem in the states, is this marketing really working in Africa?
Final edit on the soapbox - other reason why this matters is genetic diversity. Crop blight is a thing. There is no way the natural “herd immunity” of a basket of seed variants in a community is outstripped in effectiveness by a growing monoculture of owned hybrid seeds that stay in front of the blights each season. Coffee rust already jumped the Atlantic from Africa to SA. Often feels like I’ve read this sci-fi novel already (there is a good one - Windup Girl).
Edit - Can’t reply again looks like but to the response below, yes many view this approach as effectively leading to enforcing what you state. Which is why it is so horribly underhanded to me, and seeing supporting narratives in hackernews was striking.
No, it doesn't. From their "commitment" [1] which was affirmed by the courts as binding in a 2010s court case (Organic Seed Growers & Trade Ass'n v. Monsanto):
> We do not exercise our patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.
I don't understand the context. The idea of banning seed sharing is to stop counterfeits? That doesn't make much sense. Surely that'll just make it worse, no?
Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones? Is it because those get counterfeited the most?
Not quite, the counterfeit seeds here are dramatically worse to the point where buyers will feel scammed and face significant hardship if they mistakenly use them.
Imagine if 90% counterfeit electronics caused house fires, the harm is way beyond the purchase price. At that point customers start caring a great deal, but corruption is difficult to avoid.
It worked so well in the War On Drugs... Don't do the hard work of taking down illegal supply chains; simply put the end consumers into jail for several years!
> Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones?
The high yield seeds are created by cross pollinating certain varieties. When the high yield seeds are planted, the new seeds should be eaten -not re-planted- since they will give poor yield.
So a counterfeiter can just buy cheaper food-seeds and resell them as expensive high-yield seeds.
A lot of plants work like that. Apples very rarely come out tasting great if the tree is planted from a seed. You need to clone a good known apple tree from cuttings instead.
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? 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?
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.
> 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
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)
If you lived in the Midwest at any point and heard about high school kids getting “detassling” jobs, they were forcing hybridization of two corn lines in half the crop by removing pollen from the other half. Two strains were planted in the same field in stripes.
Did you go to high school in the country that made this law? In addition, how many farmers in that country get high school education?
From what I read getting grades 1-8 is common in Kenya, but the high school years of education drop off significantly with only around 40% of the population getting that education, and making an educated guess that would target city people more than those that would be farmers.
Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs.
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!
You have a point there, I was using “hybrid” as a catchall for any special seed that comes from a dedicated producer as opposed to stored seed. You are right that I don’t know enough about this, I was just judging your comment on its internal argumentation and some basic red flags caught my eye.
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.)
Universally adopted in part by very well known strong arm business practices from Big Ag vs farmers. This is a bad faith framing imo. Source - live in ag country
> I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad
Non-farmers really don't understand how human-engineered agriculture has been for the entire history of human civilization. For example, corn (maize) does not really exist in nature, it's a human-developed thing. Hybridized plants still carry the genetic code that allowed them to propagate through the ages before human agriculture, and these survival traits will very quickly express themselves in the offspring (seeds).
I had a lecture from the main researcher of that paper when I was in undergrad, fantastic lecturer and very interesting topic. The whole class actually applauded him after he finished (that isn't something that happens in US universities usually).
You should do at least a bit of research before you basically accuse someone of being a liar and corporate shill for no more reason than it fits your generic worldview.
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.
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.
You are right, my tone was too dismissive. The questions were not rhetorical, I was actually trying to understand the argument because it didn’t make sense from the basic knowledge I had. I appreciate this info, that’s what I wanted.
If you don’t want to deal with F2 plants, the alternative is “landrace”, which are collected seeds specific usually to a microbiome. They germinate with the most appropriate genes already activated (epigenetics) in the germ line. Instead of getting seeds from some company in Pennsylvania or Oregon you get them from grandpa or the guy at the other end of the valley, where the soil and weather patterns are identical. And you keep it that way.
The F1 person might also want to buy your seeds because he has access to another landrace variety from far away and wants to cross them.
If hybrid seeds provide economic and material benefit then the laws should be written to prevent counterfeits, not specifically banning people from replanting.
> But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest
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?
I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.
You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.
You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.
In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.
Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.
For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop.
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.
You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor."
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.
Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters.
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.
> “…are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources…”
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.
I am kenyan,let me put it into context since its a bit nuanced. We have a very corrupt parliament, they were bought off way back in 2012 when the law was introduced. Mainly by big corpos like Monsanto & the Apollo guy above.
They basically wanted full dependence on these companies for seeds, without giving farmers a choice. Maize is the staple of the country and big bank for anyone who captures the supply chain at whatever level. There has always been contention on GMOs since contrary to what you may have read in your media, kenyan farmers are perfectly capable of feeding their families & the nation at large. Now farmers fought back the law was suspended in court since 2012 but during that period a lot of big seed companies found a way to capture the market. Its a victory since the fines and jail time were really extreme & seed sharing is an age old tradition here, so picture a bunch of foregin companies lobbying your government to criminalize your traditions because its a direct threat to their business model
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
In fact its basically a monopoly play to sideline the longstanding seedbanks that have existed, both government ones and co-op based seed banks.
Hence the law that proposed:
Fines could reach up to 1 million Kenyan shillings (approximately $7,700) and Offenders risked imprisonment for up to two years.
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.
I read the comment and for context I am also a farmer, and stripping farmers of a choice with excessively high fines and jail time will never be correct no matter how you frame it or whatever goodwill you pupport to have, you are in it for the money not to help out “poor” farmers
“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.)”
That still doesn't give any context that would support the action.
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.
Thats a bs explanation & you know it. Where is the direct corelation between seed sharing and counterfeit seeds? Did you do any studies? Any research to back your claims? Why criminalize a practice that existed well before your companies?
Farmers that plant every year cant tell good seeds from bad seeds?
What kind of disrespect is that though?
You can look at America to see what happens when seed sharing is outlawed (or made effectively illegal through contracts to acquire seeds that are then ruthlessly enforced.) Neither path is ultimatly friendly to small farmers it seems, so this line of thinking doesn't really hold any water to me.
That is a "city slicker" read on the American farmer. The actually farmers themselves learned long ago that savings seeds isn't worth doing even without the contract. The terms of the contract look bad from the outside, but to the farmer they are "I wouldn't do that anyway"
One reason for running these seed banks is that old fashioned seeds actually work better than hybrids and similar in some areas where climate change is rampant.
This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
It is sad that the law was enacted in the first place (lobbying by 'the usual suspects') and others had to fight to repeal what is violating common law, common sense and natural justice.
Yes, the usual suspects, trying to undermine a practice going back thousands of years. Those seeds will probably be well adapted to the soils and climate of Kenya.
Seed sharing is fundamental to human civilization. It is a human right. Companies like Monsanto that belligerently interfere with this by claiming “ownership” of seeds are nothing less than evil.
I'm likely more connected to agriculture than you think. And I think seed-sharing should be enshrined legally.
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.
I don't know what exactly "seed sharing" means (and the article doesn't describe it fully) but merely owning anything communally, or owning property - which includes the right to transfer it - seems like obvious human rights.
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?
The commercial GMO seed developers require that you buy seed from them every year. You're not allowed to collect the seed and re-plant it next year. Or share it, I guess.
That's in the US, not sure how it plays out around the world.
They just want to lock in the farmers, in an situation where they can't do it technologically. So they're doing it via the law. It's...basically what you'd expect of the world today. Sad, but I suppose they argue that they should have IP rights just like any industry.
And you'd think they'd just boycott on principle, but it puts them at a big disadvantage in many cases, as their yields go down while national harvest goes up, making sale prices lower. So it's not easy to see what to do about it from the farmer's perspective.
For some context on why the original law was introduced:
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.)
Haha very important disclaimer there, because reading your post sounds a lot like a person who works for big ag.
The other reason these laws exist is a long history by Big Ag (Monsanto, Cargill) doing the following, and has been done in the states for a while:
1) gmo/patented seeds in field on the left, community non-big ag seeds on the right field.
2) Cross-pollination occurs because we’re talking crops. Variations on this.
3) Monsanto sues Farmer John and Jane into the ground next season for stealing tech via the crops he’s growing.
Add in a little bit of fear (encryption backdoors for the children, laws to prevent dangerous counterfeit seeds!), and you have monopoly on farming run by big corps.
Also, US corps have a long history of POC’ing underhanded approaches in Africa.
What could be going on here!?
Edit - Man, rereading, “forced to plant [dangerous] saved seeds,” guess it’s Big Ag + tech startups now pushing this. Maybe… those farmers just want to control their “IP” (saved seeds) so they don’t have to buy them from a cartel of seed providers? This is such a well known problem in the states, is this marketing really working in Africa?
Final edit on the soapbox - other reason why this matters is genetic diversity. Crop blight is a thing. There is no way the natural “herd immunity” of a basket of seed variants in a community is outstripped in effectiveness by a growing monoculture of owned hybrid seeds that stay in front of the blights each season. Coffee rust already jumped the Atlantic from Africa to SA. Often feels like I’ve read this sci-fi novel already (there is a good one - Windup Girl).
From what I've read, the articles about Monsanto suing innocent farmers is misleading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
“ The usual Monsanto claim involves patent infringement by intentionally replanting patented seed”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_legal_cases
Edit - Can’t reply again looks like but to the response below, yes many view this approach as effectively leading to enforcing what you state. Which is why it is so horribly underhanded to me, and seeing supporting narratives in hackernews was striking.
Doesn't this mean that farmers will no longer be able to reuse their own seeds then, if a neighbor has GMO seeds?
No, it doesn't. From their "commitment" [1] which was affirmed by the courts as binding in a 2010s court case (Organic Seed Growers & Trade Ass'n v. Monsanto):
> We do not exercise our patent rights where trace amounts of our patented seeds or traits are present in a farmer’s fields as a result of inadvertent means.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101023123618/http://www.monsan...
Meaning it didn’t happen, or the farmers aren’t as innocent as the word innocent legally implies?
Comment could be considered misleading…
How does that suing pass muster is any court of law?
Does it need to? Unfortunately, a threat of a lawsuit by a large company is weapon enough to make people buckle.
More expensive lawyers.
Read "confessions of an economic hitman", you'll get the gist
Good question
I don't understand the context. The idea of banning seed sharing is to stop counterfeits? That doesn't make much sense. Surely that'll just make it worse, no?
Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones? Is it because those get counterfeited the most?
Instead of doing things like securing their supply chains, the reaction of the seed companies is to... just make anyone else selling seeds illegal.
Not even just selling seeds. Saving seeds from the crop you planted from the previous year can also lead to infringement lawsuits.
Not quite, the counterfeit seeds here are dramatically worse to the point where buyers will feel scammed and face significant hardship if they mistakenly use them.
Imagine if 90% counterfeit electronics caused house fires, the harm is way beyond the purchase price. At that point customers start caring a great deal, but corruption is difficult to avoid.
But there's nothing stopping the farmer from observing their saved or off brand seed is not as effective and buying from the original breeder again..?
It worked so well in the War On Drugs... Don't do the hard work of taking down illegal supply chains; simply put the end consumers into jail for several years!
/s
From Nixon’s standpoint it worked great because they put brown people in jail.
Linked article claimed it was undertaken to prevent seed counterfeiting.
Edit: (I personally know basically nothing about the law or how it’s been implemented.)
shouldnt you, as the ceo of a company selling seeds in kenya, know about the laws related to saving and selling seeds in kenya...?
> Also, what's the connection to the high yield ones?
The high yield seeds are created by cross pollinating certain varieties. When the high yield seeds are planted, the new seeds should be eaten -not re-planted- since they will give poor yield.
So a counterfeiter can just buy cheaper food-seeds and resell them as expensive high-yield seeds.
Why does that make it sound like we are truly effed if we ever end up in situation where these processes or markets fail...
A lot of plants work like that. Apples very rarely come out tasting great if the tree is planted from a seed. You need to clone a good known apple tree from cuttings instead.
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? 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?
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.
> 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
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)
If you lived in the Midwest at any point and heard about high school kids getting “detassling” jobs, they were forcing hybridization of two corn lines in half the crop by removing pollen from the other half. Two strains were planted in the same field in stripes.
Also none of this is new knowledge. This was taught in my high school 30 years ago.
Did you go to high school in the country that made this law? In addition, how many farmers in that country get high school education?
From what I read getting grades 1-8 is common in Kenya, but the high school years of education drop off significantly with only around 40% of the population getting that education, and making an educated guess that would target city people more than those that would be farmers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Kenya
Poor education doesn't make it new knowledge.
If anyone was taught this in highschool, it must have been established practice for decades at least.
Hybrid seeds are ~100 years old and are nearly universally adopted across developed agricultural markets. They’re as controversial as “you should probably use source control” is in programming. You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMOs.
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!
You have a point there, I was using “hybrid” as a catchall for any special seed that comes from a dedicated producer as opposed to stored seed. You are right that I don’t know enough about this, I was just judging your comment on its internal argumentation and some basic red flags caught my eye.
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.
Sure—I’ll try!
> 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.)
Universally adopted in part by very well known strong arm business practices from Big Ag vs farmers. This is a bad faith framing imo. Source - live in ag country
> I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad
Non-farmers really don't understand how human-engineered agriculture has been for the entire history of human civilization. For example, corn (maize) does not really exist in nature, it's a human-developed thing. Hybridized plants still carry the genetic code that allowed them to propagate through the ages before human agriculture, and these survival traits will very quickly express themselves in the offspring (seeds).
I agree. Here is a photo of the wild ancestor of maize, compared to a modern one and an hybrid https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/721466
I had a lecture from the main researcher of that paper when I was in undergrad, fantastic lecturer and very interesting topic. The whole class actually applauded him after he finished (that isn't something that happens in US universities usually).
Do you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doebley ? See also https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25creature.html for the story of how maize was traced back to teosinte using hybrids and some literature with more scientific detail: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0168952592...
We are still trying to figure out how maize came to be. Last I heard we haven’t found the smoking gun yet.
You should do at least a bit of research before you basically accuse someone of being a liar and corporate shill for no more reason than it fits your generic worldview.
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.
You are right, my tone was too dismissive. The questions were not rhetorical, I was actually trying to understand the argument because it didn’t make sense from the basic knowledge I had. I appreciate this info, that’s what I wanted.
If you don’t want to deal with F2 plants, the alternative is “landrace”, which are collected seeds specific usually to a microbiome. They germinate with the most appropriate genes already activated (epigenetics) in the germ line. Instead of getting seeds from some company in Pennsylvania or Oregon you get them from grandpa or the guy at the other end of the valley, where the soil and weather patterns are identical. And you keep it that way.
The F1 person might also want to buy your seeds because he has access to another landrace variety from far away and wants to cross them.
If hybrid seeds provide economic and material benefit then the laws should be written to prevent counterfeits, not specifically banning people from replanting.
>“My grandmother saved seeds, and today the court has said I can do the same for my grandchildren without fear of the police or of prison,” he said.
Unconscionable to support such a law IMO.
> But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest
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?
I used to work on a farm producing hybrid seed. It is indeed very, very expensive compared to non-hybrid seed — in large part because it is a LOT of work to produce, depending on the crop.
You have to maintain a separate "father" line and "mother" line. You must prevent the mother line from self-pollinating, which in some cases (like tomatoes) requires you to physically remove the anthers from every single flower, ever single day.
You must also prevent it from cross-pollinating with the wrong crop, which (for insect-pollinated crops) means you may need to grow it under insect-proof netting and then provide your own pollinators. That's easy enough if it's a honeybee-pollinated crop, but some crops are only pollinated by wild insects, so you need to hand-pollinate every flower.
In most cases, the father line needs to be grown intermixed with the mother line to ensure good pollination. These are usually two wildly different varieties (otherwise, why are you hybridizing them?) with different physical features, care requirements, planting times, etc. This means you typically can't use standard farming equipment (which is designed for monocropping at scale) and must plant and care for the crops using a lot more physical labor.
Once the mother line is pollinated, the father line must removed to ensure it doesn't produce seed that could get mixed up with the hybrid seed. While removing it, you have to be very careful to not the damage the mother line crop. In some crops, you must not even jostle the mother plants too much or they'll drop a lot of their seed.
For this reason, F1 hybrid seed is very expensive, especially for crops where hybridizing is particularly painstaking. For example, the tomato seed I hybridized sold for approximately $1 per seed. It was extremely worth it to or customers, though, because it meant they could grow several times the amount of fruit in the same space with the same inputs.
What is a reasonable price? Hybrid seeds at 3x the price of traditional seeds could well be a great value because at the end of the year you get that much better of a crop.
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.
>Worse there will be bad years where they lose money
Everyone complains about farm subsidies/insurance in the US (well at least that's not a farmer), but this is the reason they exist. Farming is hard.
For some context on why the original law was introduced:
$$$.
You failed to explain why seeds that might fail to make the "best crop possible" would be banned, while leading with a promise to do so. Instead, you explained the concept of "hybrid vigor."
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.
Also, are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources in Kenya? I assume there is some sort of farmer seed-shop in most places which has been around for more than a year, known to be reputable. If they buy below-market priced seeds then those are going to be dodgy. That is why they are below market price. These people are poor not stupid. It'd be like my buying a cheap Rolex from a street vendor - I might buy it, I might not but I'm not going to be confused if it turns out to be a fake. It isn't hard to find a reputable seller of something and if you go to the unreputable sellers the reason it is cheap is because it might be bad quality. Don't go to a community seed store that lets in random seeds if the quality matters.
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.
> “…are they not capable of buying seeds from reputable sources…”
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era
Please see linked Harvard study for partial explanation of difficulties and challenges in local supply chain.
I am kenyan,let me put it into context since its a bit nuanced. We have a very corrupt parliament, they were bought off way back in 2012 when the law was introduced. Mainly by big corpos like Monsanto & the Apollo guy above. They basically wanted full dependence on these companies for seeds, without giving farmers a choice. Maize is the staple of the country and big bank for anyone who captures the supply chain at whatever level. There has always been contention on GMOs since contrary to what you may have read in your media, kenyan farmers are perfectly capable of feeding their families & the nation at large. Now farmers fought back the law was suspended in court since 2012 but during that period a lot of big seed companies found a way to capture the market. Its a victory since the fines and jail time were really extreme & seed sharing is an age old tradition here, so picture a bunch of foregin companies lobbying your government to criminalize your traditions because its a direct threat to their business model
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
Thank you so much for this first-hand insight! It takes the conversation out of theoretical law intentions, and into real-world actions.
In fact its basically a monopoly play to sideline the longstanding seedbanks that have existed, both government ones and co-op based seed banks. Hence the law that proposed: Fines could reach up to 1 million Kenyan shillings (approximately $7,700) and Offenders risked imprisonment for up to two years.
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.
Ole Jeff Monsanto at it again. Testing chemical sprays next to Hawaiian elementary schools just doesn't hit the same anymore.
Smarter to do it where you can buy off an entire national government.
Please try reading the whole comment again, I think you are missing most of the comment?
I read the comment and for context I am also a farmer, and stripping farmers of a choice with excessively high fines and jail time will never be correct no matter how you frame it or whatever goodwill you pupport to have, you are in it for the money not to help out “poor” farmers
“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.)”
That still doesn't give any context that would support the action.
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 still doesn't give any context that would support the action.
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".
Thats a bs explanation & you know it. Where is the direct corelation between seed sharing and counterfeit seeds? Did you do any studies? Any research to back your claims? Why criminalize a practice that existed well before your companies? Farmers that plant every year cant tell good seeds from bad seeds? What kind of disrespect is that though?
You can look at America to see what happens when seed sharing is outlawed (or made effectively illegal through contracts to acquire seeds that are then ruthlessly enforced.) Neither path is ultimatly friendly to small farmers it seems, so this line of thinking doesn't really hold any water to me.
That is a "city slicker" read on the American farmer. The actually farmers themselves learned long ago that savings seeds isn't worth doing even without the contract. The terms of the contract look bad from the outside, but to the farmer they are "I wouldn't do that anyway"
What hurt farmer's the worst is the formation of modern seed trusts (consolidation); well, on the seed side, at least, for small farmers.
One reason for running these seed banks is that old fashioned seeds actually work better than hybrids and similar in some areas where climate change is rampant.
This is not clear. The article is talking about traditional seeds for which that could be true (I don't know what is traditional in Kenya). Other commenters are talking about Maize which is from America and thus not traditional in Africa and thus there are no traditional seeds in Kenya. Maize also benefits greatly from hybridization, but there are other plants that do not, if we are talking about Maize you are wrong new seeds are much better than traditional, but if we are talking about other seeds who knows.
See e.g. https://apnews.com/article/kenya-seed-bank-agriculture-clima... , which is linked from TFA.
It is sad that the law was enacted in the first place (lobbying by 'the usual suspects') and others had to fight to repeal what is violating common law, common sense and natural justice.
Yes, the usual suspects, trying to undermine a practice going back thousands of years. Those seeds will probably be well adapted to the soils and climate of Kenya.
Seed sharing is fundamental to human civilization. It is a human right. Companies like Monsanto that belligerently interfere with this by claiming “ownership” of seeds are nothing less than evil.
This is a new human right I didn't even know I had
The comments in this thread make it abundantly clear there's nothing new about the right. Seed sharing predates your "TIL" knowledge of it.
There's nothing new about the practice. It becoming a human right would certainly be new.
That's like saying backhanding your kid is a human right. Every human on the planet practiced it forever.
9th Amendment, US Constitution, ratified 1789:
>The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Good luck defending those pretend rights in court. It can be difficult enough for the clearly-enumerated ones.
Perhaps because you have never had to think about the role agriculture plays in civilization.
Encourage you to look into this issue more.
I'm likely more connected to agriculture than you think. And I think seed-sharing should be enshrined legally.
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.
I don't know what exactly "seed sharing" means (and the article doesn't describe it fully) but merely owning anything communally, or owning property - which includes the right to transfer it - seems like obvious human rights.
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?
The commercial GMO seed developers require that you buy seed from them every year. You're not allowed to collect the seed and re-plant it next year. Or share it, I guess.
That's in the US, not sure how it plays out around the world.
They just want to lock in the farmers, in an situation where they can't do it technologically. So they're doing it via the law. It's...basically what you'd expect of the world today. Sad, but I suppose they argue that they should have IP rights just like any industry.
And you'd think they'd just boycott on principle, but it puts them at a big disadvantage in many cases, as their yields go down while national harvest goes up, making sale prices lower. So it's not easy to see what to do about it from the farmer's perspective.
Sadly, there is no tax that Nature itself can collect on Monsanto and others
Good!