Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Food - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 385

that respect both breeders' rights and farmers' rights. But as of now these models and
approaches are yet to be tested and validated.
Farmers' Rights
he term farmers' rights was a term coined by Pat Mooney and Cary Fowler of Rural
Advancement Fund International (RAFI) to highlight the contributions of farmers and
farming communities for global plant genetic resources and food diversity. In one sense
it served as a term to counter the argument that promoted plant breeders' rights and
other intellectual property rights that disregarded the contributions of farmers. The
1989 FAO conference adopted Resolution 5/89, which defined farmers' rights as “rights
originating from past, present and future contributions of farmers to conservation,
development and availability of plant genetic resources, particularly from centers of ori-
gin/diversity”; these rights were nominally vested with the international community.
In 1991, Resolution 3/91 proposed that farmers' rights would be implemented by estab-
lishing an international fund to support conservation in developing countries. But this
never took off. While CBD did not mention farmers' rights, Article 8(j) dealt with local
communities and indigenous populations.
Although many international instruments mention farmers' rights, no consensus
exists on its meaning and on the ways to implement it. In the negotiations over ITPGR,
farmers' rights became a hotly contested topic, finally affirmed in its preamble. Article
9.2 states: “The contracting parties agree that the responsibility for realizing farm-
ers' rights, as they relate to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, rests with
national governments.” It specifies what rights could be protected and promoted as
farmers' rights. But this is not a mandatory provision and ITPGR did not provide a com-
prehensive list of rights. As a result, while farmers' rights are mentioned in many inter-
national legal instruments, no binding treaty or convention has been enacted. While
consensus exists on rights, leaving enactment at the national level has resulted in diver-
gent interpretations and implementations. Farmers' rights can be construed as a set of
narrow rights pertaining to the rights of farmers and farming communities to access
plant genetic resources or it could be construed as a set of broad rights that go beyond
the role of these actors in conservation of genetic resources so as to promote their par-
ticipation in decision making and development of new varieties.
One important aspect of farmers' rights is the right to save and reuse seeds and to
exchange and sell farm-saved seeds. As developed later in this entry, this right has been cir-
cumscribed by intellectual property claims on plant varieties. Rights granted to plant breed-
ers and patent holders often limit or eliminate farmers' rights to sell, reuse, and exchange
seeds. On the ground, however, it often proves difficult to enforce such claims, or enforce-
ment is prohibitively expensive or cumbersome. This is especially true in large developing
countries, such as Brazil, India, and China, where farmers cultivate unauthorized varieties
and “stealth” seeds are widely exchanged (Herring 2007; Herring and Kandilkar 2009).