Connecting environmental justice and biodiversity

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Guntra Aistara. Image: Central European University

When the U.S. Supreme Court held last year that farmers can be liable for damages if they use patented seeds for more than one planting, the decision highlighted a debate over growers’ rights, intellectual property and agricultural sustainability.

Ruling in an Indiana case, the high court upheld an $84,456 verdict in favor of agri-giant Monsanto Co. in what NPR described as a

David vs. Goliath battle. The Fortune 500 company had sued Vernon Hugh Bowman, “who regularly bought Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant soybean seed for his first growth and signed a licensing agreement

promising to use all the seed and not to use any regenerated seed for future use.”

Bowman admitted that he’d violated his licensing agreement with Monsanto

He wanted “a cheap source of seed” for some plantings and bought it at a local grain elevator. That unpatented seed also was resistant to Roundup, a powerful herbicide.

In its Supreme Court brief, Monsanto argued that letting Bowman — and other farmers — to use regenerated, genetically modified seed without the company’s permission would “devastate innovation in biotechnology. Investors are unlikely to make such investments if they cannot prevent purchasers of living organisms containing their invention from using them to produce unlimited copies.”

As NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported, in upholding Monsanto’s position, the Supreme Court said that “Bowman’s actions amounted to illegal copying of a patented product, a sort of farming piracy.”

Contrast that seed situation with what happened in Latvia, a West Virginia-sized former Soviet republic with about one-fifth the population of Michigan. The country is located between the Baltic Sea to the west and Russia to the east.

Guntra Aistara tells the fascinating tale of Latvia’s Tomato Rebellion in a recent Journal of Baltic Studies article connecting a publicity-fueled protest over the sale of heirloom tomato seeds to broad issues of agricultural biodiversity, environmental justice, farmers’ rights and rural injustices, real or perceived.

Aistara earned her PhD from the University Of Michigan School Of Natural Resources and is now an assistant professor of environmental sciences and policy at Central European University in Budapest.

The conflict began in early 2012 when a couple who grew more than 200 heirloom tomato varieties sold seed packets to two undercover government inspectors attending a tomato-growing seminar for amateur gardeners at their nursery near Riga, the capital. Authorities charged the couple with selling seed varieties that weren’t registered under a European Union directive.

Not surprisingly, the first stone — or first tomato — was quickly cast:

News of the agri-bust hit the media under the rallying cry of “Freedom for the Tomato!” Spontaneous protests took off. Activists took to the Web: “A tomato revolution — how beautiful!” one Internet commentator posted.

Officials eventually dropped the charges. Latvia’s parliament, the Saeima, changed the law last year to allow such sales, and the European Union is reviewing continent-wide seed legislation.

Aistara wrote that the tomato seed incident “continues a recent trend in rural protests in Latvia that have erupted against industrial pig farms, European Union support payments and other issues that affect the quality and way or rural life in rural areas.”

Both the Indiana soybean seed conflict and the Latvia tomato seed conflict illuminate a wider, deeper interpretation of the environmental justice movement.

In the United States, the phrase “environmental justice” traditionally conjures up images of incinerators and pollutant-spewing power plants constructed in poor inner-city neighborhood and hazardous waste dumpsites located in poor rural communities.

Aistara’s article offers a more expansive and contemporary interpretation of that phrase. Although she doesn’t refer to the Monsanto case, the same interpretation arguably applies there too: “Farmers’ rights to save, exchange and sell seeds are also fundamentally a distributive justice issue regarding equitable rights to seeds as resources, to biodiversity as an environmental good, to jobs and income as socioeconomic goods and the peasant way of life as a cultural good.”

She wrote, “The brief tomato rebellion in Latvia brought to the fore a host of frustrations and political critiques that demonstrate the protests were about not only one farm’s ability sell tomato seeds, but a range of broader issue of public participation, distribution, recognition and sovereignty.”

Eric Freedman is the director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism. A version of this column first appeared on the center’s website.

One thought on “Connecting environmental justice and biodiversity

  1. Farmers do have rights to save seeds and reuse, but only so long as they aren’t a patented strain. They are still free to save and reuse all that aren’t patented or the patents have run out. Now you may argue that farmers have saved seeds for 10,000 years and it is part of our culture. But then, i must argue that tools and products are patented with no problem yet the practice of making tools and products, however primitive, stretches back much further than 10,000 years and even predates our species, and they are, too, part of our culture.

    Hence, a farmer, or anyone for that matter, has no more right to copy a patented seed without permission than he does a patented cell phone or computer.

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