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Food

Canada's Grain Farmers Have Fewer Rights Than Ever

With public grain research being defunded and a new law giving more powers to seed patent owners, Canada's farmers could be at the mercy of big agricultural companies.
Photo via Flickr user Anguskirk

Raised in a city, I thought this was how farming worked: a farmer plants seeds to grow wheat or corn, then harvests them and uses the saved seeds to replant the field for the next season. For the most part, that's how it's worked until 1989, when Canada passed Plant Breeders' Rights (PBR) legislation, a form of intellectual property like a patent on an invention. So farmers don't really own the seeds they're planting—instead, they are the property of the PBR holder and can't be saved, traded, or sold by farmers without permission from the owner. Unlike copying and sharing music, the owners will come to your house or farm to check.

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While most Canadians are concerned with C-51, there's another bill with potentially big consequences for farmers and the millions of tonnes of grains they grow for the country and the world. The recently amended C-18, or Agricultural Growth Act, strengthens the length and scope of ownership laws of plants in the country, but that won't mean much without knowing a little something about seeds.

READ MORE: Some California Rice Farmers Would Rather Sell Water Than Plant Crops

Until recently, Canadians have been the owners of those PBR "copyrights." The government—in partnership with the grain industry—subsidized grain science research, and the royalties went back into the country to the tune of a 36 percent return on investment. Under this system, scientists figured out how to turn canola oil into an edible product for frying—it was previously used as a lubricant—and decade after decade, scientists found solutions to the problems that plague grain farmers like leaf rust, yellow rust, stem rust, and fusarium head blight, all while developing varieties of wheat that would grow bigger and better.

Today, about 80 percent of the wheat grown in Canada is from varieties developed by public seed research—and the country produces about half of the exported canola in the world. But in 2012, the federal government hobbled the industry, gutting the Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg. About a third of the staff was let go and the remaining staff was sent to other research stations, says Dr. Stephen Fox, a former wheat breeder at the CRC who decided to resign rather than relocate.

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Defunding research was the first in a one-two punch to the system, shutting down public breeding programs before passing a law that extended rights to seed owners. Without Agriculture Canada scientists to research and register new species, the PBR holders will increasingly be giant agricultural companies like Dow, DuPont, and Monsanto.

"We've given private corporations the ability to extract more wealth out of farmers," says Matt Gehl, a fourth-generation grain farmer in Saskatchewan. "They would be insane to pass it up, and they won't." Gehl, who grows wheat, barley, flax, yellow field peas, and canola. "Farmers are constantly looking for that technological edge. So a lot of farmers are using the roundup-ready canola seed. And why wouldn't they? You plant it and you get this amazing chemical that kills everything but your crop. Shit yeah, that's gonna sell."

READ MORE: It's Not Easy Being a Young British Farmer

Last year, a farmer friend sold him some older canola seeds that weren't under any PBR restrictions—what he calls a "hippy's wet-dream canola"—for 30 cents a pound. To compare, the price of lab-developed seeds runs as much as $15 a pound. "What we saw with patented, privately developed and bred canola seeds in the GMO canola era, basically from 1990 to present day, was just a skyrocketing of canola cost. And the big worry is that's going to happen with wheat."

But another seed breeder has a more optimistic view. Dr. Ron DePauw was involved with developing 61 different varieties of wheat until his retirement in March, most notably the hugely successful AC Barrie and AC Lillian. If you were a grain groupie, it would be like hearing he co-wrote two seasons of Seinfeld. He sees a benefit in shifting government resources away from public research.

"With an 80 percent market share, that's too big," says DePauw. "They have to reduce their activities and make that space available to others. And that could be a good thing as long as there is competition between the private and public sector so farmers have opportunity to get good varieties from whoever might develop them."

But Fox, who is now a canola breeder for DL Seeds, is concerned that it's too late for there to be a balance. "Bill C-18 may provide a business environment more conducive to private investment," he says. "What has not been considered is the timeframe in which these changes are occurring. How come research capacity has been reduced before private investment has had time to respond to new governing structures?" He sees the current group of scientists doing public research as a skeleton crew, toiling without adequate resources in a field where it takes a decade to see results from testing.

Gehl still uses the seed-cleaning machine built by his grandfather, but under a C-18 provision called "Farmers' Privilege" it's now usable only at the benevolence of the seed owners. One of his big worries is that the PBR holders are going to discontinue his preferred species of wheat if they're not big sellers, while stopping him from replanting saved seeds.

"Up until the passage of this bill, C-18, farmers had the right to save seeds, the right. Now we have the privilege. It's a semantic argument, but unfortunately when you're dealing with legislation, those little differences in language make a huge goddamn difference. A privilege can be taken away. You can't take away a right, and that's what we've lost."