The Right to Food and Farmers' Rights

In one line

The right to food is a Covenant right, seed is where intellectual property meets it, and India built a plant variety statute that protects farmers as well as breeders because UPOV 1991 would not.

The right to food

Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration: everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well being, including food.

Article 11 of the Covenant: the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food, and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. Article 11(2) requires measures to improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition, and by developing or reforming agrarian systems to achieve the most efficient development and utilisation of natural resources.

General Comment No. 12 of 1999 interprets it, and identifies availability, accessibility and adequacy as its elements.

In India, the right to food has been read into Article 21, and Article 47 places a duty on the State to raise the level of nutrition.

And the National Food Security Act, 2013 gives statutory form to a portion of it.

Why seed is the meeting point

Because a plant variety right is a right over the means of producing food.

A patent on a machine does not stop anyone eating. A right over a seed variety controls what a farmer may sow, save, exchange and sell, and in a country where the great majority of holdings are small and seed is routinely saved, that reaches the household directly.

Three chains of consequence.

Price. Protected seed costs more than saved seed, and a farmer who must buy every season bears a recurring cost.

Dependence. A variety that must be repurchased, or that carries a technology fee, transfers control from the farm to the supplier.

And diversity. Uniform protected varieties displace landraces, which reduces the genetic base on which future breeding and food security depend, which is the concern the Convention on Biological Diversity and the plant genetic resources treaty both address.

Why India refused UPOV 1991

UPOV 1978 Article 5(1) confined the breeder's right to the production for purposes of commercial marketing, the offering for sale and the marketing of the reproductive or vegetative propagating material, which left a farmer's use of saved seed on their own holding outside the right entirely.

UPOV 1991 changed three things.

The farmers' privilege became an option. Article 15(2) permits, but does not require, each party to restrict the breeder's right in order to permit farmers to use for propagating purposes, on their own holdings, the product of the harvest obtained on those holdings, within reasonable limits and subject to safeguarding the legitimate interests of the breeder.