108 



year or two from now to argue that the real infringement is due to farmers saving 

 their own seed for re-planting? 



It is important to point out that the newly revised UPOV Convention makes 

 it optional for member countries to allow farmers to save seed for planting on 

 their own holdings. If the U.S. Congress ratines the new UPOV Convention we 

 believe that this option leaves the door wide open for a future ban on all farm- 

 saved seed. 



The PVPA Fosters Seed Industry Concentrat ion and Contributes to Genetic Erosion 

 A 1985 study on the PVPA concluded that the passage of the PVPA in 1970 

 contributed to the large number of mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. seed 

 industry. 2 Today, consolidation within the seed industry continues at a frantic pace. 

 Kent Whealy of the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa explains the impact of 

 seed industry consolidation in the garden seed sector and its impact on genetic 

 erosion: 



Between 1984 and 1987, 23% of the mail-order seed companies in 

 the U.S. and Canada (54 out of 230) either went out of business or were 

 taken over. Large corporations, often agrichemical conglomerates, are 

 buying out smaller family-owned seed companies and replacing their 

 regionally-adapted collections with more profitable hybrids and 

 patented varieties. The collections being dropped sometimes represent 

 the life's work of several generations of seedsmen and are often well 

 adapted to regional climates and resistant to local diseases and pests. 

 The new corporate owners usually switch to generalized varieties that 

 grow reasonably well in all areas, thus assuring the greatest sales in the 

 company's new nationwide market. Irreplaceable genetic resources are 

 being destroyed by marketing decisions to maximize the short-term 

 profits of corporations that may not even own those seed companies 

 the following year. 3 



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The seed industry argues that the U.S. Congress has a "moral obligation 

 to amend the PVPA so that it conforms with the new UPOV treaty. This is 

 because the U.S. negotiating team in Geneva worked very hard to draft the new 

 treaty. It is important to point out that the U.S. negotiating team at UPOV 

 consisted of seed industry and U.S. government representatives. It did not include 

 U.S. farmers, and it certainly did not include fanner's who exercise their legal 



2 Butler,L.J., and B.W. Marion. 1985. The impacts of patent protection on the US seed industry and 

 public plant breeding. North Central Regional Res. Publ. 304. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, 

 Research Division, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 



3 Whealy, Kent 1992. Garden Seed Inventory, Third Edition: An Inventory of Seed Catalogs Listing All 

 Non-Hybrid Vegetable Seeds Still Available in the United States and Canada, Decorah, LA. 



