Reuters says the same thing with more context and less gushing:
Parts of the law “granted extensive proprietary rights to plant breeders and there was no corresponding right that was given to the farmers. So, it favoured big commercial and corporate interests over the rights of farmers,” Wambugu Wanjohi from the Law Society of Kenya said.
Very good news indeed! The global IP regime around seeds is pretty bad, but this is not affecting that. It’s about even worse restrictions in Kenya specifically.
What about eating seeds, as a pass time activity?
Just depend on the toxicity of your city, really.
What if you want to own the world?
America: Shame about that coup you’re about to experience
Fuck you Monsanto
That’s seems like a great way to make sure no large seed company will ever do business in your country ever again.
I’m all for abolishing IP laws for any area, but it’s kinda dumb to lead the way if you develop basically no new products yourself.
EDIT: After some more reading, I’ve found this is a TERRIBLE article. The Kenyan law was that farmers literally couldn’t share or sell ANY seeds, including 200 year old heirloom crops. If you produced a new cultivar based on heirloom seeds, that wasn’t just free to use, it was ILLEGAL unless you were a registered seed company. That insanity has been fixed now.
There are plenty of universities in the world that actively research and freely share their hybrid, advanced cultivars. Not everything needs to be somebody’s property. Knowledge can be and is freely shared.
The problem is that hybrid seeds require seperate production, being hybrids.
The greenpeace article is actually kinda crap, because this whole thing isn’t the usual “Farmers aren’t allowed to pirate these fancy modern seeds”, it’s because the Kenyan law was that farmers literally couldn’t share ANY seeds, including 200 year old heirloom crops. A farmer could literally be fined if they gave a home-grown tomato to their neighbor, because they’re not a seed company. And that’s obviously absurd, and we should applaud it being stopped.
But now they’ve gone the other way, and said that you’re literally allowed to just do whatever you want with whatever seeds you can find anywhere. Granted, it’s going to be mighty hard to reproduce new hybrid seeds from hybrid seeds, but that’s totally allowed now.
People get to share seeds and large corporations stay out. Sounds more like a win-win to me.
Agriculture is inherently “developing new products” you fundamentally cannot stop innovating because the growth of a plant is itself a selection step.
Take your point that it might discourage certain types of agri business. But aks yourself: given protection will they work to maximise the benefit to farmers or will they innovate to maximise their own profits (E.g. By creating quasi-monopolies or increasing farms’ dependence on them)?
Now do all the other countries.
