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Update from the GM-Free Brazil Campaign
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Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, October 19, 2007

Greetings from Brazil!

The recent approvals given for the growing of Bayer’s, Monsanto’s and Syngenta’s transgenic maize varieties is part of a bigger packet from the Federal Government to please the agribusiness sector. But for government disgust, last week the Federal Court suspended these and any other future approvals until CTNBio creates coexistence and post commercial release monitoring measures.

The Biosafety Law has been recently amended to accelerate the approvals of transgenic organisms. None of these maize varieties (Liberty Link, MON810 and Bt11) would have been approved without the reduction of the number of votes needed at the National Technical Biosafety Commission (CTNBio, from its acronym in Portuguese) - as signed by president Lula - from 18 to 14 among 27 members.

Besides this, but with the same spirit, amendments at the plant variety, pesticides and access to genetic resources laws are under negotiation behind closed doors at the Civil House from the Presidency of the Republic, all of them announcing major steps backward.

In the case of the pesticide legislation, the strong push from the agribusiness sector aims to relax down the registration of similar products and to liberalize pesticide market at the Mercosul.

New companies, mainly Chinese and Koreans, jump into this market offering lower prices after the expiration of patent protections that sustained monopolies in the sector. Commercial farmers demand these products registration to be made based only on agronomics tests, and not on toxicological ones.

This alleged economy is actually a huge transfer of costs to the society and to public administration, especially in the treatment of chronic, acute and fatal cases of intoxication by pesticides. Not less important are the increasing cases of loss of human fertility and congenital malformation resulting from pesticide ingestion.
 
Rules for pesticides registration are different among countries in Mercosul, what makes some products to be forbidden or severely restricted in Brazil and still allowed in a neighbor country. The project to “harmonize” these laws equalizes them by the lowest level of safety criteria for healthy and environmental protection.
 
The plant variety protection act defines the intellectual property rights that a person or institution has over a plant variety by him developed, whether seed or seedling of agricultural, forestry, ornamental or medicinal species. The protection assures its titular the right to commercial multiplication and forbids others to produce seeds or seedlings of these varieties for commercial purposes. But, in its today format, the law establishes that saving protected seeds for self use or selling its harvest do not offend property rights and, besides that, allows donations or interchanges between small scale farmers.

Seeking to regain position at the plant breeding market lost to biotech multinational companies, the National Agriculture Research Center is leading a revision on the plant variety protection act. The debate going on about the reorientation of its breeding programs should be an opportunity for the Center to prioritize the development of seed varieties for an agriculture model less dependent on chemical inputs and more sustainable. But, on the contrary, moves to the opposite direction, seeking higher competitiveness and new ventures with the private sector.

The protection that today covers a list of certain species would also be extended to all vegetal, fungi and algae cultivated species. Resowing seeds would be allowed solely for the farmer with income smaller than USD 35 thousands per year. The period of the protection would jump from 15 and 18 to 20 and 25 years (for seeds and seedlings, respectively). Not withstanding, the protection would cover in some cases even the harvest products from certain protected crops. As result, farmers’ rights restriction, higher costs and loss of autonomy.
 
Breeding and bioprospection depend on the access of genetic resources that in most of the cases are conserved by local and traditional communities who have developed the knowledge of how to use and manage them. In the case of seeds, the starting point of the breeding carried out in research centers are the varieties developed by farmers themselves.

Companies still have lots of interest in traditional seeds, once new traits may be obtained from them and used in new commercial varieties. Same importance is given to medicinal plants and to other biodiversity components used by local and indigenous communities that companies see as potential sources of new compounds.

United Nation’s Biological Diversity Convention establishes that its member countries, including Brazil, develop mechanisms to equally share benefits between companies which have developed products from biodiversity and the communities who shared their knowledge about how to use such resources.

The act that rules this issue nowadays in Brazil is a provisional measure, that has created the Council for the Genetic Patrimony Husbandry (CGEN, from its acronym in Portuguese), under the Environmental Ministry. At this moment the Civil House is also discussing an access and benefit-sharing bill that the government aims to send to the National Congress.

As in the other issues mentioned above, this process is ignoring civil society participation and consultations to the affected sectors. Agriculture Ministry pushes to the creation of an access regime to agrobiodiversity separated from the rest of the biodiversity, as if it was not part of this one. This way, the Ministry seeks to bring to its own attribution the regulation of the issue and also to impose its view that there is no traditional knowledge associated to seeds.
 
Putting the pieces together, this packet answers to a certain view of development that foresees the concentration of strategic genetic resources in few hands and the strengthening of intellectual property rules. Traditional knowledge associated to biodiversity, cultivated or not, are only recognized on an opportunistic basis, since through them it is possible to easily reach potential sources of new products (access law) that will be many times produced through genetic engineering (biosafety law) and protected by intellectual property rights (plant variety law) for, in the case of agriculture, reproduce an unsustainable monocrop model highly dependent on external inputs (pesticide law).

One may say that such government good willing to deliver agribusiness players claims comes from conservative supports negotiated last year for Lula’s reelection. Anyway, it is being painted a scenario announcing major step backs and restrictions to conquested rights. To the organized civil society what is in place is the huge challenge to stop this corporate takeover and life privatization process and start a broad movement of debates, mobilization, alternatives promotion and pressure on the government.

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GM-FREE BRAZIL - Published by AS-PTA Assessoria e Serviços a Projetos em Agricultura Alternativa. The GM-Free Brazil Campaign is a collective of Brazilian NGOs, social movements and individuals.

AS-PTA an independent, not-for-profit Brazilian organisation dedicated to promoting the sustainable rural development. Head office: Rua da Candelária, 9/6º andar/ CEP: 20.091-020, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Phone: 0055-21-2253-8317 Fax: 0055-21-2233-363

This article can be found on the AS-PTA website at http://www.aspta.org.br

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