Tiphaine Burban
On first consideration, the seed sector in France seems to be healthy; with seventy-four selection firms, 241 production firms, and 18,800 multiplication farmers, it leads the European market for seeds and plants. For some plants like wheat and sunflowers, France is an international leader—it is the second-largest international exporter of seeds in general, and the first in exporting maize seeds. The turnover of the whole seed sector has been increasing steadily. However, at closer viewing, the situation is not so rosy; for biodiversity and small-scale farmers, the evolution of agriculture over the last century has been quite painful.
The erosion of crop biodiversity has been considerable. Numerous varieties have disappeared at an alarming rate. Thus, 80 percent of the vegetable varieties cultivated in France during the 1950s are not cultivated anymore.1 Only three or four varieties now cover 60 percent of wheat fields in France; they are commercial varieties, with a very weak genetic patrimony, and low capacity for adaptation to climatic change.2
The situation of French farmers is also very critical. The weight of farmers’ debt has become heavier in the last few years, reaching around €147,500 per farm in 2009,3 a figure that has been increasing continuously since 1990,4 principally for major crops, polycultures, and above all cattle farms. Sometimes, debts become so onerous that farms are liquidated, and farmers’ suicides are a reality in France. Agriculture is the one occupational category that shows the highest suicide rate in France; it is said that two farmers end their lives every day.
The situation for seed users is not much better as they have become dependent on seed and other agricultural inputs companies. Yet, only sixty years ago, farmers were autonomous. Seed breeding was a farmer’s activity and varieties were adapted to different soils. French crop diversity was very rich. How did we get to the point that big companies and small-scale farmers are in conflict, hurting the environment?
The evolution of seeds in France is a fascinating and worrying story. It is a story of giving up, giving up our farmers’ autonomy and our crop patrimony. With the commercial development of the seed sector, peasants progressively lost control of their seeds, essential for the survival of their activity.
Up until the nineteenth century, every peasant in France selected and produced his own seeds. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and primarily after 1945, the seed sector shifted to laboratories and fields dedicated to seed multiplication. It meant a complete overhaul for peasants, who, in this race for technology, lost their seeds and their autonomy. The very nature of their activity changed. From peasants they became farmers, agricultural exploiters, and now agri-managers. In the process, they also became simple seed users.
Two main strategies, promoted by the state and the private sector, encouraged the monopolization of the seed in France: the technological strategy and the regulation strategy.
The Second World War created the need for reconstruction and national recovery: planning and modernization were the two principles responsible for orienting the building of the seed sector during the second half of the twentieth century. The varieties promoted needed to be efficient on every soil. Seed, this grain of life, staple of human food, became a machine capable of producing in any standard environment.
Seeds, therefore, had to become a controllable item. This is why the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), created in 1946, began the creation and propagation of “stable” varieties. Pure lines were designed so that the crop yield could be precisely estimated beforehand, as long as farmers used the same variety. Maximization of the yield was the objective; and, in fact, the numbers proved that the pure lines were efficient in achieving this goal. For example, tender wheat was developed with better baking strength, and so French wheat baking strength has been multiplied by two within the second half of the twentieth century. With pure lines began the expected “genetic progress.”
However, it was the introduction of hybrids in agriculture that really consolidated the technological strategy of private and public seed research. Contrary to the United States, this happened much later in France and was tougher. In fact, F1 hybrids invaded French fields after the Second World War, when they had already spread throughout the United States some years previously. This offered the opportunity to France to assess these new modern “seeds,” which had high production costs and obliged farmers year after year to buy new seeds from the market. Nothing then indicated that hybrids would benefit French agriculture; on the contrary, they were considered the “Trojan horses” of a merchant economy in a peasant economy that until then had been autonomous.5 However, it was not the American giants who invaded the French seed market and our farmers’ fields; it was French public research itself that did so. With the INRA, it undertook hybrid promotion during its period of modernization; and the maize hybrids, F1, became models of this modernity, intended to help and prove the successful recovery of French agriculture. In 1949, a propaganda campaign was launched by the French government to strongly encourage farmers to adopt the hybrid maize: “Increase your maize crops! Sow hybrids! Your interest depends on it.…” Farmers ended up accepting these “modern seeds,” and by the end of the 1950s, F1 hybrids were well settled in France.
Orienting its research toward the creation of stable, pure, and almost sterile varieties, the French government industrialized agriculture. Farmers became simple producers, sowing seeds stemming from the market. Seed companies developed and progressively monopolized seed breeding, with the support of a new regulation system.
The development of strict regulations progressively sectorialized French farms to their simple function of agricultural production. In fact, in order to be able to commercialize a seed, it is necessary to get it registered and certified. A subscribed seed is a seed registered in the Official Catalogue either from France or from the European Union. To obtain the subscription, the seed variety must meet the specific criteria of distinctness, uniformity, and stability (DUS). Distinctness refers to the unique characteristic of the variety, compared to others; uniformity requires a strong similarity among plants of the same variety; stability demands that the plant’s characteristics stay the same crop after crop. This subscription is granted by the Permanent Technical Committee for the Selection of Seeds and Plants (CTPS) created in 1942. Through its control of these three criteria, this public organization ensures the fixing paradigm of the variety.
Seeds must also meet the Agronomic and Technological Value (VAT) criterion. This is used to assess the “genetic progress” of the variety compared to other varieties famous for their high performance, and is based on criteria such as yields, use value, or yields regularity factors. Progressively, new varieties replace previously created varieties, according to technical progress. A decree passed in 1960 imposed the radiation of varieties from the Official Catalogue that were “outmoded.” Even though private breeders opposed this law, saying it imposed a very sustained pace for seed improvement, the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Institute for Agricultural Research managed to have the law passed. Requirements concerning seed breeding are strict, and costs are heavy. In order for a selected variety to be registered and sold, the breeder must pay a large amount of money: €15,000 for ten years for big crops and €10,000 for vegetable species. This requires producing seeds in very high quantities, so as to absorb subscription costs. As a consequence, the investment needed for plant breeding and production has become very onerous.
Not only is breeding controlled, so is production. Commercialized seeds must be certified by the Official Service for Control and Certification (SOC). It checks the quality of products in seed production companies and with seed multiplier farmers, in accordance with the rules of the Ministry of Agriculture.
In order to protect varietal innovations and to recognize breeders’ work, a system of intellectual protection was created by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), founded in 1961, called the Plant Variety Rights (PVR). Delivered by the Group for the Study and Control of Varieties and Seeds (GEVES), a branch of the Permanent Technical Committee for the Selection of Seeds and Plants, the PVR is an alternative to a patent since it protects the product of the research and not the process or genes included in the variety. It thus has the advantage of preventing firms from monopolizing genetic resources discovered in nature, or in farming communities’ stocks. However, it does not oblige the breeder to communicate details of the breeding.
In the early 1960s, while the PVR was being created, farmers could still preserve their right to sow seeds stemming from their own crops, or farm-saved seeds. A few years later, however, in 1970, a new UPOV convention considered the use of farm seeds as forgery. In theory, it became illegal to save and resow your own seeds. Fortunately, good sense prevailed and farm-saved seeds remained “farmer privilege.” In 1991, the third UPOV convention tried to forbid this; France, faced with an amazing mobilization of organizations defending farmers’ rights to sow their seeds, sought to authorize farm-saved seeds, on condition of paying a tax. Finally, the French government decided to retain the law of PVR 1970. Subsequently the European Economic Commission itself adopted the law, with all the French provisions. Since 1994, according to European legislation, farm-saved seeds are authorized for twenty-one varieties under the European PVR on payment of a tax. For remaining species, every farmer who planted seeds stemming from past crops could be accused of forgery. In France, two systems are in force: the French PVR of 1970 (reformed recently in 2011) and the European PVR. Seed breeding was intrinsic to farmers’ activity; it then became a privilege, and was finally considered forgery—a progressive privation of farmers’ rights.
For seed-breeding companies there are many advantages to specializing in vegetable innovation, since the created seed is protected. To have a monopoly on a seed delivered in a market where every farmer goes to get his seeds is a great benefit. Access to breeding, however, was becoming more and more difficult; the CTPS introduced a card that was delivered to peasants who applied to be professional breeders in 1955. They had to conform to some very demanding criteria: reserving five hectares to seed production; not being millers or bakers; and having sufficient tools. Many peasants who couldn’t qualify were refused breeder cards. The method was too direct and tough for most farmers, and subsequently, conditions for seed-selling were formulated to indirectly regulate access to seed and plant breeding. The decree of June 11, 1949, made registration with the catalogue a condition for selling seeds; but, as mentioned earlier, DUS and VAT criteria were very demanding and made a very important distinction between seeds. As a result, between 1950 and 1960, half the demands for subscription of a variety to the catalogue were refused.6 Many peasants were forced to delegate seed breeding and seed production to private firms; a legal regime designed to counter monopolization was thus made to appear as a compromise with farmers.
The result of the regulation and technological strategies has been the promotion of a strong private seed sector. Private seed companies captured the market and managed to defend their interest with the support of the public sector. The CTPS selects potential varieties for the Official Catalogue and in this way controls French agriculture. Since it is composed of private and public researchers, it should demonstrate public and private “partnership” in the orientation given to the seed sector. However, the private sector took the lead on it. What matters are not farmers’ rights or healthy food, but private companies’ interests and profits. Even though Jean-Pierre Despeghel, research leader for oleaginous plants in Monsanto Europe, explains that what motivates him in his vocation is “among many things, freedom to create. The breeder is free of his choices,”7 farmers, as far as they are concerned, have lost their capacity to choose. There is no freedom for them.
The private sector creates what it calls “biodiversity,” simply another way to monopolize French fields, French food, and the French environment. On the contrary, farmers, descendants of generations of autonomous peasants, are simple producers, users of seeds that they don’t control anymore. Seed savoir faire is no longer transmitted from one generation to another, and propaganda discredits farmers’ competencies. All this contributes to discouraging them from getting involved in breeding activities and in defending peasants’ practices and knowledge. During a colloquium organized in February 2012 on the anniversary of the creation of the PVR, one of the participants asked what farmers could really bring to research in vegetable breeding. The National Interprofessional Association for Seeds and Plants (GNIS) declared on its website: “The conservation of genetic resources requires technical competencies that exceed a farmer’s job.”8
This presentation, partly historical, of the seed sector underlines the complexity of a system that has progressively escaped the control of peasants,. Of course one could say that demand determines supply. In that case, peasants should stop buying market seeds if they don’t suit their needs. However, distinctness, uniformity, and stability criteria have created clone seeds, and the seeds and plants market is dominated by a few multinational companies. Limagrain, the first French seed company, is ranked fourth internationally after Monsanto, Pioneer, and Syngenta. It bought up the big vegetable seed companies Vilmorin, Clause, and Tézier, and became the second leader internationally in vegetable seeds, proving the positive effect of concentration. Plus, it focuses on wheat, hoping to control the sector, from seed to consumer’s plate. This is why it is a shareholder in huge companies specializing in baked goods. Last but not least, it is starting GMO testing in France, and also in the United States and India. The financial weight Limagrain gained through its domination of the market makes for a political advantage too; it is now developing partnerships with the public sector to lead research on biotechnologies and promote GMOs in France, as well as around the world. French government policies no longer represent citizens’ choices but the interest of a few big companies interested in gaining an advantage over their American competitors.
Despite the strict regulation of the seed sector, which is worrying, a certain freedom has been left to farmers. The state tolerated peasants’ practices, even as it was developing seed regulation. Farmers could continue sowing their own seeds, illegally, but without state repression. Tolerance preserved peasant autonomy. But the situation threatens to get worse. Nowadays, farmers must face many new challenges that put their remaining freedom at stake.
France was well known for its resistance to GMO crops in its fields, despite the European welcome for transgenic crops. MON810 is indicative of the French attitude of precaution concerning GMOs. In 1998, the European Union accepted the culture of GMO maize seeds MON810. France decided on a moratorium to suspend this authorization, until there is conclusive proof that these GMOs are harmless. However, resistance to GMOs in France was at issue again in the winter of 2011. The Conseil d’État (the highest administrative jurisdiction in France, advising the government as well as Parliament on bills and laws) assessed that there was not enough proof of the risks of the GMO MON810, and decided to repeal the moratorium of 2008. This was a first success for big seed companies—the GMO threat was coming back. The same day, on the afternoon of November 28, 2011, a bill on Plant Variety Rights was passed in the National Assembly. The French seed companies’ union (with Bayer, Limagrain, Monsanto, Pioneer, Vilmorin, and Syngenta) had managed to defend their claim for more financial resources for their research through a “fair” return on their creation: the compulsory voluntary contribution. The companies promoting GMOs and those defending the PVR were the same. Farmers were supposed to participate “compulsorily voluntarily” to the promotion of GMOs in French fields. Fortunately, the opposition of civil society and the precautionary French politics enabled the reinstatement of the moratorium. However, a moratorium is only a suspension of a right—the complete freedom to cultivate the genetically modified crop MON810 is still likely.
Even though GMO crops in France are not yet cultivated, their consumption is authorized. The problem lies in the definition of genetically modified crops in order to determine what can be sold and what cannot. This regulation needs to be improved, and the law widened so that full information is given to consumers; for example, since July 1, 2012, meat from animals fed without GMO grains now gets the “without GMO” label.
Yet another problem, a more permanent one, is the legislation regarding organic farmers. The regulation of organic agriculture, especially concerning the use of seeds, is draconian. Indeed, organic farmers would be the first to use traditional seeds, adapted to local environments as they require strong plants that can resist adverse climatic conditions and predators. Peasant seeds, cultivated for many years on particular soils, develop resilience and meet the criteria of organic agriculture. Commercial seeds, on the other hand, are engineered to be cultivated in any environment, and are homogenized with chemical inputs. They are unsuitable for organic agriculture. Organic farmers are also the ones who face the strictest control. In fact, to obtain recognition of their organic practices (with the label AB, Organic Agriculture, for example), they have to prove the organic origin of the inputs (such as seeds) that they are using. Since 1995, seeds destined for organic agriculture must be produced without GMOs and within organic agriculture conditions. This means that organic farmers cannot benefit from laws allowing the use of farm-saved seeds. This is a very important issue in the debate about the regulation of the seed sector, as a growing number of farmers are reverting to organic agriculture in France.
It is when the situation worsens progressively that people start worrying. Over the last few years, farmers and citizens have begun challenging the threat to biodiversity and to farmers’ rights. Protesting and creating alternatives, they bring some optimism to the future of the seed in France.
The reinforcement of the European regulation concerning organic seeds in 2002 led to the creation of a massive protest movement in France on the issue of free seeds. Meetings were organized in February 2003 between peasants, researchers, sociologists, and others to defend farmers’ seed-breeding activity. The event gave birth to the idea of “semences paysannes” or “peasant seeds.” The Peasant Seeds Network, le Réseau Semences Paysannes, was also formed with the objective of bringing together organizations working for the promotion of “free seeds.”
The Peasant Seeds Network today is composed of more than sixty organizations and individual farmers. It helps members to present their points of view and their experiences, share seeds, and organize common trainings. These activities provide the movement with a platform that enables the question of peasant seeds to be taken seriously. Organizations divide themselves into working groups according to geographic areas, species, and everyone’s needs. They then work on bringing specific species back into cultivation, or simply on promoting traditional varieties that could interest local farmers.
Farmers can obtain traditional varieties from old peasants’ granaries, or from public seed banks. Indeed, public research has acknowledged the importance of biodiversity conservation as genetic patrimony. Some initiatives to preserve this vegetable richness have been implemented since the 1960s; for example, the most important French seed bank was created within the National Institute for Agricultural Research of Clermont-Ferrand. More than ten thousand different varieties of wheat, of which four thousand are from France, are preserved in it. However, the lack of financial resources and of a real political will to preserve seed biodiversity means these initiatives are inadequate. To stock seeds and to ensure seed quality are expensive; this is why a selection is made between traditional varieties; recently, about seven hundred oat varieties were discarded, having been judged as being without interest. Moreover, even though public seed banks do send seeds to gardeners who ask for them, they do not participate in the promotion of a dynamic management of varieties. Their aim is to preserve varieties in the form in which they have been discovered, storing them in freezers, and conserving their fertility.
Fortunately, the public sector also helps in the preservation of traditional seeds through the regions. Regional nature parks launch local biodiversity research and promotion programs. For example, the regional nature park of Queyras in southeast France is famous for its involvement in the Peasant Seeds Network. In the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, the Regional Genetic Resources Center (CRRG) works on finding ancient local varieties, often after having been contacted by farmers. This center leads bibliographic research and field tests to define the characteristics of particular varieties. When the CRRG assesses that a variety is of interest with regard to yields, quality, and market demand, it can help farmers financially and legally to get their varieties registered and have legal access to the market. These public organizations work on the construction of a seed bank and on the promotion of local varieties.
All these public initiatives are essential, but French farmers’ autonomy remains limited within this framework.
It is for this reason that the “maisons de la semence,” seed houses, have emerged over the last few years. These are seed banks managed by farmers themselves, in partnership with researchers, and with the support of citizens who are sensitive to this new peasant dynamic. Till now, farm-saved seeds and traditional seeds were exchanged informally between neighbors, or even between farmers from different regions of France. However, they lacked a real space in which to gather, stockpile, and test the varieties bred, cultivated, and improved by farmers themselves. More than providing a space, however, these “maisons de la semence” are a concept—they represent all the human interactions involved in seed conservation. They create social links, nourish everybody’s motivation, and support exchanges and the enrichment of the savoir faire.
Many foundations in France are developing more participative research and more democratic science. One of the issues they focus on is peasant seeds. The Citizen Sciences Foundation, for example, works at enlarging access to science and defends farmers’ participation in seed and plant breeding. The idea is to think of farmers as scientists who can participate in research programs because they have a special and beneficial knowledge about farming. Moreover, public research is evolving toward widening its experimentation field and its contributors. A number of researchers in the National Institute for Agricultural Research are now working on a peasant seed-breeding project, in partnership with farmers, sociologists, economists, and citizens. This is participative breeding, and a few programs have been implemented within this new framework. For example, INRA and the members of Triptolème, an organization of the Peasant Seeds Network, came together on the PaysBlé project. The aim of this project is to “experiment, maintain, and promote the diversity of wheat varieties cultivated on the soils of Bretagne with organic agriculture.” With public financing, farmers and bakers work together with scientists, and integrate science and seed breeding. They bring back local varieties, cultivate them in small quantities in order to multiply them, and then adapt them to the environment. Finally, they define precisely the characteristics of the varieties. In the Pays de Redon, in south Bretagne, a collection of 330 wheat varieties is conserved in a dynamic way in the baker-farmers’ fields of the area. Contrary to the simple use and reproduction of peasant seeds, the PaysBlé project involves peasants in real research activity, successfully. It is very clear proof that more democratic research is possible!
In parallel, many demonstrations and petitions have taken place in the 2000s in support of peasant seeds. In 2004, a petition campaign launched by the Peasant Seeds Network demanded that the state facilitate the commercialization of organic and conserved seeds. A new campaign, “Let’s Sow Biodiversity,” has recently begun for the signing of a petition concerning the law on PVR of December 2011. This cyber-action collected about twenty thousand signatures, demonstrating citizen response to the issue. Even though the bill was voted in, the strong mobilization of farmers and civil society seems to be delaying its application. Seeds are a public interest issue; they are political issues that must enter the public sphere of mobilization and debate. We hope this new awareness and the alternatives it encourages will spread in the next few years.
Although these initiatives are creating a positive dynamic among farmers and citizens, their expansion remains limited by the legal framework that does not recognize the extraordinary value of peasant seeds. The regulatory system needs urgently to be reformed. Indeed, the actual evolution of the law to meet alternative peasant practices is unsatisfactory, as it does not support farmers’ autonomy as it should.
The reform of French law regarding seeds may prevent varieties from disappearing, but it does not support farmers’ rights. In 1997, the Official Catalogue opened a register for “ancient varieties for amateur gardeners.” An order of 1997 authorized famous varieties to be commercialized to amateurs who would cultivate them for their own consumption only. But have we forgotten what “amateur” really means? It is “the one who loves,” and farmers love their plants, as much as gardeners.
A decade later, in 2008, the European directive that established a register for conservation varieties was transposed into French legislation. Disappearing varieties could now be registered in the catalogue for a much lower cost than conventional varieties, and with less strict criteria, but their diffusion remained limited to the original region of the variety. In 2010, the French register for conservation varieties was further improved and it is now divided into two: a list of conservation varieties and a list of varieties without intrinsic value. The subscription criteria are widened and adapted to new agricultural practices, including organic agriculture. But many problems remain. The diffusion of conservation varieties is still very limited; it sets out the conditions only for commercialization of one variety, whereas farmers exchange a lot of their seeds among themselves. Finally, it is limited to vegetable varieties, since the National Interprofessional Association for Seeds and Plants claims that the demand for ancient and/or local varieties is not important enough to begin reforming cereal seeds’ regulation. Yet some associations such as Triptolème work on preserving, cultivating, and adapting peasant wheat varieties to their needs and to their soils, sometimes breaching law barriers.
The few reforms undertaken by the government are indicative of the possibility of changing laws and regulations when citizens and organizations demand it. However, the measures mentioned above cannot give peasants much satisfaction, as the catalogue is not adapted to peasant seeds, based on their continuous evolution (rather than their stability) with rich interactions among famers. What is required is a new conception of the catalogue that excludes peasant seeds—free seeds need their own regulation that protects and promotes their development.
There was a time in France when farmers sowed their own seeds, adapting them to their environment and enriching local biodiversity. There was a time when farmers were autonomous and controlled their agricultural activity.
Then there came a time when farmers lost their seeds and the knowledge for saving, breeding, and producing their seeds. They lost their autonomy, to the advantage of big private companies.
It is time now for farmers, researchers, and citizens to create alternatives to recover their autonomy and to preserve seed biodiversity and seed freedom. The seed issue concerns us all. It is about our food sovereignty, about our environment, about our freedom. Guy Kastler, seeds spokesperson of Confédération Paysanne, says, “If today we are prevented from re-sowing our own seeds, tomorrow we will be prevented from giving birth.” The seed issue is a social debate, a debate that is deeply political, and must involve us all.
1. R. A. Brac de la Perrière et al., avec la Contribution d’Elise Demeulenaere et François Delmond, Visions Paysannes de la Recherche, Fondation Sciences Citoyennes, Réseau Semences Paysannes, BEDE, 2011: 60.
2. Fondation Nicolas Hulot, “La Maison de la Semence,” www.fnh-tv.org.
5. C. Bonneuil and F. Thomas, Gènes, Pouvoirs et Profits: Recherche Publique et Régimes de Production des Savoirs de Mendel aux OGM (Versailles: Editions Quae, 2009), 619.
6. Ibid.