Monday, November 29, 2010

The farmers' right in U.S history.

The farmers' right need protect.
Justice Thomas, who wrote the opinion, left the attorney general’s office in 1977 and became a corporate lawyer in the pesticide and agriculture division of the Monsanto Company. When J.E.M. was being decided, Monsanto held over a thousand plant patents that stood to be overturned.In the wake of those decisions, a handful of corporations spent more than thirty-four billion dollars in mergers and acquisitions.
    As a result of extending utility patents to sexually produced plants, the farmer and research exemptions of the PVPAthe right to save seeds and the right to use any protected variety to develop new varietieswere eliminated. Furthermore, farmers would now be subject to liability for patent infringement, not only if they saved patented seed, but also if they saved seed contaminated by patented pollen from neighboring fields.
    Internationally, during the negotiations over the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Treaty of 1992, the notion of a farmer’s right, as the right to save seeds and use protected varieties to develop new varieties, gave way to a new definition of “farmers’ rights.”

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The farmers' right in U.S history

The topic is about the farmers' right in U.S history.


The USDA hopes to help farmers while promoting the environment.

    Sixty-five years of congressional activity protected the farmer’s right to save, use, exchange, and sell seed of the 20th century. Recognizing the obstacles patent monopolies would pose to farmers, the Senate clarified “the patent right granted is a right to propagate a new variety by asexual reproduction. It does not include the right to propagate by seeds.”
   In 1965, a presidential commission reviewed the role of plant patents and concluded that patents did not fall into §101 subject matter for utility patents. In 1968, Congress proposed an amendment to insert the words or sexuallyin sections 161 and 163 of the PPA. The amendment was defeated.
    Instead, in 1970, Congress specifically crafted a new and distinct intellectual property regime for sexually reproducing plants—the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA). With the PVPA Congress created a sui generis statute extending patent-like protection to sexually propagated seed plants, while carefully preserving a farmer’s right to save seeds. 
    The USDA opposed granting utility patents to sexually reproducing plants because such patents would threaten continuing development and introduction of new seed varieties. More specifically, the USDA feared that seed patenting would severely limit free data exchange, restrict open research discussion, and diminish the exchange of experimental plants.
The image search: http://www.machinefinder.com/ww/en-us/articles/1341 from Machine Finder

Thursday, November 11, 2010

The farmers' right in the U.S history

The topic is about the farmers' right in the U.S history.




Striking farmers

    In 1983 the International Undertaking on Plant Gebetic Resources was adopted at the FAO conference, which is the supreme governing body of the organization.There was, however, as yet no documented mention of Farmers' Rights.
    Later on, in 1995, the mandate of the Commission was broadened to cover all components of agrobiodiversity of relevance to food and agriculture (Resolution 3/95, Twenty-eighth Session of the FAO Conference, Rome, 1995).
    In March 1985, at this session there was still no documented mention of Farmers' Rights.However, the Commission noted that 74 of the 156 FAO member nations had expressed support for the Undertaking.It was in this Working Group that Farmers' Rights were first addressed in the FAO system, but that did not come until 1986.
    On the basis of the discussion in the Working Group on how to deal with country reservations to the Undertaking and attract greater adherence, a report was produced for the Second Session of the Commission on Plant Genetic Resources, to be held in Rome in March 1987:
    Farmers' Rights were addressed in greater detail, so these parts of the report from the meeting constitute an important basis for understanding the history of this concept in March 1987.


picture source: http://picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/?p=322 from Picturing U.S History