German breeders develop ‘open source’ plant seeds By Lucas LaursenJun. 12, 2017 , 4:45 PM
German breeders develop ‘open source’ plant seeds
There's open-source software, open-source pharma research, and open-source beer.
Now, there are open-source seeds, too. Breeders from Göttingen
University in Germany and Dottenfelderhof agricultural school in Bad
Vilbel, Germany, have released tomato and wheat varieties under an open-source license.
Their move follows similar schemes for sharing plant material in India
and the United States, but is the first that provides legal protection
for the open-source status of future descendants of plant varieties.
The idea behind the open-source license is that scientists and
breeders can experiment with seeds—and improve them—unimpeded by legal
restrictions. The license “says that you can use the seed in multiple
ways but you are not allowed to put a plant variety protection or patent
on this seed and all the successive developments of this seed,” says
agricultural scientist Johannes Kotschi, who helped write the license last year. Kotschi manages OpenSourceSeeds for the nonprofit Agrecol in Marburg, Germany, which announced the tomato and wheat licensing in Berlin in late April.
Since then, university, nonprofit, and organic breeders have
expressed interest in issuing open-source licenses for their hop,
potato, and tomato varieties, Kotschi says. Many have also requested the
open-source tomato seeds, he adds. People have been breeding plants in
search of desirable features, such as drought- and pest-resistance, for
millennia. But until 1930, when the United States began applying patent
law to plants, there was little a breeder could do to assert ownership
over a new variety.
Since then, a flurry of protections, including patents and a
special intellectual property system for crops called “plant variety
protection,” has begun to block the way for researchers trying to breed
new varieties, open-source advocates say. Developing the famous Golden
Rice, for example, required so-called humanitarian exemptions to plant patents. As a result of mergers, plant intellectual property is in the hands of a shrinking number of companies.
International agreements on plant variety protection include a
so-called breeder’s exception that allows for research—but breeders who
use it to develop a new commercial variety have to pay royalties to the
owner of the protected variety. And patents are even more restrictive,
says Niels Louwaars, director of Plantum,
a plant breeder's association in Gouda, the Netherlands: “When one
trait in a plant is patented, you are in principle not allowed under the
research exemption to use such materials for further breeding,” he
says.
The recent German licensing action circumvents those problems. Anyone
can use the varieties, so long as they do not prevent others from
conducting research on derivatives; all of the plant's future
descendants are also in a “commons.”
An allied U.S. group called the Open Source Seed Initiative
(OSSI) tried for several years to write a similar binding license but
concluded in 2014 that it was too unwieldy to gain widespread acceptance
among breeders and seed companies, says plant geneticist and OSSI
Executive Director Claire Luby of
the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Because patents play a bigger
role in plant intellectual property in the United States, breeders are
more hemmed in than in Europe. Instead, OSSI now encourages supporters
to make and follow a "pledge" to keep new varieties and derivatives
open.
Organic seed company Fruition Seeds in Naples, New York, has taken a carrot population Luby and colleagues put into the commons
and begun breeding it to create a sexually reproducing variety, Luby
says. Luby has also sent out open-pledged carrot seeds to university
researchers over the last couple years.
There's a similar development in India, where agriculture scientist GV Ramanjaneyulu
of the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture in Hyderabad has organized an
open-source network that has bred and shared eight varieties of rice,
wheat, and pulses. That may seem superfluous, because Indian law does
not recognize patents on plants or plant traits at all. But a
much-debated seed law pending since 2004 could change that. "We are
trying to prepare for the future," Ramanjaneyulu says. "Conditions
should be much simpler and easier for sharing."
But Louwaars cautions that a complete shift to an open-source system
would harm innovation. Commercial breeders, the main producers of
economically important new crop varieties, can't use open-source seeds
because they would not be able to claim royalties for any varieties they
develop from them. If too many seeds were in the open source–only
commons, they would be "killing the business model,” Louwaars says. Many
universities would also lose out if they could no longer charge
royalties for plant traits or breeding tools.
How much of an impact the various sharing systems have remains to be
seen. For now, it's best to experiment with them in different legal
systems, Ramanjaneyulu says: "Let each nation decide, and let's learn
from each other."
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