Geoff Juden has been Chair of the East London Garden Society since its establishment in 2012. The group aims to promote urban growing in the community, and help East London’s gardeners to share ideas and resources. They produce The Voice, a monthly magazine to fill you in on the latest garden gossip, and have introduced the ‘Best Garden in East London’ competition.

In his guest post for imanurbanfarmer, Geoff writes about what he perceives to be one of the greatest challenges facing urban farmers – a proposed EU regulation which would affect how seeds can be marketed.

Save our Seeds

There are many challenges confronting the determined urban farmer, on whatever level. My tomatoes never grew to maturity in 2012 owing to the weather in London being mostly wet.

But some challenges are made by human intervention. Possibly the greatest challenge to growers internationally are the behemoth agriculture companies. They first came to my attention when I heard that in USA, where 90% of all soya bean seeds are genetically modified, these corporations will pursue legal action against any farmer or gardener who chooses to grow crops which may be construed as having their genetic material. Their argument being that this constitutes copyright infringement.

The East London Garden Society believes the proposed new EU regulation on the marketing of plant reproductive material will put the future of our plant biodiversity at risk. It will have a disastrous effect on the availability of rare varieties and farmers’ varieties, and stop the exchange and selling of traditional seeds. This will not only affect farmers and growers in the short term by outlawing the exchange of seed which is not currently commercially available, in the long term it will also erode the diversity of species that even the large seed companies, who are driving the proposal, need to provide their future varieties.

Access to seed and plant propagating material from diverse varieties is essential in order for farmers to adapt to the local environment and respond to changing climatic conditions. Current European seed law which favours the production of uniform varieties and discriminates against less homogenous open pollinated varieties and populations. This has already resulted in a non-reversible loss of agro-biodiversity. But the proposed regulation goes even further – it will require every seed to be registered and an annual license to be paid for each variety.

Under this law it won’t be possible to register old and new niche varieties and populations (e.g. conservation and amateur varieties, landraces and farmers’ selections) without official registration and certification, as is currently practiced. If this regulation is passed, not only will we lose a huge number of plant varieties, we will lose the amazing diversity of appearance, taste, and potential benefits such as disease resistance and nutritional content.

The proposal is opposed by two EU Directorates – DG AGRI (Agricultural Affairs) and DG ENVI (Environmental Affairs). But it is being pushed through by the DG Sanco (Sanitary and Consumer Affairs), who we believe are responding to pressure from hard lobbying by the globalised agricultural seed industry. The DG Sanco presented its proposal to the conference of commissioners on 6 May 2013.