I had to split my writing on Open Source Licenses for seeds in two posts. Mostly because it was becoming too long, also because this topic is very dear to me, so I wanted to give it a proper presentation. Sorry ;)
In this post I’ll introduce anything that I had to study to understand and contextualize the License and the need for it. In a next post, coming soon, I’ll discuss the license itself.
Agricultural interests
When discussing regulations, policies and decisions for seeds and agriculture,many interests must be balanced.
In no particular order:
Breeder interests and breeder rights
The plants that we cultivate and eat come from highly selected varieties. Breeders select those varieties; and this takes massive work. Plant variety are often produced and selected by crossing multiple plant lines that have been exposed to different evolutive pressure, trying to combine multiple favorable traits into one single plant or one single population. This involves a combination of low tech genetics and plant science, to cross plants, grow the offspring and inspect them for valuable traits and properties, together with high tech approaches to speed up the process. Moreover, when a new plant variety is selected for agriculture,it must be tested and described in detail, to ensure that it is distinct, uniform and stable and so that farmers know what to expect from it.
The breeders that perform that work must be paid, so that they can keep on doing it, while living a reasonably successful life. At this moment this is granted by Breeder’s Exclusivity Rights in Plant varieties.
Interests and rights of agricultural workers
Farmers need access to high quality plant varieties and high quality seeds, that they can grow efficiently, possibly with minimum input. Meaning that those seeds should be fertile and produce good quality plants, that are adapted to the local condition, so that they require minimum help to grow and can yield a high quality product, with minimum threat to the health of farm workers. All of this for a reasonable price. For a reasonable price.
It cannot be stated enough how important it is have supportive policies toward agricultural workers and respect their rights. because agriculture is a highly dangerous and straining job. The risks include, exposure to heavy machinery, exposure to noise and vibration, exposure to dangerous substances, to biological agents and to physical strains. To get an idea, it is enough to check this Wiki from EU-OSHA or the resource section on the wikipedia article on agriclutural safety, which links to detailed reports on agricultural the topic.
Agricultural workers provide an immense service to society, they grow the food that we eat and more. This is why we must do our best to make their work easier. Supporting policies that grants them access to high quality seeds is one.
Public - Food Justice
The public, as in every single member of our society has the right to access safe and nutritious food and to other key agricultural products.
This has often been termed food security. Which means, a condition in which everybody has access to necessary food, and in which food will not be used as a mean of political and social or economic pressure. FAO is the main organism that monitors food security worldwide.
A more comprehensive approach than food security, which caught my interest is food justice. If you are interest in the topic I would suggest to read about it, and I rate this concept higher than food security, since it investigates more deeply and more systematically the relationship between food and our society, how are they shaped by one another. And it is more rigorous in treating the history of our society and our food production systems including in it concepts like racism, trauma, land possession and labour arrangements. This concepts are discussed in this brilliant paper by Rachel Slocum.
(actually, the concept of food justice is so powerful that kind of kills down all the others. But for the sake of it ;) let go on with this blog post).
Ecosystem
We must do all the above, while preserving our ecosystem. Which means, minimizing pollution and waste of key resources such as water, preserving plant biodiversity and nourishing insect and animal life. Trust me on this, it’s in our interest.
When we introduce a tool so powerful, such as an Open Source Seed license into this system, what might be the impact on these four categories.
Issues with exclusivity rights on plants
More in detail, an Open Source seed license is going to interact with the exclusivisity rights on plant varieties. How are these rights structured at this moment?
The current European (and partly worldwide) approach to providing high quality seeds to the farmers while at the same time ensuring a payment to the plant breeders is a form of intellectual property and exclusivity rights on plant varieties, together with mandatory quality checks.
When a breeder produces a new variety and want to introduce it in the market, the breeder must show that the new variety has distinct, uniform and stable properties, and that it has a value for the market. For example, the properties of a new plant varieties might be, resistance to some kind of pest, resistance to drought, higher yield, better flavour etc, shorter growth period etc.
In case, the breeder can get exclusivity rights to market the seed, and ask for royalties if the farmer wants to use saved and self propagated seeds for that variety. These rights last 25 to 30 years.
This system currently has drawn criticism at many levels. Intellectual property and exclusivity rights are generally awarded to novelty and inventions, but are plant varieties deriving from crossing of existing plant lines any novel or in anyway an invention? Moreover plants are living organisms and constantly evolving and differentiating, until when should exclusivity rights hold on a constantly evolving living being?
Though, again, breeding a new plant variety takes a lot of work and the people that worked on it should be rewarded for it. But how?
Some of the most intense criticism to the current breeding system an to the system of exclusivity rights are that, applied under the current regulations, they concentrated of plant breeding in the hands of few big companies. Although this might not be a direct consequence of exclusivity rights, but rather of the economic and legislative system under which those rights are implemented, concentration of breeding is an issues. It might encourage unfair market practice, it might leave less choice to farmers, it might discourage research and innovation, it might reduce biodiversity. OECD recently released a detailed report on this issues.
Another report was released by the European green party. While I would suggest to read partisan reports skeptically, this one discusses detailed data on market concentration.
The main issues raised by OECD and by the Greens are the mergers of the six greatest company in the field into three (Bayer + Monsanto; Chemchina + Syngenta; Dow + Dupont) and the non horizontal monopoly in the seed market, where the same company might own the rights to a plant variety, control GM technology, have patents for pesticides and fertilizers required to make it grow, and controls data and software required to monitor it
The OECD suggests to improve the seed market by:
- Lowering the barriers to access the market.
- Lowering the barriers to access genetic resources.
- Stimulate public and private research
Could open source seed license introduce changes to this sector? And in case what are its expected effects?
Learning from Open Source Software and publishing.
The Open Source Seed License is explicitly inspired to the Open Source movement, which was pioneered by computer software developers and activists as early as in the ‘80s. To contextualize the Seed license and guess potential effects, I decided to explore and introduce the basis of the Open Source Movement itself.
Ethical considerations comes first: software plays a big role in our life and thus it must be accessible and transparent to everybody. But Open source addressed also another big issue of software deveopment that is inherently linked to how software is made: Software is generally written in source code, but it is then used as executable binaries. If you have access to only the executable binaries, which are the only part that is distributed for proprietary (non open source) software, you can use the software but you cannot know (better, it is really hard to figure out) what the software does in detail or how it does it, nor you can modify it or improve it. For you need the source code.
Much of the Open Source movement was born out of ethical concerns, but practical concerns played a big part in its success: Open source software can be improved by anyone, thus eventually, it might be work better than it’s proprietary counterpart (Typical examples of Open Source Software is GNU-Linux, instead typical proprietary software are, well, all the other main operating systems: Unix, Windows, MacOS. compared to the latter, the user base of Linux grew consistently in the last years).
But maybe, what really guaranteed the success of the Open Source, was its incredibly innovative license concept: the Copyleft license. Developers needed a copyright to protect the Open Source code that they were writing, or better, they needed a tool to protect their software from copyright, ensuring that nobody would take their code and lock it under some restrictive license. A basic copyleft license claims that anyone can use, modify and redistribute the software, or any kind of intellectual work, that it protects; under the clause that it must be redistributed under the exact same license.
Copyleft licenses (such as the GNU, the BSD or the MIT license) are strong tools for freedom of knowledge and of information. This kind of licenses are also defined “viral” because they spread through their redistribution clauses.
Are there similarities between computer code and plant breeding? Could be. Sincerely, I’m not sure.
A license that allows breeder to take any seed, grow it, further cross it with other plants, redistribute the new varieties for free and open for further improvements would be a massive step forward. It could help breeders and farmer propose more biodiverse plant varieties and to react more quickly to issues, to climatic changes, to new threats or it could help them just to improve the quality of the fruits and vegetables that we use and that we eat.
From a technical point of view, like computer software thrived under the Open Source movement, so could plant breeding.
Open source is just a Piece of the Puzzle
Does being open source makes a project automatically “good”? Does it make it automatically fair and inclusive for the people working on it? Does it make it’s impact on society fair? Does it make it ecologically sustainable? Short answer: no.
An open source project, by itself, does not guarantee that people working on it will be safe from harassment, that they will be properly remunerated, it does guarantee that the impact of your project on society will be good, that it will not stir up hate, that it will be used to concentrate wealth in few hands and to increase inequality.
I tried to find more answer by looking at the business model for Open Source projects. Perhaps no dominant business model is associated with open source software, and if you check online, the discussion on what is the best open source business model is still wide open. There are many examples and different models, first Red Hat Linux, which produced a free and open source operating system and earned money with consultancies and training. Another options is providing an open source version with premium features for payment. Or charging for services such as server usage, which is Gitlab’s option. According to Gitlab co-founder, one key to run a successful open source business is to be inserted and to contribute to the open source community.
Some open source initiative rely heavily on voluntary financial support from users such as Linux Mint. Or on support “from the state”, sometimes with grants or more often with contribution from academics such as with R. In my opinion, some form of state support for key open source software could be crucial, since they are an important resource to society.
Besides the concept of making software available to everybody, none of those models includes by default any specific ethical commitment or statements. Although there are many great examples of companies and initiatives that made extra steps to commit to fair practices and to implement them, such as the Tidyverse, there are also many who didn’t. For a more detailed treatment of ethics in programming and in the open source world, I would check Rachel Thomas and Jeremy Howard blog at Fast AI.
Concluding on Open Source. The act of making the computer code available to everybody was an ethical step toward a more fair society. Open source worked great for software and likely this method contributed to the wealth of fast growing computer code and software that is available at this moment. The act of being open source did not imply any other ethical commitment, which required an extra step form open source initiatives. An extra steps that many initiatives are at least trying to take. With big ifs and big caveat, open source has been a great step forward and a great force of progress in software development.
Open access publishing
Open Access publishing is the practice of publishing research results without costs or barriers for readers. This practice is tightly linked to the Open Source movement and is improving access to culture for many people around the world (for example, me ;)).
I fully support Open Access publishing, but I have personal experience with it, and it is a great example of how branding something as open does not make it fair by default.
Academic publishing is been for long in the hand of few companies, which drew strong criticism for unfair pracitices and prices. (While discussing this topic, I think we must keep in mind and never forget the actions and the struggle of Aaron Swartz)
Accessing a scientific peer reviewed article, can come at quite a cost for a private person and for public institutions, and often none of those money goes to the author of that article, which often, instead, pays to publish. On the wave of success of the Open Source and Open Access movement, the main academic publishers started to offer an open access option for their articles. Open access articles can be accessed freely, and thus can reach a wider audience than the paywalled ones. But publishers placed the costs of Open Access on authors, meaning that well funded author could pay for it and reach a wider audience while authors with less fundings couldn’t, increasing devised and inequality with this inherently unfair system. The open access system is open to exploitation.
Open Access is a great idea, but by itself it is not enough to make the publishing system fair. It must be done, and then it must be constantly improved and adjusted.
For example The Max Plank institute shows that a fully open access publishing system could be financed worldwide, free for everyone, without other expenses for institutions then the current ones. Also, many academics around the world are starting to publish on free servers provided by non profit organizations, such as Biorxiv by CSHL. Open textbooks are also being supported and hosted by companies, such as Bookdown by Rstudio.
To support high quality knowledge for everybody, while guaranteeing to the authors proper and fair retribution and a living wage, the Open Access practice will probably need some level of public funding and support by states and governments. Knowledge is a fundamental resource for everyone, it could be funded by taxes…
Soon
This was a quick overview of agricultural interests on one side and of the open source / open access culture from the other. If you want to analyze in depth those themes, feel free to contact me, or let me know what you find out.
Hopefully, this post will be useful to contextualize and understand the Open Source Seed licenses, that will be discussed here very soon.
Stay tuned! (^_~)
PS: Shaking the Habitual is the name of an Album by The Knife. Although Silent Shout is actually their best album, the title Shaking the Habitual fits better to this series of posts.