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Comment by wwarner | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, very inadequate treatment of this story. Golden rice is intellectual property, whose seeds are no longer owned by the farmer who grows them, but by whoever is selling it.

Think about it, can the root of the problem be the nutritional value of rice, when no rich country needs to license a foreign company's intellectual property to feed itself?

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I mean this discussion of IP from the Golden Rice Project's website is ridiculous! [1] How can this page of legalese compare to having a the seeds in your barn?

[1] http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php

From the first paragraph of that article:

"The Golden Rice Humanitarian Board [has] the right to sublicense breeding institutions in developing countries free of charge."

From later in the article:

> This contribution was based on the understanding that Syngenta would retain commercial exclusivity for the technology, including large agricultural setups in developing countries.

The sub licensing agreement has several hooks to ensure that.

Free of charge is not freedom. If I were a farmer, or a nation of farmers, I would want the source code.

Not that I like it but to be fair you don't get the genome of any seed you buy.

Are they F1 sterile?

If not, then I would encourage developing countries to just igonore the IP rights and/or in the case that they are sterile to develop a generic.

The license requires the country to decide whether it allows planting golden rice. So I wouldn't be surprised the owner of the patents tried to use that to extract money from the countries directly when they fail to enforce it.

Usually international agreements take precedence over local laws. I don't think there would be any problem to enforce it.

In theory yes. In Africa... not so much. [1]

[1] https://mg.co.za/article/2015-06-18-how-zuma-and-ministers-p...

Africa doesn't rely so much on international agreements as much as corporate paramilitary and colonial military forces to enforce foreign interests.

Part of the concept of sovereignty is that you can just ignore agreements and no one can enforce them.

Well, if there's no technical way to enforce the agreement, then the agreement doesn't really exist. But if there's a way to enforce it, another part of sovereignty is that you can complain only to who wants to hear.

The definitions of a sovereign country is that it's government/ people decides what goes.

They can definitely suspend IP protections for indefinite period.

That works when you're a rich and powerful country, but not so much when more powerful countries are willing to inflict economic sanctions on you for disrespecting the IP of their corporations.

IP is not enshrined in a UN charter and is not a human right. There is no reason to believe every country should respect it.

Using it as a cause to impose sanctions would be highly illegal.

Combined with the blowback you'd get for imposing sanctions on Somalia for trying to feed kids, I don't think it's a realistic possibility.

If that's true, this is the real problem.

Is there legal precedent for this? I can't imagine that there were cases in the pre-GMO world where seed suppliers claimed that they owned all of the seeds grown by a farmer, but I could be wrong.

Would love to see some direct sources -- licensing docs from the vendors, legal cases, that sort of thing (e.g., not a link to a news article).

Plants have been patentable in the US since 1930: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930

I strongly suspect, but have no verified numbers to prove, that the majority of currently-patented plants are not GMO cultivars.

Even with GM crops there are still ongoing legal battles on their patentability, e.g. on cotton seeds between Monsanto and Indian farmers:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/agriculture/was-there-a-...

Any sovereign government has the right to nullify patents on its territory in times of emergency, or in the interests of national security. Doing so to feed starving kids would not even be controversial.

UK has such provisions in its laws, and so does India. I am less informed about Africa

This is definitely a navigable issue. The GM rice should succeed or fail on it's own merits, and if usefull, the IP could be sorted.

An enormous amount of plants are already IP (under PVR) so I don't really understand your point.

Most farmers already buy their seeds from somewhere anyway even if their non GMO

Most of the seeds you buy are hybrids that don't breed true if you reuse the seed.

Sometimes, that doesn't matter much - I've saved corn seed and replanted it year after year, and it may not be exactly Silver Queen or Seneca Horizon anymore, but it's still corn. But some things get weird.

I'm interested to know what weirdness you've run into.

Mostly I've seen odd results trying to replant seed from cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, that variety of thing, when they are hybrid varieties. A lot of times, there's a clear regression back to the base varieties that were hybridized, and it can be quite a striking difference.

Also, a number of these cultivars can cross-pollinate, and then you can get some really interesting monstrosities. For instance pumpkins getting crossed up with buttercup squash that come out as dark green and orange tiger-striped things.

That sounds really cool! Even if they might not be edible.

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