Seeds shouldn’t be covered by patents. When you buy a patented item from a patent holder (or a manufacturer that licensed the patent) then First Sale Doctrine says that you can do whatever you want with it without needing to pay for a patent license. In the case of a seed, that means you could resell it to someone, you could roast and eat it, or you could plant it in the ground. But unlike other inventions, a seed’s purpose is to create more of itself. By buying a seed, you are implicitly buying the ability to make more seeds. If First Sale Doctrine allows you to use the patented product how you want, then it allows you to grow more seeds, because that’s just what seeds do.
I think most of these seeds are modified in a way that they don’t reproduce. This is what creates the dependency of farmers, they have a well growing plant with good harvest, but need to buy the seeds year for year.
The problem discussed in the article is that people that develop new plants are working under a high uncertainty, as big cooperations have patented a variety of plants and could make claims that some of their “inventions” have been used to develop new one or that new development look the same than their patented “development”.
I think patents were a good idea then we used to have many small companies. But in today’s economy it is overly used and slowing down innovation instead of making innovation attractive for inventors.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but modern technologies aren’t the only issue. The fact is that many food crops are hybrids that don’t breed true, and it’s been like that for many decades. That is, you can save seeds, even legally, but within one or two generations the plants revert to form, losing their desired characteristics and “hybrid vigour”.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a GMO wheat. Yet saving seed at scale hasn’t been viable since at least the 1960s.
