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2014-07-05 |

AFSA appeals to ARIPO, AU and UNECA for protection of farmers’ rights and right to food

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a Pan African platform comprising civil society networks and farmer organisations working towards food sovereignty in Africa, has today lodged an urgent appeal to the African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO), African Union and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) to urgently revise the draft ARIPO Plant Variety Protection Protocol, recognise farmers’ rights and facilitate the right to food. AFSA is requesting that such revision be based on a broader consultation process with farmer organisations and experts from outside of the plant breeders’ rights sector.

African civil society organisations, many of them members of AFSA, made submissions to ARIPO on its draft Plant Variety Protection (PVP) law and policies in November 2012. AFSA has itself submitted comments on ARIPO’s Response to Civil Society: Draft Legal Framework for Plant Variety Protection, March 2014. In both submissions, several serious concerns were raised about the law, which later was titled “the draft ARIPO Plant Variety Protection Protocol”, being based on UPOV 1991 (the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants), a restrictive and inflexible legal regime focused solely on promoting and protecting the rights of commercial breeders that develop genetically uniform seeds/plant varieties suited to mechanised large-scale mono-cropping agriculture systems. Of particular concern, is that the draft ARIPO PVP Protocol renders the centuries-old African farmers’ practices of freely using, exchanging and selling seeds/propagating material illegal and undermines the right to food.

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