SEEDS STUDY

As Howard notes, the ongoing consolidation in the seed market

“is not an inevitable process”

. According to

the scholar it occurs

“when differential market success accrues additional advantages to leading firms (such as

economies of scale) that snowball into even greater market success (often at the expense of their competitors).

The process may also be assisted by government policies, particularly when economic power translates into

political power: larger firms are more successful in lobbying for government actions that result in an uneven

playing field, to the benefit of the big. The result of these positive feedback loops is that circuits of accumulation

become even more concentrated, or controlled by fewer and fewer players.”

The analysis carried out in this study allows us to draw the conclusion that the EU, along with the rest of

the world, is experiencing a process of unacceptably increasing concentration in the seed market. The 7000

seed companies operating in the EU, to which the EU Commission and ESA frequently refer when denying that

the process of over-concentration is occurring, are principally seed producers/multipliers and traders rather

than breeders, and they are increasingly being bought up or becoming dependent upon a few huge companies.

Furthermore, in the breeding sector it is hard for newcomers to enter and for smaller operators to survive. So

this needs policy making that addresses the real situation and takes long term biodiversity, resilience of farming

systems and future generations into account, and not the “myth of the 7000 companies”.

The EU Common Catalogue as such has not protected the EU seed market from this global concentration process,

but has obliged multinational companies to adapt their strategies to this market by focusing on acquiring local

companies and on improving hybrids of conventional varieties. From an agro-biodiversity point of view, the

system in place has put up many barriers to the small organic breeders, farmers and other operators that work

in non-industrialised production. The work of those actors could be recognised by legislation which was not

based on criteria tailored for industrial production: this could be an opportunity to create an environment of small

enterprises working with varieties designed for more sustainable agriculture without agrochemical inputs.

In that sense, public breeding and research could play an important role re-orienting investment into another

kind of agricultural productivity. But it is clear that if the system continues functioning as it does today, or even

gets worse along the lines of the seed marketing regulation proposed by the Commission, it would be almost

impossible to find seeds in the future that are not bred for agro-chemical, industrial scale production.

The global trend towards adopting biotechnologies into intensive agricultural production and strong IPR

protection is reinforcing the abovementioned consolidation and concentration process of the biggest companies,

which are currently able to provide highly sophisticated technology platforms. Biotechnology in particular is a

business model for big companies. This is because corporations, notably with the support of public funds, can

easily afford those kind of investments.

It is clear that much of the US political and agricultural lobby interest in the on-going TTIP negotiations

lies in

the USA’s desire to speed up the EU’s slow approval process and labelling standards for biotech products.

This

attempt by transnational biotech companies, to bypass the normal democratically-decided procedures, could

have an even bigger impact on the market structure of the EU systems of seed supply and food systems, by

further increasing the market power of the seed giants.

94. Philip H. Howard,

Visualizing Consolidation in the Global Seed Industry: 1996-2008

, Sustainability journal, 2009, 1, 1266-1287, Basel. p. 1270,

95. TTIP is the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership