Abstract
The European Union’s (EU) approach to safeguarding seed quality and ensuring agricultural productivity includes a range of regulatory measures related to seed marketing, including the restriction of market access to seed varieties that are properly certified. In order for varieties to be properly certified, they have to be registered in a Plant Variety Catalogue. EU seed laws, and their Member State implementation, have traditionally favoured uniform crop production of commercialised breeds over conservation varieties, which has been a contributing factor to crop genetic erosion. The United States’ (U.S.) approach to seed marketing regulation is often presented as an alternative model to the EU’s approach. In the United States, any seed can be indistinctly marketed if properly labelled. In this regulatory framework, certification and registration of seed is voluntary. In light of the continued issues regarding crop genetic erosion and the recent developments in EU seed law reform, this article examines the key elements of both regimes and considers their different approaches to market access for conservation varieties. The most important differences relate to in truth-in-labelling (U.S.) and ex ante quality control mechanisms (EU). These differences highlight that EU and U.S. seed laws must be placed in their respective broader regulatory context and that their relative comparability hinges on policy aims related to seed quality. This raises the broader question as to what the key policy aims of seed laws are and whether these oft-compared regimes are in fact analogous in terms of goals and structure.
Highlights
Crop genetic diversity in the agricultural sector is a fundamental component in a resilient food production system, as it allows the system to recover from agricultural challenges such as environmental hazards, pests, and diseases, but the crops seeds are a carrier for genetic information—an indispensable resource for breeders and farmers in the development of new crop varieties
In the United States, government control of the market is set out to provide a high level of transparency to help farmers make ‘informed choices’, while the European Union (EU) system focuses on ensuring access to ‘quality’ seed, pre-empting the possibility of buyers being exposed to low(er) quality seed
Conservation varieties have historically evolved through external environmental pressures, such as climate conditions, pests, and diseases, making them highly adapted to local environments
Summary
Crop genetic diversity in the agricultural sector is a fundamental component in a resilient food production system, as it allows the system to recover from agricultural challenges such as environmental hazards, pests, and diseases, but the crops seeds are a carrier for genetic information—an indispensable resource for breeders and farmers in the development of new crop varieties. By analysing the U.S seed marketing regime, Agronomy 2021, 11, 2038 we aim both to contribute to the ongoing debate on how to reform seed marketing law in relation to conservation varieties and to investigate whether or not it is desirable to adopt elements of the U.S regime, as suggested in the literature [6,10,20,21,22,23,24,25,27] This longstanding debate is made timely by the EU’s renewed focus on “facilitat[ing] the registration of seed varieties, including for organic farming, and to ensure easier market access for traditional and locally-adapted varieties” in its EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the EU Farm to Fork Strategy These include EU Directives, Regulations, and Decisions; EU Member States legislation; and U.S Statutes and implementing regulations
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