On 5 July, the European Commission is due to adopt a proposal to revise the legislation on seeds and other plant and forest reproductive material.
It wants to introduce flexibility into the rules to take account of technological developments, improve access to genetic resources and include provisions to meet the EU’s sustainability objectives.
The European seed sector is worth €13 billion in value and accounts for 20% of the world market.
Over the past years, “current legislation has allowed freedom of choice for farmers, with more than 50,000 varieties in the common catalogue and 4,000 varieties coming to the market every year”, according to Euroseeds.
The current legislation (from the 1960s), in the form of Directives, has given rise to problems of interpretation in the EU Member States and, consequently, different conditions for operators to place products on the market.
Registration is subject to certain conditions. For example, before a variety can be marketed, it must be registered and tested, the price must be fixed and it must be checked that it is distinct from other varieties, uniform and stable.
The second element that is also tested is the value for cultivation and use. In the past, you had to be very careful about yield. Some of the traits tested for these varieties are probably not entirely in line with the current objectives of the ‘European Green Deal’.
The authorisation and marketing system is fairly complex. There is an official certification system operated by EU countries. Member States must check that what has been registered actually corresponds to the product on the market. So they carry out tests, take samples, send them to the laboratories and carry out further experiments to check that everything complies fully with the legislation. This is a highly regulated sector.
The principle of equivalence applies to seeds or forestry material imported by the EU (imported products must comply with the same rules as those in force in the EU). This means that EU countries can only import varieties from third countries that appear in the EU’s registered catalogue. In addition, the test conditions are those defined in the EU.
The Council of the EU has asked the Commission to review the legislation in 2019. The Commission carried out an impact study which showed that the sector is working very well, but that certain elements could nevertheless be improved. For example, the sector is unable to integrate innovation and international standards quickly. What’s more, the digitalisation aspects are not part of current legislation.
As far as forest reproductive material is concerned, the most tested category meets certain conditions, but perhaps not in the conditions that would help the forest to better withstand the current environmental stresses. Some of the other categories are not of the highest quality.
Forest seed manufacturers and users want the material to be of the highest possible quality and to be resistant to climate change and disease. The proposed revision should move in this direction.
The Commission will also try to respond to criticism that seed legislation only benefits large farms. For example, current legislation lays down certain conditions for organic growing which are not very different from normal conditions. But organic varieties should be different, because it’s a different system of cultivation.
According to Euroseeds, breeders work on many different traits, based on the needs from the different actors of the agri-food chain. Most of these traits contribute, or have the potential to contribute, to different aspects of sustainability: resistance/greater tolerance to pests and diseases, higher yields, longer shelf life, higher nutrient content, better use of resources (i.e. fertilisers) or quality in the processing industry (bread baking quality).
Another current factor is that ‘heterogeneous’ material is only authorised for organic farming, under certain conditions. These conditions are not conducive to achieving the European objective of devoting 25% of agricultural land to organic farming by 2030. The Commission intends to tackle this problem in the proposal.
More information: https://aeur.eu/f/7um (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)