Dear all,
on September 5 we will have next zoom meeting. This will an important meeting, because we have to take some decisions about further strategy very soon. The reason: We have to file a new application to Salvia with a strategy for three years. And we will have to file an new application to Gen ethical Foundation. And also our member organisations have to know what our plans are. So this mail is about to start further discussions.
I also will draft a text document, in this mail I just want to circulate some general ideas and analysis in advance.
1. We should become more confrontative with governments
We will not achieve our goal for a call of an international conference. So far, we gained some support and managed to show urgency, but this will, by far, not sufficient. Therefore we should organise out handover in a more confrontative way. We should choose governments which know about the issue very well (Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark, maybe Spain and France) but did not get active. So we could organise a public events in front of the ministry, also without handover and blame them for doing nothing (we still can do friendly handover in addition).
2. We should start talks & confrontation with selected companies
We should start direct talks with KWS, asking them to drop their patent applications. We should not expect KWS to become our supporter, but at least to trigger a debate with public impact. We could run public activities at their their offices (in several countries).
3. broaden public outreach
There is the idea to 'lable' seed packages with a message saying somtheing 'only use patent-free seeds!'. we could discuss with some friendly breeders or seed producers like Arche Noah oer Bionext if they would like to spread the message by this way to an important target group. Maybe this also would have some impact on other breeders to start discussions.
4. In addition, we will file opposition against the KWS patent and appeal against Carlsberg decision (the written decision is available now, we can draft our arguments) and also continue debate with the EPO.
These activities are all meant to create synergies to move forward the political decision makers to take action. However, we may not try to set further deadlines like we did with the international conference. We should not expand our activities in terms of diplomatic conferences, changes of law as long as we do not have much more support. We also will not change our goals.
We also should not expect a quick solution. But we should be aware that we are the only organisation acting against patents on seeds and likely the only chance to stop it. If we move forward some governments for example to change national laws and wake up some more breeders (or other stakeholders like brewers) we still have a chance to make progress.
So if you have to send me your thoughts, I can try to include in the preparation of the strategy-paper which we will need to achieve further funding.
Cheers
Christoph