In the proposed ftaa and similar trade agreements, are there similar proposed blocks to farmers planting their own seeds? In order 81 in Iraq, farmers are forbidden to plant their saved seeds from the year before's crop and must buy seeds from multinational biotech, thanks to Paul bremer's order.
Google.com may provide some leads: ftaa "planting seed" gets 15 hits, and ftaa replanting patents gets 44 hits. There would appear to be a lot of opinion back and forth on this issue of patent rights and resulting license agreements to buy only from a particular supplier. It is harder to find "official" sources, partly because there is plenty of legal language in many sources that discuss this.
In Firstgov.gov (click on "advanced search" in upper right corner), the words seed and modified and ftaa get 80+ hits, but would take some hunting to find actual mention of replanting restrictions. The exact phrase: "planting seed" and "must include in text": ftaa gets 3 hits. "all the words": seed patent ftaa gets 33 hits.
There are websites for FTAA itself. The 3rd FTAA Draft
Agreement Nov 21, 2003 seems to be the latest on their pages
at www.ftaa-alca.org. Subsection B.2.i. "Rights of Breeders of Plant Varieties" 2/3 of the way through Chapter XX,
under "Article 4: Rights conferred" says the following:
----------------------------
[4.1. The grant of a breeder’s certificate shall confer on the
owner thereof the right to prevent third parties, without his
consent, from carrying out the following acts with respect to
the material of reproduction, propagation or multiplication of
the protected variety:
a) production, reproduction, multiplication or propagation;
b) conditioning for the purposes of reproduction,
multiplication or propagation;
c) offering for sale;
d) selling or any other act that implies introduction into the
market for commercial purposes, of the material of
reproduction, propagation or multiplication;
e) exporting;
f) importing;
g) stocking for any of the purposes mentioned in the preceding
paragraphs;
h) commercial use of ornamental plants, or parts of plants, as
multiplication material for the purpose of producing ornamental and fruit plants or parts of plants, or cut flowers;
i) the performance of the acts referred to in the previous
paragraphs in respect of harvested material, including entire
plants and parts of plants, obtained through the unauthorized
use of material of reproduction or multiplication of the
protected variety, shall require authorization from the breeder, unless the owner has had reasonable opportunity to exercise his right in relation to the said material of reproduction or multiplication.
The breeder’s certificate shall also confer on its owner the
rights established in the preceding paragraphs with respect to
varieties that are not clearly distinguishable from the protected variety, within the meaning of paragraph 3.5 of this Subsection (Distinctness), and in respect of varieties whose production requires the repeated use of the protected variety.
The competent national authority may confer on the owner, the
right to prevent third parties from performing, without his
consent, the acts specified in the previous paragraphs, with
respect to varieties essentially derived from the protected
variety, except where the latter variety is itself an essentially derived variety.]
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Lots of food for a good international intellectual property
attorney to chew on there....
Your best beginning try, beyond the web itself, might be searches of newspaper databases like Proquest Newspapers and magazine databases like Ebsco Masterfile Premier - maybe just search FTAA by itself, or try "free trade area of the americas". I did not find much at all by including words like seed, seeds, planting, or replanting in the search. Possibly there will be mention of small farmers' rights without actual mention of the patent restrictions.
If you are near a large academic library, you will have better
luck in Lexis Academic database. "Business News" / "Industry News" gets 8 hits in 2 years for the search: ftaa and seed! in full text. You would need to be on site to get these articles, because Lexis, like most commercial database producers, is VERY tight about its license agreements to institutions. I suspect the right words in Lexis "Legal News" would get more articles. "Legal Research"/"Law Reviews" got 6 hits in just 6 months for the search ftaa and seed.