Efforts to control intellectual property of seeds and germ plasm has expanded in the last 30 years through patents and utility patents and has included many major and minor crops.
Irwin Goldman tells the story about why they created the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI). I learned that there for example exists a patent for increased lycopene in carrots. That’s the carotene coding for red carrots - which has existed for hundreds of years. There is also a patent for purple carrots, which dates back a thousand years.
Goldman expresses the current paradigm based on plant patents in this way: The farmer is essentially renting the seed for the purposes of one–time growing and does not own the seed, ie. can’t save the seed, continue breeding with it or in some cases even research the seed.
