Mittwoch Mai 02, 2007

Locked-in by a potato
On Monday, more or less by accident, I watched a documentary about a particular potato type called "Linda". A translation of the title of the documentary would be something like "Always trouble around Linda". I first thought that the show probably would be pretty boring, but it turned out to be extremely interesting!

"Linda" has become one of my favorite potatos over the last few years as well, and thus I feel quite attached to the issue covered by the documentary. The issue is, that the "Linda" potato type is controlled by one single vendor who owns the rights for that potato, and now the vendor wants to get "Linda" off the market and replace it with something else before others get allowed to sell "Linda" as well. Here is a quote from one of the few English articles that I have found about the topic:

"Linda is a potato variety that was bred by plant breeder Friedrich Böhm. In 1974, it was registered and certified for sale in Germany and protected with plant breeders ' rights (PBR) for 30 years. Europlant was assigned the rights to maintain and collect royalties on the marketing of Linda.

One month prior to the expiration of the PBR certificate in December 2004, Europlant ceased maintenance of the variety, even though its registration on the national list was valid until 2009. This means that no one else could take over maintenance of the variety because it was still under PBR at the time -- meaning Europlant had the only rights to produce the variety. So Linda was marked for deletion from the German potato market.

The reason that Europlant stopped maintenance? There are other potato varieties now available that are similar but superior to Linda, they said. But the move was constructed in such a way that Linda was de-listed and may not get re-listed because it may be difficult for it pass the VCU tests of today. Various groups in Germany have called it foul play, figuring that Europlant just wants to control the market for its own benefit.

Organic farmers like Karsten Ellenberg and small farmers organisations like ABL are upset that Linda is being taken off the market because it is a very popular variety that deserves to be kept available. Europlant, however, says Linda only commanded 1.4% of the German seed potato market in 2004 (and 0.5% for the whole period of registration 1974-2004). Critics also say that Europlant is improperly playing a role of monopolist, deciding what is good for German consumers. Europlant responds that Linda was a quality potato because production of the seed was licensed out to a few highly controlled seed producers and that if it goes into the open market now, seed will be produced by uncontrolled producers resulting in bad quality seeds, thus harming both farmers and consumers."

The full article can be found here.

I found the documentary fascinating because I, probably for the first time, realized that open competition and vendor lock-in are a key issue of the food sector as well and thus everybody should care. Sure, if a vendor takes your favorite potato from the market, you can easily switch to a different potato type because I'm not aware of any "potato addictions". This is very different for software where vendors often try to lock in customers via proprietary file formats and interfaces, which often make switching to different products costly or even impossible.

Even though I fully respect commercial rights of vendors, I still believe that something is wrong if one vendor can control what a whole nation is eating.
( Mai 02 2007, 07:22:42 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [1]