Page 67 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

Seed Regulation in the US

Seed choices, organisational developments and unintended consequences

The respondents identiied transparency in the registration of organic seed

availability as a key concern because it impacts enforcement, on-farm genetic

diversity and overall market development strategies. The lack of efective

information tools to source organic seed was identiied as a major impediment

to achieving the desired transparency. In 2003, as the economic potential of

the organic market became more apparent, the ASTA formed a committee to

respond to the draft seed regulation (ASTA interview, 2008). A year later, the

ASTA approached the Organic Material Review Institute (OMRI) with start-up

funding to establish a national database of all available certiied organic seed

varieties (ASTA meeting minutes, 2004). The goal of the OMRI database was to

provide a single commercial listing of suppliers and a comprehensive register

of the availability of organic seeds and planting stock. It was proposed that

organic seed companies wishing to be listed on the database pay a small,

one-time fee to OMRI but that the database would be free to the public. It

would be designed to be searchable by crop, variety or company. The lack of

formal organic seed regulatory guidelines by the NOP, however, prevented the

database from securing suicient interest (OMRI interview, 2008 and 2011) and,

as the ASTA funding ran out, this initiative ended as a limited-use list of 15 well-

known organic seed sources and eventually closed in 2011. In 2005, the Carolina

Farm Land Stewardship, an organic certiication and education organization,

funded the Save Our Seed project to create another database. The goal in this

case was a free, publicly accessible list of available varieties that were certiied

organic, with supporting educational material for organic seed production.

This initiative ceased toward the end of 2008 (Save Our Seed interview, 2008).

In 2007, the Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) service

launched another database. It included 125 less commonly known sources of

untreated, non-GMO and open-pollinated seed. In 2008, the OSA, too, launched

a database listing 23 suppliers of organic seed (Colley and Baker, 2010). Still

more databases were developed by certiiers, including California Certiied

Organic Farmers (CCOF) that prepared a database of 29 organic seed suppliers

to support their own grower clients.

None of the databases were completely comprehensive nor were oicially

sanctioned by the NOP, and none fulilled the NOSB recommendation for a

‘two-way database’, although they did represent sincere stakeholder eforts to

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