By Lizzie Bennett | The Organic Prepper
The way we are being pushed and squeezed by regulations that govern every facet of our life, we will soon only be able to defecate when our allotted time slot comes around.
The European Commission is currently drawing up a new law to regulate the sale of all seeds, plants and plant material. The latest draft of the law is even more restrictive than the regulations that we have at the moment.
Every single variety of vegetable will have to be registered on an EU list, otherwise it will be illegal to sell it. To be registered on the list, seed varieties have to pass a series of tests demonstrating what is called DUS ‘Distinctiveness, Uniformity and Stability’. It costs nearly £3000 to test & register just one single variety of seed for sale.
Although we have had a system like this for many years, there have been much simpler and cheaper options for what are considered ‘amateur varieties’ for home gardeners, and the rules have never been strictly enforced in the UK.
The EU wants to get rid of these simpler and cheaper rules for ‘amateur’ seed, and make sure that every country enforces the rules 100%.
Although they say there will be exceptions, in current drafts of the law these are very, very limited.The effect of this new legislation will be to massively limit the choice of vegetable varieties available to home gardeners.
This is because if you are selling seed to farmers, you can expect to sell hundreds of tonnes of seed every year, so it is worth the cost of registering the variety. But if you are selling to gardeners, even the biggest seed companies will be selling a few kilos of seed at most, sometimes just a few hundred grammes of more unusual varieties. It just doesn’t work if they have to pay thousands of pounds to register that variety! So only seed designed for farmers will get registered and be legally sellable.
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Read the full article at: theorganicprepper.ca
