On Sun, 17 Nov 2013 22:34:06 +0100, Martin wrote:



All ABOUT THE New EU Seed Law


Reading your post, it seems the new law is a very bad thing for
gardeners. Presumably the law is intended to be a benefit for somebody
but who supposed to benefit from this draconian legislation?

People who buy seeds.


How? It is so draconian it throws the baby out with the bath water.

Read the draft regulation and ignore the works of rent-a-rumour posts.

There have been discussions about this proposed PRM legislation in
April, May and September this year (see 'more EC tomfoolery' 25 April
and 'have you heard about this' 12 May and 'blog mentioning possible
EU plant regs' 17 September).

At the time of the April thread I checked the draft legislation and
gave a brief summary on 26 April which indicated that the main purpose
of the new reg was to pull the many existing Council Directives (12
from memory) concerning plant reproductive material together under one
piece of legislation and that the impact on gardeners was likely to be
minimal as the controls, concerning a fairly limited list of seed
species, were directed at commercial enterprises.

From a quick look it appears that the legislation has not yet been
agreed but the current proposal summary includes the following text
which supports the above -

'The complexity and fragmentation of the existing legislation is
likely to perpetuate existing uncertainties and discrepancies in its
implementation between the Member States. This creates an uneven
playing field for professional operators on the single market.

Developments in the areas of agriculture, horticulture, forestry,
plant breeding and making available on the market of plant
reproductive material have shown that the legislation needs to be
simplified and further adapted to the developments of the sector by
replacing the existing Directives by a single Regulation.'

It goes on to cover the need to improve 'The traceability of any plant
reproductive material' which is in line with the introduction of farm
to retail traceability of many foodstuffs during the last few years.

For anyone who is really interested a short European Parliament
summary is at
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/p...64628&t=e&l=en

--
rbel