Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The fact that a seed decree was issued no more than a year into Nazi rule merits reflection. Comparing it briefly with the American case may illuminate what was at stake. The US Plant Patent Act, issued in 1930, concluded a long-term lobbying effort by nurserymen to have their innovations protected by legal rights.[61] It was passed as a typical Hoover-Republican anti-depression measure, meant to promote innovation by private breeders and thus to save federal money, since until then public institutions did the large majority of breeding work. The patent act applied only to plants reproduced asexually by budding, by grafting, by the rooting of clippings, or by the dividing of bulbs. It was considered that only in these cases was it possible to guarantee the genetic identity of progeny, and that a patent would be meaningless for plants reproduced sexually by pollination and seeds. The Plant Patent Act thus protected innovation first and foremost in fruit and nut trees, vinous fruits (grapes, strawberries, and blueberries), but also in ornamental shrubs, vines, and perennials such as lilacs, peonies, and roses. Quite tellingly, two of the most important plants in the seed market—wheat and corn—were excluded. For these, instead of a commercial patent, a seed certification system had been in place since 1919, with state agencies publishing lists of recommended varieties.[62] Seed dealers were certified by local experiment stations, guaranteeing that seed was genetically pure and that it would grow uniformly and with good germinability. In 1939 the Federal Seed Act was passed to protect farmers from buying unreliable seed and to safeguard “quality seeds from the competition of less worthy alternatives—and thus [protect] the intellectual property investment that produced the quality.”[63]

The German seed decree seems a combination of the American Plant Patent Act and the American Seed Act. In Germany, commercial varieties entering the Reichssortenlist had their intellectual rights protected. The list guaranteed for the first time some sort of protection to German commercial breeders of their creations, in the form of license fees from farmers who sold replanted versions of original varieties. The similarities may suggest that we are only talking of general modernization processes. But the differences were indeed relevant. The BRA scientists were emphatic about the distances of the system they created from the issuing of a patent, noting that commercial breeders could not release in the market new products if the BRA had not confirmed their value for the Battle of Production.[64] It was not enough for a commercial breeder to develop a new variety. The BRA could exclude it from the list for not complying with wart-resistance standards. Indeed, of the approximately 120 new varieties sent in annually by commercial breeders to the BRA for approval, only a few got onto the list. By 1938 the list included only 64 varieties.[65] In other words, it was not for the market to decide the value of a variety; such value was defined at the BRA in accordance with the general food policy of the regime as established by the RNS.

But the most interesting difference may lie in the fact that the American Plant Patent Act explicitly excluded potatoes from its realm of application. In the German case, potatoes, as we saw, were actually the origin of the seed decree. The justification in the US for excluding potatoes, although they are also reproduced asexually trough tuber propagation, was their availability everywhere and the easiness with which the patent could be infringed and the consequent discredit of the entire plant patent system.[66] According to the American promoters of the Plant Patent Act, there was just no way of enforcing breeders’ rights in the case of potatoes. Well, that was exactly what the extended territorial structure of the RNS offered in Germany: a surveillance system that guaranteed the enforcement of the seed decree. In 1937 the Nazi propaganda of the Battle for Production boasted that at least 80 percent of the commercialized seed potatoes in Germany were wart-resistant certified potatoes.[67] Only those potatoes that kept to the resistance standards established by the BRA deserved to be cultivated in German soil. The weeding out of hundreds of potato traditional varieties from German fields is eloquent enough testimony to the misleading characterization of Darré’s Reichsnährstand as an institution resisting modern science and technology.