Next October, a commercial court of Valencia should rule on whether the tango mandarin variety, which was obtained after years of research in the University of California, Riverside (USA), is different than the Moroccan Nadorcott variety, owned by a company linked to Les Domaines Agricoles that manages and markets the products of the farms owned by King Mohammed VI and his family.
The decision of the court should help settle the conflict between the companies that operate both licenses in Spain, Eurosemillas from Cordoba, which sells the variety from California, and Sociedad Carpa and the Club de Variedades Vegetales Protegidas, which owns the Moroccan variety. The ruling will also help the citrus industry choose which plants to use for varietal conversion.
The battle for the mandarin has huge implications in a key sector in Spain. There are 300,000 hectares of this crop, an average production of about 6.5 million tons, and exports of nearly four million tons a year. Despite the magnitude, in recent years citrus have suffered strong price falls that, in some cases, have forced producers not to harvest or abandon thousands of hectares of crops.
Against this backdrop, Valencia, which represents almost 60% of the sector, is betting on a five-year restructuring plan. Among the pillars of this project are the late varieties (i.e., those which mature in late February and early March), such as the tango or the Nadorcott.
Both varieties have their origin in the W. Murcott variety, a cross between mandarin and sweet orange developed in 1912 in USA For Morocco, the tango is an American evolution of the Nadorcott, which appeared virtually by accident in 1988 in the region of Beni Mellal. According to experts from the University of Riverside (and the US Patent Office), the tango was developed independently from an ancestor of the Nadorcott, taken to the US in 1985.
The European Patent Office, in line with the US Patent Office, has concluded that it is a different variety than the Moroccan; the Spanish Patent Office has the same opinion. However, the war for the late variety monopoly goes beyond the Spanish borders and the Kingdom of Morocco does not seem willing to give in to US pressure. Morocco has filed lawsuits in major citrus producing countries to keep the monopoly of the late variety in all markets.
The main difference is the double sterility of the American plant (it doesn't produce seeds nor does it induce them to other varieties), which gives it a clear advantage in the eyes of producers. According to the Farmers Union agricultural organization, the dual sterility of the tango variety saves farmers from putting mats or applying treatments against bees in the pollination periods, which also benefits the beekeepers activity.
Arrival in Spain
Spain has grown the Nadorcott variety since the nineties from seedlings introduced irregularly from the North African country. Following the adoption of the patent in 2004, Spanish companies Carpa Dorada and Club de Variedades obtained the license to commercialize the variety in Spain and designed a sales policy of planting rights limited to only 2.3 million seedlings. The strategy was denounced by the AVA-ASAJA agricultural organization because they considered it went against the free market, which ended in a five million Euro fine.
Almost simultaneously, Eurosemillas, which had collaborated in the development of the tango variety with the University of California, erupted in the Spanish market with tango seedlings in 2007, a time by which it had already been patented in the United States. From that first recognition, Eurosemillas began the process of obtaining, in 2013, the commercial rights of the tango variety for a period of 30 years.
Once the positions of technical and scientific bodies were clear, the battle for the mandarin moved to the law circuit, with reports and counter-reports of investigators hired by the parties and veiled warnings to farmers about the risks of patent violations they might incur when cultivating the tango variety if the courts finally decide it was derived from the Nadorcott variety.
For producers, the end of the conflict paves the way for choosing which variety to grow and it will allow them to calculate the cost of operations. The seedlings and the rights to the Moroccan variety cost around 20 Euro per plant while they cost 15 Euro per plant for the tango variety. War could not be more acidic.
Source: economia.elpais.com