Seeds of conflict

Farmers’ rights and our long-term food security are under threat from an international treaty that is concentrating corporate control over seed supplies.

Lean Ka-Min

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SEEDS are the stuff of life, the source of the crops that provide our food. Control of seed supply is therefore nothing less than an existential issue, one that is however currently being played out far away from the farms and fields, in corporate boardrooms and the halls of international diplomacy.

Farmers have traditionally used seeds saved from their own harvest, exchanged with neighbours or bought from local markets and other farmers. They also breed new varieties with desirable traits adapted to the local environment. This informal seed system produces some 70–90% of the seeds used in much of the developing world.

The rest are sourced from the formal system, where seeds are marketed as commodities for profit. Modern varieties are developed by commercial plant breeders and released for sale by seed companies to farmers.

The informal and formal systems complement each other and should co-exist; in fact, the latter often turns to the former for the genetic resources used as the source material for its breeding activities. The essential role that farmers play is acknowledged in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Plant Treaty), which ‘recognises the enormous contribution that the local and indigenous communities and farmers of all regions of the world … have made and will continue to make for the conservation and development of plant genetic resources which constitute the basis of food and agriculture production throughout the world’.

The Plant Treaty and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) both affirm farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed and other propagating material. However, these rights, so integral to the informal farmer seed system, are now under serious threat.

The threat comes in the form of UPOV – the French acronym for the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants. UPOV was established in 1961 following calls by European breeding companies to enshrine intellectual property rights over plant varieties. The conference which paved the way for the adoption of UPOV’s founding Convention had only European governments taking part, with the participation of three seed industry associations and the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property as observers.

The UPOV Convention ‘was largely conceived and designed by and for European commercial breeding interests’, notes the intellectual property scholar Graham Dutfield, and each subsequent revision of the 1961 text has only reinforced its pro-industry bent. The latest iteration, drawn up in 1991, grants wide-ranging intellectual property rights to plant breeders at the expense of farmers’ rights.

Under UPOV 1991, no one is allowed to undertake the following acts in respect of a protected plant variety without the breeder’s permission: production or reproduction; conditioning for the purpose of propagation; offering for sale; selling or other marketing; exporting; importing; and stocking for any of the above purposes. What this laundry list of restrictions effectively amounts to is that farmers are barred from saving seeds of protected varieties, except under very limited circumstances. They are prohibited altogether from exchanging and selling farm-saved seeds, even among themselves on a local scale. This would essentially compel them to purchase the seeds anew from the rights-owning seed company every planting season.

That farmers’ interests are given short shrift by UPOV was dramatically underlined in 2009 when an application by the European Coordination Via Campesina (then known as CPE) for observer status in UPOV bodies was rejected. ECVC is a member of La Via Campesina, the largest international peasants’ movement. The reason for the rejection: La Via Campesina had earlier in the year called for the suspension of intellectual property rights on seeds in connection with the global food crisis that was then raging. Such a stance, according to UPOV’s Vice Secretary-General, was at odds with the UPOV Convention and thus unacceptable. It was only with the support of individual UPOV member states that ECVC was eventually accredited the following year, but the rough ride it faced contrasts with the welcome mat laid out for the seed industry, which is well represented among the ranks of UPOV observers.    

The prioritisation of the commercial seed sector by UPOV not only undermines farmers’ rights; it also puts long-term food security at risk. Under an intellectual-property-driven model, plant breeding efforts are skewed towards development of a narrow range of high-value commercial varieties, focusing primarily on genetic uniformity to meet industrial or market demands. A 2009 report by then UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter found that ‘most of mankind now lives off no more than 12 plant species, with the four biggest staple crops (wheat, rice, maize and potato) taking the lion’s share’. Genetic variability within crops is also declining: while 2,000 varieties of rice were cultivated in Sri Lanka in 1959, there were fewer than 100 in 1992, 75% of which were descended from a common stock. Some 74% and 62% of the rice varieties in Indonesia and Bangladesh respectively descend from a common stock. This erosion of genetic diversity increases the vulnerability of food crops to new pests and diseases and to shifts in the climate – no small concern in an age of global warming.

In contrast, resilience is a hallmark of the informal seed system, with farmers having engaged in plant breeding since the dawn of agriculture and where the accumulated traditional knowledge and free exchange of seeds have contributed to crop diversity and the development of locally appropriate varieties. However, this farmer-managed system is steadily being sidelined, even by national governments. As De Schutter explained, traditional farmers’ varieties are often excluded from government-approved seed lists and seldom included in state-subsidised seed distribution programmes. Instead, it is commercial varieties which come bundled with government assistance packages that also include associated inputs like fertilisers and pesticides as well as much-needed credit, making it difficult for farmers to forgo.

Development of the informal system is further hampered when farmers’ innovation – which may involve combining traditional and modern varieties to produce locally adapted varieties – is stymied by stringent intellectual property restrictions like the ones imposed by UPOV 1991.

The good news for advocates of the farmers’ seed system is that countries are not obliged to adopt UPOV 1991 under the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). While the TRIPS Agreement does require WTO member states to provide intellectual property protection for plant varieties, it does not bind them to any particular means of protection. They are free to put in place ‘an effective sui generis system’ of protection that better balances farmers’ and breeders’ rights.

However, governments find themselves coming under pressure from other sources to join UPOV, not least from its major beneficiaries. Given UPOV’s Eurocentric origins, countries from Europe are among its most fervent cheerleaders, along with the United States and Japan, and it’s not difficult to see why. Over 80% of global seed exports in 2022, valued at more than $13 billion, originated from the European Union, the US and Japan. Seven of the top nine seed companies are from Germany, France, the US and Japan, controlling over 55% of the world seed market in 2023 with sales exceeding $28 billion. To entrench their dominant positions, these firms turn to plant variety protection: in 2023, over three-quarters of all PVP applications filed globally by non-residents were lodged by entities from the US, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, Germany and Japan. And when it comes to the scope of PVP rights, few are more demanding than UPOV.

This is why the likes of the EU, the US and Japan have incorporated in their free trade agreements with other countries requirements to provide plant variety protection along UPOV 1991 lines or to accede to UPOV 1991 itself. Meanwhile, the East Asia Plant Variety Protection Forum – which comprises Japan, China, South Korea and 10 Southeast Asian countries – was initiated and is hosted and principally funded by Japan, with substantial support from the UPOV secretariat. The Forum is upfront about its ‘long-term direction’ to ‘establish effective PVP systems consistent with the UPOV Convention among Forum members towards achieving all Forum members’ membership of UPOV, as a basis for further PVP harmonisation and cooperation in the region…’. Lending keen support to this aim are intellectual property offices and other government agencies from developed countries as well as seed industry representatives, who are regular ‘guests’ at Forum meetings.

Beyond the regional level, developed-country entities have also been hard at work spreading the UPOV gospel in individual developing countries. For example, the Collaborative Seed Programme under the Nigeria-Netherlands Seed Partnership financed by the Dutch foreign ministry seeks, among other goals, to ‘develop an operational PVP system [in Nigeria] in accordance to the UPOV system that supports the growth of the seed sector’. The Dutch government has also funded a PVP Development Program that includes a ‘PVP Toolbox’ for technical assistance and knowledge sharing with other countries on setting up UPOV-aligned national PVP systems.

If such campaigns bear fruit and a country decides to join UPOV, it will then have to jump through legal hoops before it can be accepted as a member: to pass muster, its PVP laws must be assessed by UPOV as being in compliance with UPOV 1991. The experience of Malaysia and the Philippines, which had submitted their legislation for scrutiny, is instructive. In both instances, provisions in their laws pertaining to farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds fell foul of the UPOV examination and were recommended to be either watered down or removed altogether. (Neither Malaysia nor the Philippines went on to implement UPOV’s recommendations, and both countries remain non-members for now.)

In other cases, UPOV’s input is sought not to evaluate existing laws but to actually draw up new laws. In Zambia, a draft PVP bill had UPOV’s fingerprints all over it: the electronic copy in the form of a Word document sent to stakeholders in the spring of 2024 showed the author as the UPOV secretariat and contained comments and recommendations from UPOV. The draft, proposed as a replacement for the PVP act currently in force, drops or restricts farmers’ rights conferred by the present law and curbs existing public-interest limitations on breeders’ rights. It was rejected by the Zambia Alliance for Agroecology and Biodiversity, a broad network of farmer and civil society groups, for being ‘completely an ill-suited PVP model for the Zambian context’.

This concern about the inappropriateness of UPOV standards is echoed in more general terms by a study commissioned on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The 2015 study concluded that ‘the “one size fits all” approach of UPOV appears … problematic if the highly diverse conditions and needs of developing countries are to be addressed’, and that ‘UPOV 91–based PVP laws were found to not advance the realisation of Farmers’ Rights; rather they are effective in the opposite direction’. It recommended that developing countries ‘consider opting for an alternative sui generis system of PVP that allows for more flexibility’.

Such a PVP regime must be crafted through an inclusive process that involves the various stakeholders in the food and agriculture sectors, including of course farmers themselves. It has to recognise and promote the informal and formal seed systems alike, acknowledging their complementary and mutually supportive roles in advancing food security. The public interest could be safeguarded with, for example, measures to ensure protected varieties are made available within the country in sufficient quantities at reasonable prices, and to ensure fair sharing of benefits stemming from the use of traditional local farming resources and knowledge.

Away from the confining dictates of UPOV, farmers’ rights can be preserved and, in turn, seeds of a more food-secure future planted.                                        

Lean Ka-Min is editor of Third World Resurgence.

References

APBREBES (Association for Plant Breeding for the Benefit of Society), UPOV’s War Against the Rights of Farmers, 2024, https://www.apbrebes.org/sites/default/files/2024-12/Apbrebes_UPOV-War-against-Farmers_EN_241202_fin.pdf

ETC Group and GRAIN, ‘Top 10 Agribusiness Giants: Corporate Concentration in Food & Farming in 2025’, June 2025, https://grain.org/en/article/7284-top-10-agribusiness-giants-corporate-concentration-in-food-farming-in-2025

Olivier De Schutter, ‘Seed policies and the right to food: enhancing agrobiodiversity and encouraging innovation’, report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, United Nations document A/64/170, 23 July 2009.

Report of the South East Asian Regional Workshop on Plant Variety Protection, Farmers’ Rights and Development of the Seed Sector, Kuala Lumpur, 4–5 October 2023, organised by APBREBES in collaboration with the Third World Network and SEARICE.

Sangeeta Shashikant, The East Asia Plant Variety Protection Forum and UPOV 1991: Implications for Seed Systems in Southeast Asia, Penang: Third World Network, 2025, https://twn.my/title2/books/pdf/EAPVP_Forum_and_UPOV_1991.pdf

*Third World Resurgence No. 364, 2025/3, pp 11-13