Seed wars: How UK trade deals threaten Global South farmers

On a Tuesday morning in 2019, farmer and village-head Tengku Munirwan was taken from his village in North Aceh, Indonesia, and put behind bars. He was accused of producing and selling a rice seed variety that the Indonesian government had not officially released to the public. Munirwan had originally received the seed from the provincial government as part of a strategy to improve food security in the region. After several good harvests, the farmer had saved the seeds for the next sowing season and sold the rest. That's when his troubles began.

According to Indonesian law, each seed variety circulating in the country must be released and certified by the government. Farmers are not permitted to breed their own varieties, even if they originated from certified seeds. As a result, relying on informal seed systems - such as community swaps, seed banks or reusing seeds from previous harvests - can become a potential liability that most farmers cannot afford to risk. 

Munirwan's story wasn't the first case in Indonesia and is far from unique globally. In rural and agrarian communities, especially in the Global South, informal seed exchanges and seed saving practices are common, but strict seed laws often discourage farmers from saving and using their own seeds out of fear of legal action. 

Since the 1960s, when development programmes started pushing high-yielding crops into developing countries, seed laws have proliferated, granting property rights over seed varieties, usually to governments and corporations. Over time, this system has deemed only commercially developed seeds as legitimate, replacing indigenous varieties and forcing farmers to purchase the seeds they need for their livelihood instead of relying on their own. 

Seed laws and trade deals

Over the past 30 years, the evolution of international trade has made it increasingly challenging for countries to avoid ratifying stringent seed laws, as these regulations have become a standard component of commercial treaties.

An investigation published this year by British NGO Transform Trade found that the UK has been leveraging trade agreements to enforce strict seed patenting in at least 68 countries in the Global South. According to the report, the UK has signed or ratified 19 trade deals that require or encourage signatory countries to comply with UPOV91, the Convention working on promoting intellectual property rights on plant varieties. 

While these are intergovernmental deals, they end up directly benefiting agricultural corporations which are selling commercial seeds. 

"We know that there are trade bodies that lobby governments on behalf of big agri-corporations, which have financial interests in commercial seeds," Hannah Conway, Agriculture Policy Adviser at Transform Trade and author of the report, told FairPlanet.

"In Europe, for example, there's a big trade body called Euroseeds with members like Syngenta and Bayer, which have a lot of intellectual property protections on seeds that they sell on the international market. We know that those trade bodies exist and we know that they talk to governments, but that's all we can say about how influential they are."

While it is not entirely known what processes take place behind closed doors, the result is that the global seed market is highly monopolised, with four companies controlling 67 per cent of all seeds worldwide. 

Seed systems managed by farmers

At the same time, informal seed systems managed by farmers continue to form the backbone of small-scale agriculture. A study conducted across 10 countries in Africa, where smallholder farmers supply 70 per cent of all food produced, found that 90 per cent of their seeds came from farmer-managed seed systems. 

These practices hold numerous benefits, including allowing farmers to come together, socialise and share knowledge. Saving seeds is also cheaper for farmers, who don't have to repurchase the same seeds every year nor comply with the inflated prices set by large companies who control most of the market. 

With climate change expected to affect 17 per cent of the global food production by 2050, growing indigenous varieties of seeds, which are better adapted to local conditions, should be the way forward. 

"Loss of genetic diversity due to monocropping has made the whole food system vulnerable to climate shocks, including pests and diseases," explained Conway. "And if we don't have systems in place that recognise indigenous knowledge and the importance of genetic diversity, then we are going to lose it - and we are losing it, and we have been losing it for decades."

Many communities around the world are resisting agricultural homogenisation and seed privatisation by preserving and cultivating indigenous and local seed varieties, despite potential liabilities.

In Tunisia, in response to prolonged droughts affecting local wheat production, a group of farmers decided to revive an ancient durum wheat variety resistant to drought and local insects, requiring no pesticides. Starting with a single bag of seeds, they successfully multiplied their stock and planted over 250 hectares of land.

"I didn't irrigate, and I didn't use any chemicals," Youssef Hamouda, one of the farmers involved in reviving the lost wheat variety, is quoted saying in a report by the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa. "That saved me a lot of money and I'll also be able to resow my own seeds next year."

At the international level

Back in the UK, organisations like Transform Trade have been lobbying with the government demanding that seed laws be excluded from trade agreements. The power, said Conway, comes from the ground up: "Our lobbying work in the UK was very much inspired by farmers' organisations on the ground who are collectively organising themselves to get better recognition for farmer-managed seed systems and how important they are."

Conway is adamant that we must undermine the importance of UPOV by demanding that countries stop pushing it onto others, but she also emphasises that there are international tools already in place that can be leveraged. 

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, for example, recognises the need to support smallholder farmers, farmer-managed seed systems, seed genetic diversity and indigenous knowledge.

Similarly, the UN Declaration of the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP) states, among other things, that "peasants and other people working in rural areas have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their own seeds and traditional knowledge."

While not legally binding, these frameworks can lay the groundwork for legal actions, and many countries are already moving in that direction. In Honduras, for instance, the Supreme Court revoked the country's restrictive seed laws because they found them in contrast with UNDROP. 

In Kenya, 15 farmers have petitioned the High Court to review a law that penalises farmers for sharing and exchanging uncertified and unregistered seeds with a prison sentence of up to two years. The farmer's legal battle with the Kenyan government began in 2022 and is ongoing, but a ruling siding with the plaintiffs would set a powerful precedent.

"In the UK, we are hoping that the new government elected this year will rethink how they do trade," said Conway.

"They said that they are going to publish a trade strategy in the next couple of years, so we're feeling hopeful. If they actually make some tangible changes, like taking UPOV out of trade deals, then we'll know that they mean what they say," she added.

Image by Vince Veras.