IATP submitted the following comments on February 19 to the U.N. Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Peasants, in response to a call for submissions to clarify the content and scope of the Right to Seeds for a report that will be presented to the Human Rights Council in October 2026.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) appreciates this opportunity to give input to the members of the Working Group on Peasants, as the group prepares a thematic report that seeks to clarify the content and scope of the Right to Seeds1. IATP is a nonprofit organization based in Minneapolis that works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm, and trade systems.
1. Seeds in Context: Significance and Practice
In our submission we will focus on sections 2 and 3: the Right to Seeds in the context of National Frameworks as well as the Challenges and Responses in the context of International Frameworks, both based on IATP’s ongoing work on seed sovereignty and trade (2025-2026).2
In response to the first section, “Seeds in Context: Significance and Practice,” we share a report by the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA). The report, “A Preliminary Report on Seeds & Seed Practices across the United States,” is based on a seed survey by its Rights of the Mother Earth/Defense of the Commons Work-group and was brought out to provide the members3 and partners of the USFSA with an overview of the good practices in the region for helping build food and seed sovereignty. It is the earliest report (and one of the few) of its kind in the U.S., examining the culture of saving, keeping, and sharing seeds in the U.S. and seed advocacy across the U.S. and North America. Over the last decade or so, faced with multiple crises in our food systems, many more communities in the United States have embraced agroecological transitions, rooted in the culture of saving, keeping, and sharing seeds.
2. National and International Frameworks
As the above report too makes clear, there are no national laws, regulations, or policies protecting the common heritage of seed varieties and knowledge in the United States. However, as a result of the White Earth campaign, in 2007 the Minnesota legislature passed a law restricting the release and sale of genetically engineered (GE) wild rice in Minnesota and requiring consultations with Minnesota Ojibwe.4 But, national seeds laws of the U.S. are not at all effective in recognizing and upholding the farmers right to seeds (save, share, exchange, or sell), nor are they effective in supporting the conservation of native and traditional seeds.
The Plant Variety Protection (PVP) Act, which came into effect in April 1995, is intended to protect only breeders’ rights and the interests of commercial seed actors, and does not address the interests of peasants and rural communities.5 In fact, commercial input contracts, identity preservation programs, and the U.S. intellectual property protection legislations, together, criminalize farmers in the U.S. for:
a. Saving any more seeds (of a PVP variety) than necessary to plant on their own farm;
b. Exchanging or selling the seeds that they have grown (from PVP variety).
In 1994 U.S. Congress amended the PVP Act, enabling the U.S. to align domestic laws with the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 91). UPOV prohibits farmers from saving and sharing protected seeds. This agreement greatly restricts farmers’ ability to develop new varieties that meet their specific needs and respond to changing climate conditions. The modifications of the PVP also ensured international recognition of U.S. plant breeders’ rights (helping the breeders’ rights of Monsanto, then a U.S. multinational corporation, on the cusp of releasing their proprietary genetically modified (GM) seeds). In the case of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the U.S. Senate officially ratified the treaty on March 13, 2017 upon the advice by the executive branch that “the treaty does not require states parties to afford any particular rights to farmers under domestic laws.”6 In the most recent governing body meeting of the ITPGRFA in Lima in December 2025, the U.S. (along with Japan) opposed any and all efforts by food sovereignty advocates to examine legal measures for Contracting Parties to implement Farmers’ Rights at the national level, under Article 9.2. The U.S. has not ratified either the Convention on Biological Diversity, or its Nagoya Protocol. While it voted against the adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2007, by 2011 the U.S. government decided to support the UNDRIP.7 In the case of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the U.S. voted against the adoption of it in 2018 and continues to not support it as of now. However, U.S. farmer organization networks such as the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) has on several occasions called for the fulfillment of the UNDROP (see here).
3. Challenges and Responses8
Even before the unpredictability of the current administration exacerbated these challenges, commitments in trade agreements have been used by the U.S. (and other developed countries) to lock in the rules established in UPOV. Earlier discussions of these issues at the World Trade Organization (WTO) resulted in rules that require countries to either ratify and implement UPOV or to establish their own “sui generis” laws on those issues. Many of the bilateral or regional free trade agreements that followed cut off even the possibility of locally appropriate sui generis systems to require countries to ratify UPOV and have functioned as obstacles to upholding farmers right to seeds.
These requirements have become even stricter over time. For example, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) required countries to ratify either the 1991 or 1978 version of UPOV. The 1978 version allowed for exceptions for smallholder farmers to save, share, and sell seeds. The agreements negotiated by the U.S. that followed NAFTA, including the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), requires the member countries to ratify UPOV 91, within four years of ratification of the trade agreement. There have been several unsuccessful attempts to push through ratification in the Mexico’s Senate.
The inclusion of the requirement to ratify UPOV 91 in trade agreements is about more than favoring one set of rules on intellectual property rights; it serves to lock in one specific approach for the foreseeable future. If a country were to decide on a different approach to these issues in the future, it might have to reopen the trade deal, opening the possibility of demands for other changes from trading partners. In addition to the rules on intellectual property rights over seeds, the USMCA also set in place new rules on the approval of the products of agricultural biotechnology. These trade rules set out two big sets of problems for right to seeds:
Who determines which seeds are protected, and how?
Even the flawed WTO rules accept that governments can develop their own rules on the rights of seed and plant breeders. The USMCA and similar agreements dictate that the specific rules in UPOV 91 are the only acceptable possibility. It is a clear example of overreach — trade rules setting limits on issues well beyond what could be justified to prevent discrimination against imports. This was one of the points that IATP, NFFC, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC) included in the comments submitted during the review process of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).9
IATP, the Rural Coalition, and the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas also developed legal analysis10 to explain why the restrictions on GM corn were necessary for Mexico to honor its constitutional and international commitments to Indigenous people and on biodiversity (including concerns over contamination of native corn seeds with GM materials). The dispute panel on the USMCA case rejected that argument, claiming that the government could find other ways to meet those obligations without limiting GM corn imports.11
How can governments regulate the health or environmental safety of genetically manipulated seeds?
In addition to the rules over ownership, saving and sharing of seeds, many countries have restricted the planting or imports of GM seeds and products intended for consumption by humans or animals over concerns about human and environmental safety. In December 2020, the Mexican ban on imports of GM corn (which was revised in 2023 to limits on imports of white corn for human consumption) stemmed in part from concerns about the health impacts of the corn itself, as well as the agrochemicals used in its production. A common variety of transgenic corn is modified to be resistant to the weed killer glyphosate, a chemical the World Health Organization has deemed a probable carcinogen.12
Current trade rules are designed to facilitate flows of goods and services. Public interest laws that have the effect of limiting imports can be seen as violating principles of non-discrimination and national treatment, which require imported goods to be judged by the same standards as those produced domestically. In practice, these rules limit governments’ ability to develop new safety standards, especially when laws in other countries are lagging, such as the case of gene-edited seeds and crops. In 2023, the U.S. challenged the restrictions on GM corn as a violation of the USMCA rules on food and plant safety (Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards). Civil society groups in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada pushed back hard on the trade dispute, both because of the assault on Mexico’s sovereignty and because the so-called sound science the U.S. uses in its food safety rules is often generated by the corporations themselves without peer review. The dispute panel — made up of trade lawyers — eventually ruled against Mexico, asserting that the science around the safety of GM corn is adequate.
Civil society mobilizations
Provisions in USMCA, the WTO, and countless other bilateral and regional trade agreements intentionally create obstacles for new rules on transgenic and gene-edited seeds and programs to advance agroecology. They are designed to favor corporate interests that advance yields and profits over human rights and livelihoods.
Civil society groups from Mexico, the U.S., and Canada came together around the trade dispute over Mexico’s rules on corn to develop new analysis to challenge the U.S. (and Canadian) positions.13 The popular mobilizations led by the Sin Maíz No Hay País (No Corn, No Country) and Demanda Colectiva Maíz initiatives and their letter-writing campaigns in Mexico generated more than 100,000 letters to the dispute panelists, which in turn became a focus of public attention. Even though the panel ruled against Mexico on this issue, it seems likely that the public mobilization contributed to the incoming Sheinbaum administration’s decision to enshrine the prohibition on planting of GM corn in the constitution. It is only through public mobilizations that public attention is directed to the need for better rules that support agroecological transitions rooted in food and seed sovereignty.
Download the PDF of the submission.
1Throughout this this document, “seed” means seed as well as propagating material, depending on the case.
2Shiney Varghese, Battling for Farmers' Seed Systems: UPOV 91 and Trade Agreements, https://www.iatp.org/battling-for-farmers-seed-systems
3IATP is a member of the USFSA; see the full list at https://usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org/member-organizations/
4Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Respecting rights in the USMCA corn dispute, July 2024, https://www.iatp.org/respecting-rights-usmca-corn-dispute
5In the U.S. there are three types of intellectual property protection given to plant breeders: In addition to the IPRs covered through PVP Act, breeders in the U.S. can get two other types of intellectual property protection through patenting for new plant varieties: https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/plant-variety-protection
6Submission by Mr. KERRY, from the Committee on Foreign Relations, recommending that the Senate give its advice and consent to ratification of ITPGRFA https://www.congress.gov/111/crpt/erpt7/CRPT-111erpt7.pdf
7U.S. Department of State (January 12, 2011), Announcement of U.S. Support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
8This section extensively draws on a forthcoming article, by Karen Hansen Kuhn on Trade Rules and Seed Sovereignty.
9IATP, NFFC, and WORC comments regarding USMCA renewal https://www.iatp.org/usmca-renewal-comment
10https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/2024-04/Written%20Views%20Alianza%20IATP%20Rural%20SPA.pdf
11Sharon Anglin Treat, Mexico’s path to food sovereignty undercut by USMCA decision, 10 February 2025, https://www.iatp.org/usmca-undercuts-mexico-food-sovereignty
12https://www.iarc.who.int/featured-news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/
13https://www.iatp.org/usmca-corn-case-submissions
