On February 19, IATP submitted comments to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Peasants, emphasizing the importance of protecting farmers’ Right to Seeds including the right to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seeds. See the full comments here, and read on for an introduction from submission author Shiney Varghese.
Seeds are foundational to global food systems and to conserving biodiversity. For indigenous peoples and smallholder farming communities, it continues to be part of their culture and the basis for rural livelihoods. The ability of these communities to grow, harvest, and selectively save to improve seeds and exchange them underpins their food security and community resilience. However, this ability has been significantly compromised in North America (and Europe) over the last century, thanks to national laws that seek to protect the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) of the private sector corporations engaged in seed development.
At the international level, this approach is codified in the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), which restricts farmers from saving and sharing protected seeds. These efforts were accelerated in recent years through pressure to ratify the 1991 version of the UPOV treaty, which is even more restrictive than previous versions.
With newer developments in seed governance, the United Nations Human Rights Council, through its Working Group on Peasants, is seeking to clarify the content and scope of the Right to Seeds in a thematic report that will be presented to the HRC in October 2026. On February 19, IATP submitted our comments to the Independent Experts of the Working Group on Peasants, in response to this call for submissions, which seeks input from all relevant stakeholders, including civil society organizations, peasant movements, indigenous peoples, academics, and private sector actors.
In our submission — in addition to sharing efforts underway in the U.S. over the last decade to help build food and seed sovereignty, as agroecology gains recognition as a pathway to healthy food systems — we focused on three sets of issues:
- National frameworks on seed governance and the extent to which they do or don’t protect common heritage of seed varieties and knowledge in the United States.
- International frameworks on seed governance and the extent to which the United States is party to those agreements/implications.
- How developed countries (such as the U.S.) have used trade agreements to pressure developing countries (such as Mexico), to undermine their own sovereign seed laws, and how this is emerging as a space for organized resistance.
Read our full submission to the Working Group on Peasants here, or view the PDF.
