The UN Working Group on the rights of peasants has urged governments to repeal provisions that criminalise farmers’ traditional seed practices, warning that penalties for saving, exchanging and selling seed threaten food supply. It called on states to put the right to seeds in national law and to exempt traditional seed systems from rules designed for industrial markets.
The intervention, delivered to the Human Rights Council on 16 September, focuses on the legal gap between peasant varieties and formal seed regimes. The Working Group said certification rules can allow sale or exchange only of catalogued seed, while locally developed varieties are deliberately diverse and keep adapting. Farmers who exchange them can consequently be treated as traders of counterfeit seed.
The practical stakes are considerable. Traditional systems provide 70 to 90 per cent of seed sown in many countries, according to the Working Group, which said nearly all food begins with seed. Saving, replanting and sharing seed lets growers retain varieties suited to local conditions and maintain their capacity to respond to drought, floods and disease.
The Group said plant-variety protection rules can penalise farmers for trading seed of a company’s protected variety. It also said enforcement has become more punitive in some places, with conduct once handled as a private dispute pursued as a criminal matter tied to industrial property. The release said penalties can reach 15 years’ imprisonment in certain jurisdictions.
It asked states not to apply the 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants in ways that conflict with peasants’ rights. The Group linked pressure to adopt UPOV 1991 to trade agreements and to World Bank financing associated with UPOV-aligned reform. Its requested response is not a blanket rejection of seed law, but protection for traditional systems where industrial standards do not fit their characteristics.
Women could bear a particular burden, the Working Group said, because they often select, adapt and make local seed available. It argued that seed rules which penalise those practices can weaken household income and food autonomy, including by making families more dependent on purchased seed and related inputs. The Group also pointed to conflict: it said raids in December 2025 closed and seized a Palestinian community-managed seed bank holding more than 70 varieties.
The European Union told the same Council dialogue that seed-related rights form part of the right to adequate food. It said farmers and peasants should participate actively and meaningfully in decisions shaping the seed systems on which they rely, and should have access to transparent, inclusive and accessible processes and remedies. The EU said a research and policy strand of its €335mn DeSIRA initiative supports farmers’ rights to save, reuse, exchange and sell farm-saved seed.
The Group also pointed to two national court decisions: a November 2025 ruling by the High Court of Kenya at Machakos that seed sharing was not a crime, and a 2021 Honduran Supreme Court decision striking down that country’s plant-variety protection law after citing articles 19 and 20 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants for violating the right to nutrition, one of the first such judgments to invoke it. The Working Group’s recommendations do not alter national law, and neither its release nor the EU statement identified governments that would change seed rules or gave a timetable for doing so. Whether states translate the call for legal protection into exemptions, participation procedures and enforceable remedies remains unresolved.
