The East African Community's draft Seed and Plant Varieties Bill 2025 went through regional public hearings from 26 to 28 August. Civil society groups say the farmers most affected by it were largely left out of the room.
Six of the bloc's eight partner states took part: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Somalia. The bill would create a single regional framework for seed certification, variety release and cross-border seed movement. It would replace a patchwork of national rules that now governs how seed is bred, tested, labelled and traded across the region.
Civil society organisations working on farmer-managed seed systems say the hearings reached agribusiness representatives and government officials more easily than the smallholders who grow most of the region's food. Tabby Munyiri of Kenya's Seed Savers Network and David Manongi of the Tanzania Alliance for Biodiversity are among those who have raised the gap publicly. Rwanda Organic Agriculture Movement director Dieudonne Sindikubwabo and Somalia's Center for Dryland Development and Resilience Systems, represented by Mohammed Hassan, have made similar points.
Farmers seek a longer consultation window
The coalition is not opposing regional seed harmonisation outright. Its demand is narrower. It wants an extended consultation timeline and clearer recognition of farmer-managed seed systems in the bill's text. It also wants explicit legal protection for farmers' rights to save, exchange, multiply and replant seed from their own harvests, year after year, without new certification costs.
Dr David Kabanda of the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights in Uganda argues the bill's current drafting leans towards a certified-seed model favouring commercial breeders. He says it lacks safeguards that farmer groups believe the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture already commits EAC governments to uphold. In Burundi, legal adviser Tusiime Pauline has pressed for the same alignment. She says national consultations in Bujumbura moved faster than affected communities could absorb.
The practical stakes are significant. Smallholder farmers still supply most of the seed planted across East Africa each season. Much of it is saved, traded or gifted outside formal certification systems. Farmer groups warn that a regional law tightening certification requirements, without protecting informal seed exchange, could push long-standing local varieties into legal grey areas.
A familiar tension across the region
The disagreement echoes seed-law debates seen elsewhere in East Africa in recent years. Governments have sought to modernise seed systems, boosting certified-seed use and cross-border trade. Farmer organisations have pushed back, wanting customary seed-saving to stay legal and visible in the resulting rules. The EAC bill's drafters describe the harmonised framework differently. They call it a step towards letting certified varieties bred in one partner state reach farmers in another more quickly. That, they argue, would cut delays that now slow the spread of drought-tolerant and higher-yielding seed across borders.
Civil society groups counter that harmonisation should not come at the cost of the seed systems most smallholders already rely on. Their joint call, issued after the August hearings, asks the EAC Secretariat to reopen the consultation window. It also calls for a dedicated round of outreach in rural districts before the bill advances further through the bloc's legislative process. The dispute echoes a related complaint this month over how little climate-adaptation financing reaches African farmers.
No revised timeline had been published at the time of writing. Civil society trackers following the process expect the next procedural step to be a consolidated response from the EAC Secretariat. That response should address the concerns raised during the August hearings, though no date has been confirmed for its release.
