GENEVA - Farmers across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America face fines and imprisonment for saving, exchanging and selling seed under laws written for industrial seed markets, the UN Working Group on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas said today.
Punishment for seed sharing goes up to 15 years in prison in some jurisdictions, the Working Group said.
In its latest report to the UN Human Rights Council, the Working Group said almost all the world's food comes from seeds, and traditional systems supply 70 to 90 per cent of the seed sown in many countries.
"Saving and sharing seed are among humanity's oldest agricultural practices, and the reason crops can still withstand drought, floods and disease," said Shalmali Guttal, Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group. "Criminalising them is unacceptable and counterproductive."
Plant variety protection laws punish farmers who trade seed of a company's protected variety. Certification rules go further, permitting the sale or exchange only of catalogued seed. Peasant varieties, intentionally diverse and continually adapting, do not meet standards for industrial seeds. Peasants trading their own traditional seed thereby become traders of "counterfeit" seed.
The experts noted that women, as the principal custodians of seed, are particularly affected. They select, adapt and make available local varieties, protecting families from debt arising from purchased seeds and expensive inputs. Rules penalising traditional practices undermine their income and food autonomy.
"Traditional seed systems should be celebrated, not prosecuted," Guttal said. "By exercising their right to seeds, peasants feed the world, protect nature and find sustainable ways forward through the climate crisis."
Enforcement has hardened in recent years, the report found. Infringements once settled as private disputes are now pursued as crimes against industrial property, with molecular markers, drones, satellite imagery and anonymous tip lines inviting reports of "suspicious seed activity."
The report traces the pressure to the 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 1991), which trade agreements increasingly require States to adopt, and to World Bank financing conditioned on UPOV-aligned reform.
The report also examines the concentration of the seed market, where four corporations, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF, control more than half of US$81 billion in annual sales. Patents are staked on digital sequence information, which allows companies to claim traits without ever obtaining the seed.
"Laws should penalise biopiracy, commodification of seeds and prevent seed monopolies," the Working Group said.
"War and occupation destroy seed systems outright. In December 2025, military raids forced the closure and seizure of the only Palestinian community-managed seed bank, which held more than 70 varieties collected across the West Bank and Gaza; its seed-multiplication unit had been bulldozed five months earlier."
The experts said peasant seed survives only by being grown, exchanged and reselected. Varieties kept but not planted stop adapting and knowledge not passed on is gone in a generation. "What is at risk is not only the seed already collected but the knowledge and capacity to go on producing more," they warned.
In November 2025 the High Court of Kenya at Machakos held that seed sharing is not a crime. In 2021 the Supreme Court of Honduras struck down the country's plant variety protection law, citing articles 19 and 20 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants for violating the right to nutrition, among the first judgments anywhere to invoke the Declaration.
The Working Group urged States to write article 19 of the Declaration into national law, refrain from implementing UPOV 1991 in ways which contravene the rights of peasants, repeal provisions criminalising peasant seed practices, and exempt traditional seed systems from industrial-market rules.
"Seeds are the material basis of the rights to life, food, health, culture and a healthy environment before they are articles of commerce," Guttal said. "Laws and policies must therefore unconditionally protect peasant right to seeds."
