For centuries, farmers, including women, meticulously saved, shared, and exchanged a vast diversity of seeds, ensuring self-reliance and accessibility without economic burden. This traditional system, built on wisdom, skill, commitment, creativity, and love, fostered diverse seed availability suited to various needs and locations.
However, recent decades have seen a significant shift towards increasing corporate control over seeds, largely dominated by multinational companies and their collaborators who leverage patents on life forms—a concept previously unimaginable. This corporate dominance poses a major obstacle to developing a farming and food system rooted in small-scale agriculture, producing safe food, and operating in ecologically protective and sustainable ways. Discussions at international forums, such as the plant treaty deliberations, often narrow the focus to "benefit sharing," where corporate seed interests might offer a small fraction of their profits to farming communities. This limited framework fails to address the fundamental issue: the inherent unfairness of the system itself.
The history of corporate seed control, from smaller companies to the global dominance of huge multinational corporations, reveals a primary objective: long-term, massive profit increases. This is achieved by expanding control over seeds through patents and technologies like genetic modification. Such a system is incompatible with protecting small farmers' livelihoods, safeguarding the environment, or ensuring safe and healthy food. Instead, seed companies drive up costs for seeds, herbicides, and other inputs linked to their products, making farming more expensive and ecologically destructive. This leads to increased use of harmful chemical inputs and the promotion of monocultures over decentralized, diversity-based approaches. Areas with strong multinational seed company presence have reported widespread adverse impacts on farming communities. Furthermore, there have been numerous reports of these companies unfairly accessing the genetic diversity of the global south.
Therefore, the core issue extends beyond mere benefit sharing; it's about transforming a highly unjust seed control system that is only a few decades old but profoundly threatens the common heritage of humankind, a legacy of hundreds of generations of farmers. Rather than legitimizing this inherently wrong and rapidly expanding system, efforts should focus on restoring a system where seeds are truly the common heritage of all.
The most crucial input in the entire farming and food system is seeds. The nature of the seed system largely determines whether farming supports sustainable livelihoods and provides safe food, or if it's dominated by a few giant multinational companies that harm both farmers and consumers. Protecting the vast diversity of seeds on the farms of millions of small farmers significantly enhances the prospects for sustainable livelihoods and safe food. Conversely, increasing corporate control over seeds jeopardizes both.
Recognizing the pivotal role of seeds, agribusiness corporations have aggressively sought to control the seed sector for decades. While they've largely succeeded, from the Green Revolution to the spread of GM crops and easy access to gene banks, there has also been resistance to their relentless pursuit of greater control. This resistance has prevented them from achieving their full desired level of dominance, and protecting farmers' seed rights has become a vital issue, particularly in the global south. This involves both farmers' struggles to secure their seed rights and creative initiatives to conserve and protect seed diversity.
In response, powerful corporate interests and their collaborators are employing manipulative tactics and leveraging technological advancements not to assist farmers, but to further consolidate their control. This context is crucial for understanding discussions at ongoing plant treaty talks, such as the 14th meeting of the Ad-hoc Working Group of the UN’s International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (IT-PGRFA) in Lima, Peru, held from July 7 to 11, in preparation for the 11th Session of the Governing Body in November 2025. Beneath the facade of terms like "benefit-sharing," corporate interests continue their efforts to enhance their control over the critical seed sector.
A contentious issue in these talks is Digital Sequence Information (DSI), or genetic data extracted from seeds. This is seen as a means for large corporate interests to increase seed control, potentially bypassing benefit sharing, and exemplifies how new technology can be used unethically. The dual-access system, comprising a subscription model for broad access (fixed fee) and a single-access model (payments only upon product commercialization), has also been widely debated. While concerns exist about both, particular apprehension surrounds the potential for corporate interests to exploit these systems to maximize gains.
Ultimately, the broader power-politics context in which decisions are made is perhaps more significant. Some countries hosting powerful multinational companies are increasingly asserting their power, potentially bullying smaller, more vulnerable nations to grant unfair advantages to their corporate interests at the expense of global south farmers. Therefore, it is imperative for farmers worldwide to unite to protect their seed rights and resist the adverse impacts of increasing multinational company dominance over the food and farming system, supported by powerful countries. As everyone needs safe and healthy food, this farmer-led resistance deserves universal support. Additionally, creative efforts, with strong participation from women farmers, must be expanded to promote village-based conservation of diverse seeds.
---
Bharat Dogra is the Honorary Convener of Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Saving Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, and India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food
Comments