The vast majority of people living in rural areas in developing countries rely on peasant food and seed systems. These systems are essential to food security, preserving biodiversity and promoting sustainable development. Peasants produce 70 per cent of the world’s food, but remain to be vulnerable and exposed to the societal risks such as poverty, gender inequality and climate change.
This month the UN has adopted a draft of the landmark Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which recognizes rights that are considered to be new in international human rights law, such as the right to seeds.
For years small farmers have been campaigning for right to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds. The issue has been contentious because of its high relevance to intellectual property rights and the commercial interests of the seeds companies and plant breeders, which argued that “if peasants want to save and sell seeds
that they harvest from improved protected seeds they bought from the companies, they would have to pay royalties”. Indeed, in many cases a right to seeds could potentially conflict with many national policies on seed or intellectual property, trade agreements, and intellectual property rights. Enhancing intellectual property rights, that occurred mainly at the request of the developed countries and for the benefits of their industrial companies had worsened the vulnerable position of the farmers in developing countries. (De Schutter, 2009) The declaration was expected to provide the plausible indications towards resolving the tension between intellectual property rights over seeds protected by the UPOV Convention and TRIPS Agreement from one side and peasants’ rights to food and seeds from another side.
Some experts underscored, that the solution for protecting the rights to health and access to medicines found by the WTO at the Doha Ministerial Conference in November 2001, offers a relevant precedent. WTO members provided governments in the developing world with greater clarity and certainty on the use of flexibilities factored in the WTO Agreements, and confirmed that protection of patents does not and should not prevent members from taking measures to protect public health (WTO Secretariat, 2017).
At the same time the text adopted by the UN Committee does not provide the clear indications towards solving the intellectual property rights issues. Evaluating the impact of the UN Declaration, UPOV’s Vice Secretary-General Peter Button noted “there have been no proposals for UPOV action regarding impact on UPOV’s work.”(IPWatch, 2018)
The Committee approved draft resolution “L.30” by a recorded vote of 119 in favour to 7 against (Australia, Hungary, Israel, New Zealand, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States), with 49 abstentions.
The representatives of the states who participated in voting and abstained or voted against the draft mentioned the imperfectness of the text of the draft.
The right to seeds, and in particular the right to save, exchange, and sell farm-saved seeds is not a new concept in international law per se, but it is a novelty in international human rights law. It is also enshrined in the International Treatyon Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Article 9), the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Protocols, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Agriculture, the FAO Right to Food Guidelines, and the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples.
