Farmers Face Prison for Sharing Seeds: UN Experts Demand Protection of Their Rights

Saving seeds after harvest and sharing them with neighbours can expose farmers to fines and imprisonment under laws designed for industrial seed markets, according to UN experts who warn that these restrictions threaten food supplies, rural livelihoods and generations of agricultural knowledge. Farmers across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America face penalties for saving, exchanging or selling seeds, with punishment reaching 15 years in prison in some jurisdictions, the UN Working Group on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas said.

The Working Group's latest report to the UN Human Rights Council places these penalties against the everyday realities of farming, noting that traditional systems supply between 70 and 90 per cent of the seed sown in many countries. Shalmali Guttal, the group's Chair-Rapporteur, said saving and sharing seeds have helped crops withstand drought, floods and disease, making the criminalisation of these practices both unacceptable and counterproductive.

When Sharing a Harvest Becomes a Legal Risk

Plant variety protection laws can punish farmers for trading seeds belonging to a company's protected variety, and certification requirements can restrict sales or exchanges to seeds listed in official catalogues. Traditional varieties are deliberately diverse and keep adapting to local conditions, which means they may not satisfy standards designed for uniform industrial seeds, leaving farmers at risk of being treated as sellers of counterfeit products for exchanging their own seeds.

Enforcement has become harsher in recent years, with disputes previously handled privately increasingly pursued as crimes against industrial property, according to the report. Molecular markers, drones, satellite imagery and anonymous reporting lines are being used to identify suspected infringements, extending scrutiny over practices that rural communities depend on to keep planting from one season to the next.

Women and Local Knowledge Bear the Cost

Women face particular pressure because they are often the main custodians of seeds, selecting and adapting local varieties and keeping them available to their communities. Their work helps families avoid debt linked to buying commercial seeds and costly farming inputs, so restrictions on traditional practices can undermine women's income and families' ability to control their own food production.

Keeping seeds in storage cannot preserve everything that makes a traditional variety valuable, the experts explained, because seeds need to be grown, exchanged and selected again to continue adapting. War and occupation can destroy that living system outright: the report states that military raids in December 2025 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, after its seed-multiplication unit had been bulldozed five months earlier.

UN Experts Call for Laws That Protect Farmers

The report links pressure on traditional systems to the 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, known as UPOV 1991, through trade agreements and World Bank financing tied to aligned reforms. It identifies corporate concentration as another concern, stating that Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF control more than half of an annual seed market worth US$81 billion, and examines patent claims involving digital sequence information that allow companies to claim traits without obtaining the physical seed.

Court decisions offer examples of protection for farmers, including a November 2025 ruling by Kenya's High Court at Machakos that seed sharing is not a crime and a 2021 Honduran Supreme Court decision striking down the country's plant variety protection law. The Working Group urged governments to put Article 19 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants into national law, repeal provisions criminalising traditional seed practices, exempt these systems from industrial-market rules and prevent seed monopolies and biopiracy, treating seeds as essential to life, food, health and culture.