The study When Saving Seeds Becomes a Crime, authored by Karine Peschard, Associate Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, aims to document the criminalization of farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell seeds under plant breeders’ rights laws.
The study reviews the modalities of criminalization and their impact on farmers, based on selected case studies. As demonstrated, criminalization is a multilayered set of modalities. Its most overt manifestation is the prosecution of PBR infringement under criminal law, but it also materializes through technological surveillance, harassment, and intimidation.
In addition, the study compiles and analyzes legislative provisions related to what farmers are allowed to do with PBR-protected seeds and sanctions for PBR infringement in a sample of fifteen countries’ legislation worldwide.
Karine Peschard concludes that “A farmer who allegedly infringes PBR does not represent a threat to society that justifies the intervention of the state and criminal sanctions.” On the contrary, she said, “it is the criminalization of farmers’ seed practices that represents a threat to the public interest and to society given its manifold negative impacts on peasant seed systems, agrobiodiversity, farmers’ rights and livelihoods, food security and the right to food.”
For readers who are short on time, we have also published a condensed version of the study.