En route to the twin summits at the end of the year— the food crisis summit in Rome in November, and the climate crisis summit to be held in Copenhagen in December— the meeting of the FAO Seed Treaty (ITPGRFA) is at the critical nexus of the international community’s ability to respond to the food and climate crises.

“If we don’t safeguard our seed diversity and implement peasants’ rights, then the global agricultural system won’t be able to respond to rapidly changing climatic conditions,” said Adam Kuleij, Massai pastoralist from Tanzania.

Addressing the fundamentals of on-farm conservation is essential to the food supply. Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that member states have spent years squabbling over the barebones 116 million dollars in budget proposed from 2007 needed to fulfill the basic goals of the treaty.

The International Planning Committee on Food Sovereignty (IPC) facilitated a meeting of people from five continents including 25 countries, representing peasant, pastoralist, and indigenous organizations, to analyze the status and role of the treaty.

Dr. Malaku Worede of Ethiopia, the founder of Africa’s most important gene bank and former chair of the U.N. Commission that led to the Treaty emphasized the key role of small farmers in conserving the genetic diversity of seeds:

“Ex-situ gene banks have an important role to play. But we’ve been trying to save seed in gene banks for the last half century, with more failures than successes. To ensure a sustained supply of useful germplasm and a more dynamic system of keeping diversity alive, we must support farmers in maintaining seed in their field. If we lose this living diversity Africa and the world will not be able to adjust to climate change,” Worede said.

After two days debate the representatives are demanding the following:

In light of the food emergency there must be a suspension of all intellectual property rights and other regulations that prevent farmers from saving and exchanging non-GMO seed.

There must be a major financial commitment to save seed in the field, for the conservation of genetic diversity in the field, and to prevent and monitor biopiracy.

We must bring an end to the monopoly practices of multinational seed companies who are controlling seeds, the first link in the food chain.

Governments cannot act alone, they must involve farmers in decision making every step of the way, and governments must implement the treaty’s decision on Farmers’ Rights.

“We, are giving states one last chance to implement collective farmers’ rights, and on-farm conservation of seeds. If not we’ll no longer consider the treaty a relevant body for implementing food sovereignty.” said Soniamara Maranho of the Via Campesina Brazil.

(Below the Declaration of La Via Campesina)

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Seed Treaty: La Via Campesina Declaration

Submitted to the members of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Genetic Plant Resources for Food and Agriculture on the occasion of the Third Session of the Governing Body, held June 1-5, 2009, in Tunis.

The multiplication and the aggravation of the food, economic, energy and climate crises are forcing peasants all over the world to adapt their farming systems to the acceleration of changes to their environment. The dynamic conservation and sustainable use of cultivated biodiversity, agro-systems, social systems and related peasant knowledge are at the heart of this adaptation; the food of future generations depends on it.

Biodiversity cannot be preserved and renewed without recognizing the farmers’ rights defined by the ITPGR (International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources), particularly those rights defined in Article 9 to preserve, use, exchange and sell their seeds, to participate in national decision-making, and to protect their traditional knowledge. However, in spite of many political and scientific declarations on the need to develop on-farm conservation, the majority of the signatory countries of the Treaty prohibit the exercise of these collective rights. They have replaced them with private intellectual property laws on seeds, which make it possible for a handful of multinational seed companies to proclaim their ownership of all existing biodiversity.

Deprived of their rights, the peasants can no longer preserve the hundreds of thousands of varieties, which they so patiently selected to adapt them to their agro-systems. The multinational companies replace these varieties with a few dozen industrial crops intended to feed the richest populations, their animals or their cars. These varieties cannot be reproduced and are protected by Intellectual property laws (IPL) which prohibit the peasants from re-sowing the seeds harvested, these industrial seeds are too expensive for the small farmers who can neither afford to buy them every year, nor to buy fertilizers or the pesticides required to grow them. They thus destroy food crops, social and cultural systems, and the traditional knowledge of peasant communities and indigenous peoples.

To only allow farmers the right to sharing of advantages is a decoy used by UPOV who refuse to make the labeling of the origin of resources compulsory for depositing a variety certificate and by the patents that camouflage this information. This illusionary right is only used to gain acceptance by the intellectual property Rights in denying the collective rights of farmers, and generating “shared benefits” that are never shared.

Using the money ear-marked for fighting hunger to distribute these industrial seeds and associated fertilizers for free to the small-scale farmers - who feed the poor people of the South - until they give up their local peasant seeds, is to condemn them to give up farming as soon as this non-sustainable support comes to an end: this aggressive policy is contrary to the protection of the rights of farmers as defined in the ITPGR.

The “ex-situ” gene banks and cultivated biodiversity are threatened in their very homelands and in their diversification, by contamination by patented GMOs, wars, and the lack of public finance required for their conservation. This is particularly true in the countries of the South that have the richest cultivated biodiversity. To replace them with genetic collections of digitized genetic sequences deprives the peasants of access to the diversity of the reproducible living seeds that they will need to feed future generations. The peasants have no use for seeds that cannot germinate, that are locked up in an immense strong room of ice and to which they have no access, or for their digitalized genetic code stored in computers. Only the multinationals will have access to this treasure to market a few standardized plants resulting from patented synthetic genes that their financial power allows them to manufacture.

This is why the Via Campesina demands the Governing Body of the Treaty to implement the following proposals:

- to request compliance by all signatory countries of the rights of farmers to conserve, use, exchange and sell their farm-grown seeds, protect them from biopiracy, contamination by patented genes and from the aggressive policies which destroy social systems, agro-systems, cultural systems and the associated traditional knowledge. And to request to suspend intellectual property rights on seeds in order to allow peasants to respond to food, climate and energy crises as quickly as possible.

- to preserve the ability of seeds to germinate, and to make genetic plant resources grown in the fields and currently locked up in the gene banks, available to all the peasants of the world

- to mobilize financial partners, particularly the World Food Program, in order to develop vast programs of participatory selection in the field and not to distribute industrial seeds that cannot be reproduced or to digitalize the collections that exist within the multilateral system

- to associate the small-scale farmers’ organizations present within the Via Campesina with the process of developing decisions, on an equal basis with the representatives of industry.

In order to achieve this, we propose to bring peasant organizations into the functioning of the Treaty in order to:

create a report on the rights of farmers and the conditions of peasants in the world, on the basis of their own experience. This should be done on the basis of peasants’ own experiences as well as based on documentation provided by government institutions

create a working group in charge of ensuring the conformity of practices of those who participate in the multilateral system with the rules of the Treaty, in particular in order to take measures against biopiracy

create a working group with the task of defining a framework for in-situ conservation on farms and to secure its financing

create common working areas with CGIAR on the definition of ex-situ resources and a code of procedure as to how to access resources, how to use them and the sharing of benefits, as well as to secure for small peasants’ organizations the financial means to participate in this work.