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ACB comments on the FAO draft desk study on

“The Effects of Seed Policies, Laws and Regulations on Farmers’ Ability to Access and Use Diverse, Locally Adapted Farmers’ Varieties and Landraces”

Submission by the African Centre for Biodiversity

To: Working Group on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture; ITWG-PGRFA@fao.org Copy to: pgrfa-treaty@fao.org

15 September, 2026

Table of Contents 1. Introduction and overall position ................................................................................. 4 2. Comments on the Executive Summary, pages 4–7 ........................................................ 5 2.1 Scope and methodology ........................................................................................ 5 2.2 Main regulatory approaches .................................................................................. 5 2.3 Reported effects on use, conservation, and access ................................................ 6 2.3.1 Access must be assessed through farmers’ actual seed realities .......................................... 6 2.3.2 Conservation must include dynamic on-farm conservation, not only registration or documentation............................................................................................................................ 6 2.3.3 The Executive Summary should reflect country examples without overstating impact ............ 6

2.4 Overall finding of the Executive Summary: legal accommodation is not enough ....... 7 2.5 Reported effects on commercialisation ................................................................. 7 2.6 Reported effects on genetic diversity ..................................................................... 7 2.7 Knowledge gaps and implications for future work ................................................... 7 2.8 Overall conclusion of the Executive Summary ........................................................ 8 3. Comments on the main study ...................................................................................... 8 3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 8 3.2 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 9 3.3 Definition and scope of farmers’ varieties and landraces ........................................ 9 3.4 Seed laws, policies, and regulations accommodating farmers’ varieties and landraces, pages 11–19 ............................................................................................. 10 3.4.1 General concern: accommodation is not the same as protection ........................................ 10 3.4.2 Direct and indirect accommodation of farmers’ varieties and landraces .............................. 10 3.4.3 Legal recognition: what does recognition do? ..................................................................... 10 3.4.4 Registration, listing, DUS, and VCU .................................................................................... 11 3.4.5 Exemptions and separate pathways ................................................................................... 11 3.4.6 Conditions for marketing and commercialisation ................................................................ 12

3.4.7 QDS, truthfully labelled seed, and alternative quality systems............................................. 12 3.4.8 Legal space for farmer-managed seed practices as the central benchmark ......................... 12

3.5 Effects of seed policies, laws, and regulations, pages 19–25 ................................. 13 3.5.1 General comment: the effects section is central to the study’s inquiry ................................. 13 3.5.2 Implementation evidence should not be treated as impact evidence ................................... 13 3.5.3 Effects on use, conservation, and access ........................................................................... 13 3.5.4 Effects on commercialisation should not be over-privileged ................................................ 14 3.5.5 Effects on genetic diversity require stronger indicators........................................................ 14 3.5.6 Farmer-led evidence and lived experience should be central ............................................... 14 3.5.7 Article 9.3 and UNDROP should guide the interpretation of effects ...................................... 15

3.6 Knowledge gaps, limitations, and methodological challenges ............................... 15 3.6.1 Digitalisation, seed data, and community control should be treated as a distinct knowledge gap ........................................................................................................................................... 15

3.7 Conclusion and possible future work ................................................................... 16 4. Consolidated recommendations for FAO’s future work and final revisions .................. 17 5. Conclusion—overall response to the draft desk study ................................................ 18 6. References ............................................................................................................... 19

1. Introduction and overall position The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the draft desk study, “The Effects of Seed Policies, Laws and Regulations on Farmers’ Ability to Access and Use Diverse, Locally Adapted Farmers’ Varieties and Landraces”, prepared for the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. ACB has worked for more than two decades at the intersection of biodiversity, food, and agricultural systems, seed sovereignty, biosafety, farmers’ rights, agroecology, and environmental justice in South Africa and across the African continent. We therefore approach the draft study not only as a technical review of seed-law design but also as a matter of democratic seed governance, biodiversity justice, food sovereignty, and the urgent need to protect the living seed systems that small-scale farmers continue to sustain. ACB’s central submission is that the final study should move beyond describing legal measures that “accommodate” farmers’ varieties and landraces and should more clearly assess whether those measures protect farmer-managed seed systems (FMSS) in practice. The study should distinguish between reforms that remove barriers, protect farmers’ rights, and support farmer-led seed systems, and reforms that make farmers’ varieties visible only by drawing them into formal registration, certification, marketing, traceability, quality control, digital, or intellectual property (IP) systems. ACB is concerned that the scope of the desk study, while useful, contains an inherent limitation. By focusing on seed policies, laws and regulations that support the “registration, commercialisation and use” of farmers’ varieties and landraces, the study risks presupposing that the principal pathway for recognising farmers’ seed is through legal frameworks originally designed for commercial seed systems. This framing effectively positions registration, listing, certification, market-entry approval, varietal description, quality control, and commercialisation as the main channels through which FMSS and Farmers’ Rights are to be recognised and protected. From ACB’s perspective, this is too narrow. FMSS should not be treated as informal systems awaiting incorporation into commercial seed law. They are living, autonomous, biodiversity-generating systems of farmer knowledge, selection, exchange, adaptation, conservation, local sale, and community governance. The central policy question should therefore not be how farmers’ varieties can or are being fitted into commercial seedlaw categories, but what kind of appropriate legal and policy frameworks can and should recognise, protect, and support farmer-managed seed and systems on their own terms. This is particularly important in the African context, where ACB has consistently argued for the recognition and protection of FMSS, including through alternative, farmer-led and community-based quality assurance mechanisms. In ACB’s work on continental and regional seed policy processes, including discussions on the African Union seed policy and strategy, ACB has emphasised that quality standards for farmer seed should not replicate industrial certification systems in lighter form. They should be developed from the realities of FMSS, including community norms, participatory guarantee systems, farmer-to-farmer accountability, local ecological knowledge and agroecological practice. The desk study should therefore explicitly recognise that protecting FMSS may require legal pathways outside, alongside and, where necessary, against commercial seed-law frameworks (ACB Seed Laws and Policies resource page). 4

The study’s own structure already provides a useful entry point for such a stronger analysis. It expressly discusses direct and indirect accommodation of farmers’ varieties and landraces; degrees of legal recognition, registration, and listing requirements; marketing conditions; legal space for farmermanaged seed practices; and effects on conservation, commercialisation, and genetic diversity. ACB recommends that these categories be retained, but deepened so that each section asks whether the measure genuinely expands farmers’ rights and practical autonomy or simply draws farmer seed into formal regulatory systems. A rights-based test for the study’s regulatory approaches ACB notes the desk study’s organisation of the analysis around the principal regulatory approaches used in seed laws, including legal recognition, registration and listing, marketing conditions, seed quality measures, and legal space for farmer-managed seed practices. However, we recommend that FAO applies a clear rights-based test to each approach: does it protect farmers’ existing practices of saving, using, exchanging, selling, selecting, adapting, and governing seed, or does it make those practices conditional on compliance with formal seed-system requirements? This test should guide the study’s assessment of whether each regulatory approach enhances or restricts farmers’ access to and use of diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces. These overarching concerns are developed in our comments on the Executive Summary below. In particular, ACB asks FAO to clarify the study’s scope and methodology; apply a rights-based test to the main regulatory approaches; distinguish formal legal availability from farmers’ actual access, use, and conservation realities; avoid treating commercialisation as the primary measure of success; assess genetic diversity through dynamic on-farm and farmer-managed indicators; and identify knowledge gaps that require farmer-led, gender-responsive, and context-specific future research. These points should also guide the reading of the main body of the study, especially the sections on accommodating farmers’ varieties and landraces, reported effects, methodological limitations, and possible future work.

2. Comments on the Executive Summary, pages 4–7 2.1 Scope and methodology The Executive Summary should make clearer that the study’s scope is useful but limited. By focusing on seed policies, laws, and regulations that facilitate registration, commercialisation, and use, the study effectively positions formal seed-law pathways as the dominant channel through which farmers’ varieties, FMSS and Farmers’ Rights are recognised and protected. ACB recommends that the summary explicitly identify this limitation and clarify that FMSS should be assessed on their own terms, not primarily by their ability to enter registration, listing, certification, market-authorisation, or commercialisation systems.

2.2 Main regulatory approaches The Executive Summary should briefly carry through the rights-based test introduced above, without repeating the full discussion. It should state that the main regulatory approaches identified in the study should not be presented as neutral tools. The summary should indicate that legal recognition, 5

registration, and listing; marketing conditions; quality measures; and legal space for farmer-managed seed practices must each be assessed according to their effect on farmers’ practical autonomy, legal security, local seed circulation, community governance, and the continued use and conservation of diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces.

2.3 Reported effects on use, conservation, and access ACB welcomes the Executive Summary’s cautious finding that legal measures often show implementation more clearly than impact. This point is central to the study and should be foregrounded more strongly. The Executive Summary should state plainly that legal recognition, registration, listing, notification, or authorisation of farmers’ varieties and landraces does not, in itself, demonstrate that farmers have improved access to seed; that seed is affordable or locally available; that varieties remain in cultivation; or that FMSS have been protected or strengthened. 2.3.1 Access must be assessed through farmers’ actual seed realities

The Executive Summary should distinguish more sharply between formal legal possibility and lived reality. A law may allow a farmers’ variety to be registered, listed, or marketed, but farmers may still be unable to use that pathway if it is costly, centralised, dependent on technical expertise, unavailable in local languages, poorly understood by officials, or disconnected from the ways in which seed actually circulates through own-saving, exchange, gifting, barter, local sale, seed fairs, community seed banks, and reciprocal social relations. 2.3.2 Conservation must include dynamic on-farm conservation, not only registration or documentation

ACB recommends that the Executive Summary make clear that conservation of farmers’ varieties and landraces is not achieved merely by documenting, registering or cataloguing them. Conservation is a living process carried out through continued cultivation, selection, adaptation, exchange, experimentation, seed saving, and intergenerational knowledge transmission. The Executive Summary should therefore ask whether seed laws support dynamic, in-situ, and on-farm conservation under farmer and community control, rather than treating formal recognition as a proxy for conservation. 2.3.3 The Executive Summary should reflect country examples without overstating impact

The desk study’s examples from Nepal, Peru, the European Union, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, and Brazil are valuable because they show different ways in which legal mechanisms have been implemented. However, the Executive Summary should be careful not to overstate what these examples prove. Nepal’s farmer-variety registration experience may indicate positive enabling conditions where farmer organisations, community seed banks, and public institutions support registration. Brazil’s recognition of local, traditional, and creole seed may show the importance of public programmes and seed fairs. Zimbabwe’s experience highlights the continuing importance of farmer-managed seed sources. These examples should be framed as evidence of possible enabling conditions, not as proof that seed laws alone have enhanced access, conservation, or use. ACB recommends that the Executive Summary frame reported effects through FMSS rather than through registration counts or market indicators alone. The relevant questions are whether seed laws reduce the risk of criminalisation, support continued farmer selection and adaptation, enable on-farm 6

conservation, protect local circulation, strengthen community seed banks, recognise women seed custodians, support farmer-led knowledge systems, and maintain diversity in production systems. Without these indicators, the study risks overstating the significance of legal categories that exist on paper but do not necessarily transform farmers’ practical seed realities.

2.4 Overall finding of the Executive Summary: legal accommodation is not enough The central finding of the Executive Summary should be that legal accommodation is a necessary but insufficient condition for protecting farmers’ varieties and landraces. Formal recognition, registration, or marketing pathways may remove some barriers, but they do not guarantee farmer access, legal security, continued cultivation, community control, or protection against criminalisation and enclosure. The Executive Summary should therefore make this a clear synthesis point rather than a passing qualification.

2.5 Reported effects on commercialisation The Executive Summary should avoid implying that commercialisation is the main indicator of success. Local sale, barter, gifting, reciprocal exchange, seed fairs, and community seed-bank circulation are not simply informal precursors to commercial seed markets. The summary should recognise that market access may be useful where farmers choose it, but it should not become a condition for legality, recognition, or support.

2.6 Reported effects on genetic diversity The Executive Summary should make clear that genetic diversity is conserved not only through formal listing, registration, ex-situ collections, or niche markets. It is continuously renewed through farmers’ selection, adaptation, exchange, experimentation, and use. The summary should therefore ask whether seed laws support dynamic, in-situ and on-farm diversity, or whether uniformity, stability, traceability, and certification requirements narrow that diversity over time.

2.7 Knowledge gaps and implications for future work The Executive Summary should identify as a major knowledge gap the lack of farmer-led evidence on how seed laws are experienced in practice. Future work should document enforcement, costs, accessibility, gendered impacts, effects on Indigenous Peoples and local communities, impacts of plant variety protection, and the role of digital catalogues, registers, and data systems in shaping control over farmers’ varieties and landraces. This should include an explicit cross-reference to digitalisation and seed-data governance. The Executive Summary should state that registers, catalogues, varietal descriptions, traceability systems, digital databases, digital sequence information (DSI), genomic datasets, and digital seed platforms are not neutral tools. They may support visibility and coordination where they are farmer-led and publicly governed, but they may also enable data extraction, bioprospecting, surveillance, standardisation, commercial targeting, and loss of community control. These risks should be treated as part of the study’s knowledge gaps and future work agenda.

2.8 Overall conclusion of the Executive Summary ACB recommends that the Executive Summary conclude with a stronger message: legal accommodation is not enough, and recognition must serve protection, not absorption. The final study should state that effective seed policy must protect FMSS, legal space, Farmers’ Rights, community governance, agroecology, biodiversity, and non-criminalisation, rather than simply creating formal entry points for farmers’ varieties into existing seed markets, catalogues, quality-control systems, or regulatory databases.

3. Comments on the main study 3.1 Introduction The introduction should more explicitly locate the study within the implementation of Farmers’ Rights under Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and the right to seeds under Article 19 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). It should also state that farmers and communities are not merely users of plant genetic resources but rights-holders, knowledge-holders, and governance actors whose seed systems sustain biodiversity, food sovereignty, and agroecological resilience. The Introduction should also identify a broader political-economy limitation in the study’s framing. Across many countries, FMSS continue to operate largely outside sustained public funding, budgetary support, extension services, research systems, public procurement, and formal institutional recognition. Yet these systems remain central to biodiversity, resilience, seed access, food sovereignty, local adaptation, and agroecological production. Because FMSS are poorly supported, weakly protected, and often invisible in official seed-sector planning, there is a growing danger that the registration of farmers’ varieties becomes the default policy response to their marginalisation. As noted in our comments on the Executive Summary, this risks shifting attention away from the broader legal, institutional, and budgetary measures needed to protect FMSS themselves. ACB cautions against this default. Registration may be useful where it is voluntary, community-led, non-proprietary, and protective, but it should not become the primary route through which farmers’ seed is recognised or made lawful. Registration systems may exclude varieties that do not meet official descriptors; exclude farmers and communities who lack resources, language access, institutional support, or technical assistance; and shift authority over seed from farmer-managed systems to state agencies, experts, databases, and markets. The political economy question is therefore not simply how to register more farmers’ varieties, but who defines them, who controls the data, who benefits from their recognition, and whether recognition strengthens or weakens farmer autonomy. For this reason, the Introduction should frame the study as a partial inquiry into seed-law accommodation, not as a complete assessment of the legal and policy conditions required to protect Farmers’ Rights and FMSS. Legal and policy reform should begin from the realities of seed saving, exchange, barter, gifting, local sale, selection, adaptation, conservation, cultural practice, and community governance, and should ask what forms of public support, legal protection, alternative 8

quality assurance, and democratic seed governance are required to sustain these systems on their own terms.

3.2 Methodology The methodology should identify its core limitation: it reviews legal and policy texts and available literature, but the effects of seed laws on FMSS are often shaped by implementation, enforcement, institutional capacity, cost, language, geography, gender, power relations, and farmers’ own experiences. ACB recommends that the study treat desk-based findings as a starting point and call for farmer-led, country-level, gender-responsive, and context-specific follow-up research.

3.3 Definition and scope of farmers’ varieties and landraces The study’s structure is useful because it separates regulatory approaches from reported effects and knowledge gaps. However, the final study should make the connections between these parts more explicit. Each regulatory approach should be assessed through the effects lens: what does the approach do to farmers’ legal space, access, conservation, commercialisation, diversity, knowledge, and control? For this reason, the final study should avoid treating all forms of legal recognition as functionally equivalent. ACB recommends a clearer distinction between categories that recognise farmers’ varieties as part of autonomous FMSS, and categories that merely create limited points of entry into formal seed regulation. The former may strengthen Farmers’ Rights and seed sovereignty; the latter may leave farmers’ practices vulnerable to control, criminalisation, or commercial absorption. The study should therefore assess not only whether a law names farmers’ varieties, but what the naming does. Does it protect living seed systems, or does it pull them into a regulatory architecture built for commercial seed? ACB also recommends that the definition foreground farmers and communities as rights-holders and knowledge-holders, not merely as users of plant genetic resources. Farmers’ varieties and landraces should be understood as inseparable from the social relations, customary institutions, gendered knowledge, ecological practices, and reciprocal exchange systems through which they are maintained. This has direct implications for policy: seed laws should not require farmers to translate this living diversity into formal varietal identities before their seed practices are recognised as legitimate. ACB therefore proposes that FAO revise the definition section to include language along the following lines: For the purposes of this study, farmers’ varieties and landraces should be understood as dynamic, diverse, and locally adapted plant populations and varieties developed, selected, conserved, exchanged, used, and governed by farmers, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and their organisations over time. They include material that may be genetically or phenotypically heterogeneous and may carry traditional knowledge, cultural meaning, local names, ecological adaptation, nutritional uses, and community histories. Their value lies not in conformity to industrial standards of uniformity and stability, but in their contribution to biodiversity, resilience, farmer autonomy, food sovereignty, cultural continuity, and agroecological transformation. 9

This revised definition should then inform the whole study. It should guide the assessment of registration pathways, marketing rules, quality assurance systems, legal exemptions, public support measures, IP interactions, digital catalogues, and harmonised seed frameworks. If the definition is broad, dynamic, and rights-based, the study should not evaluate success mainly by counting how many farmers’ varieties enter registries or markets. It should evaluate whether farmers and communities retain and expand their ability to save, use, exchange, sell, select, improve, document, protect, and govern their seed on their own terms.

3.4 Seed laws, policies, and regulations accommodating farmers’ varieties and landraces, pages 11–19 3.4.1 General concern: accommodation is not the same as protection

This section canvasses a large and important part of the desk study: the distinction between direct and indirect accommodation, the degree of legal recognition, registration and listing requirements, commercialisation pathways, and legal space for farmer-managed seed practices. ACB notes that this typology is a useful mapping exercise. However, the final study should make clear that accommodation is not the same as protection. A law may mention farmers’ varieties, create a special category, waive some requirements, or open a limited marketing route without protecting the FMSS through which those varieties are actually selected, maintained, exchanged, adapted, and governed. 3.4.2 Direct and indirect accommodation of farmers’ varieties and landraces

The desk study’s distinction between direct and indirect accommodation is helpful, but it should be sharpened. Direct accommodation should not be treated as automatically positive merely because a law expressly names farmers’ varieties, landraces or equivalent categories. Similarly, indirect accommodation should not be dismissed if it preserves broad legal space for seed saving, exchange, barter, gifting, local sale, and community circulation. The decisive question is not whether recognition is direct or indirect, but whether it protects farmers’ rights and FMSS in practice. 3.4.3 Legal recognition: what does recognition do?

The desk study identifies a range of legal categories used to recognise farmers’ varieties and landraces. ACB recommends that this part of the analysis should not proceed by treating each category as self-evidently enabling. Instead, FAO should assess legal recognition according to its function and effect. Recognition is protective only where it affirms farmer and community rights, protects customary seed practices, supports public programmes, prevents criminalisation and leaves FMSS free to operate on their own terms. Recognition is insufficient, and may become harmful, where it merely makes farmer seed visible to the state, to markets, to breeders, or to data systems through registration, description, cataloguing, certification, traceability, or IP controls. 3.4.3.1 Recognition should not become a precondition for legality

The final study should clearly distinguish between voluntary recognition and mandatory recognition. Farmers’ seed practices should not become lawful only after a variety has been registered, listed, described, notified, or approved. Where recognition becomes a precondition for exchange, local sale, participation in seed fairs, community seed-bank circulation, or farmer-to-farmer sharing, it does not

protect FMSS; it narrows them. Recognition should therefore be available as an optional protective tool, not imposed as an administrative gatekeeping mechanism. 3.4.3.2 Recognition should protect collective rights and community governance

The study should also make clear that farmers’ varieties and landraces are not merely technical objects requiring administrative description. They are embedded in collective knowledge, local names, histories, ecological practices, customary institutions, women’s seed work, Indigenous and local community governance, and reciprocal systems of exchange. Any legal recognition should therefore protect collective rights, customary governance, traditional knowledge, benefit-sharing, and community authority over documentation, use, and circulation. 3.4.3.3 Recognition should be assessed for risks of absorption and enclosure

ACB recommends that FAO add a specific caution that legal recognition can be used to absorb farmers’ varieties and landraces into formal seed, market, digital, and IP systems. Registers, catalogues, labels, varietal descriptions, and databases may appear protective, but they can also facilitate surveillance, market discipline, bioprospecting, data extraction, or claims by breeders and commercial actors. The study should therefore ask whether recognition is accompanied by safeguards such as FPIC, community protocols, non-proprietary documentation, limits on commercial appropriation, public-interest support, and protection against criminalisation. 3.4.4 Registration, listing, DUS, and VCU

ACB is concerned that the desk study sometimes treats adapted registration and listing pathways as enabling measures without sufficiently interrogating the underlying bias of registration systems. DUS DUS (distinctness, uniformity, and stability), VCU (value for cultivation and use), formal release, and catalogue requirements were developed for commercial seed systems built around uniformity, stability, market entry, and fixed varietal identity. They are inappropriate as default standards for farmers’ varieties and landraces, whose value often lies precisely in heterogeneity, local adaptation, intra-varietal diversity, farmer selection, and evolutionary change over time. Where registration or listing mechanisms are used, they should be voluntary, low-cost, nonproprietary, community-led, and protective. They should not become preconditions for legality. The study should therefore clearly distinguish between voluntary recognition mechanisms that farmers may choose for their own purposes and mandatory administrative procedures that make existing practices of exchange, local sale, or circulation unlawful unless farmers first comply with formal requirements. 3.4.5 Exemptions and separate pathways

The desk study identifies exemptions and separate pathways in several countries. ACB recommends that FAO assess these more critically. Exemptions can be important, but their protective value depends on their scope, clarity, and accessibility. A narrow exemption that allows seed saving but not exchange, exchange but not local sale, or sale only in limited quantities or through recognised organisations may fail to reflect how FMSS actually function. Farmer seed practices commonly combine saving, replanting, exchange, gifting, barter, reciprocal sharing, seed fairs, community seed banks, and local sale. 11

The study should therefore treat exemptions as meaningful only where they provide broad, clear, and enforceable legal space, including protection against confiscation, penalties, licensing burdens, and chilling effects. Legal space should not depend on discretionary enforcement or the goodwill of officials. Farmers and communities should know affirmatively that their seed practices are lawful. 3.4.6 Conditions for marketing and commercialisation

ACB recommends that the study avoid treating commercialisation as the primary indicator of success. Commercial marketing may be useful where farmers and communities choose it, but farmers’ varieties and landraces should not have to become market commodities in order to be recognised or protected. Local sale, barter, gifting, exchange, community seed-bank circulation, and seed fairs are legitimate seed practices in their own right, not merely incomplete forms of commercial seed marketing. The study’s discussion of marketing derogations should therefore ask whether such pathways genuinely expand farmers’ choices or instead impose market logic on farmers’ seed systems. Territorial limits, quantitative restrictions, packaging rules, labelling rules, licensing requirements, and authorised channels may reduce barriers when compared with full commercial certification, but they may still be too restrictive for farmer-managed systems. FAO should assess whether these rules are proportionate, accessible, farmer-led, and compatible with local circulation. 3.4.7 QDS, truthfully labelled seed, and alternative quality systems

The desk study usefully identifies Quality Declared Seed (QDS), truthfully labelled seed, and lighter quality-control systems as possible forms of indirect accommodation. ACB recommends, however, that FAO avoid presenting these as inherently farmer-friendly. While QDS may reduce some barriers compared with full certification, it remains a regulated quality-control approach organised around standards, declarations, inspections, authorised producers, and institutional oversight, and may reproduce commercial seed-system assumptions in simplified form. The final study should therefore distinguish QDS and truthfully labelled systems from genuinely farmer-led quality assurance rooted in FMSS. Where such systems are used in relation to farmers’ varieties and landraces, they should be voluntary, low-cost, locally accessible, adapted to heterogeneous and evolving seed populations, and governed with the meaningful participation of farmers, women seed custodians, Indigenous Peoples, and local communities. They should not become preconditions for lawful exchange, barter, gifting, local sale, seed fairs, or community seedbank circulation. 3.4.8 Legal space for farmer-managed seed practices as the central benchmark

ACB strongly recommends that FAO elevate legal space for farmer-managed seed practices from one regulatory juncture among others to the central benchmark for the study. The key question should be whether seed laws protect farmers’ practical ability to save, use, exchange, barter, gift, sell locally, select, improve, conserve, document, and govern seed without criminalisation, confiscation, excessive cost, inappropriate administrative burden, or loss of community control. If a measure facilitates registration or marketing but narrows farmer-to-farmer exchange, local sale, seed fairs, community seed banks, customary governance, or women seed custodians’ roles, it should 12

not be described as an unqualified accommodation of farmers’ varieties and landraces. The final study should explicitly distinguish between protective and absorptive recognition. Protective recognition strengthens legal space, farmer autonomy, community governance, public support, and biodiversity. Absorptive recognition makes farmer seed visible only by drawing it into systems of registration, certification, traceability, commercialisation, data extraction, or IP control.

3.5 Effects of seed policies, laws, and regulations, pages 19–25 3.5.1 General comment: the effects section is central to the study’s inquiry

The effects section should distinguish legal recognition from actual effect. A measure should not be treated as successful simply because it permits registration, listing, limited marketing, or recognised use. The analysis should ask how farmers experience the law: whether it reduces risk, supports local circulation, protects exchange and local sale, strengthens on-farm conservation, maintains genetic diversity, and avoids administrative burdens or criminalisation. ACB recommends that this section include concrete implementation indicators: affordability, availability in local languages, accessibility for women seed custodians and small-scale farmers, public budgets, extension support, community seed-bank infrastructure, participatory breeding, farmer-tofarmer training, local institutional support, and enforcement practices. These factors determine whether apparently enabling laws protect FMSS in practice. 3.5.2 Implementation evidence should not be treated as impact evidence

ACB welcomes the desk study’s repeated caution that the evidence base is uneven and that registration, listing, authorisation, or recognition data mainly show that a mechanism has been used, not that farmers’ access, autonomy, or seed diversity have improved. This distinction is essential and should be made more prominent. The study should avoid treating the presence of a legal route, or the number of registered farmers’ varieties, as evidence that FMSS have been strengthened. Implementation evidence is not the same as impact evidence. 3.5.3 Effects on use, conservation, and access

The study’s discussion of Nepal, Peru, the European Union, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, and Brazil demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between formal recognition and practical access. ACB recommends that FAO assess whether farmers can actually obtain, reproduce, exchange, and continue using seed of farmers’ varieties and landraces after a legal measure is adopted. Relevant questions include whether seed is available locally, whether farmers can afford it, whether communities retain control over maintenance, whether women seed custodians are recognised, whether knowledge remains community-governed, and whether on-farm conservation is supported over time. ACB also recommends that the study pay more attention to farmer-managed routes of access that do not depend on formal markets: own-saved seed, reciprocal exchange, gifting, barter, local sales, seed fairs, farmer-to-farmer networks, community seed banks, local markets, and social relations of seed sharing. These are not secondary or residual channels. For many small-scale farmers, they are the primary means through which diverse, locally adapted seed is conserved, renewed, and accessed. A 13

seed law that enables registration but restricts these channels may weaken access even while appearing supportive. 3.5.4 Effects on commercialisation should not be over-privileged

ACB recommends that FAO treat commercialisation as only one possible effect, not as the central measure of success. Farmers’ varieties and landraces may enter markets where farmers and communities choose to do so, but their value should not be judged primarily by sales volumes, market share, or commercial viability. Their importance also lies in household seed security, food diversity, agroecology, local nutrition, climate resilience, cultural continuity, collective knowledge, and the ability of communities to reproduce seed outside dependence on corporate and formal markets. The study should therefore assess commercialisation pathways carefully. A limited marketing derogation may create a formal outlet for some farmers’ varieties, but it may also channel farmer seed into packaging, labelling, inspection, licensing, territorial limits, quantitative ceilings, or authorised marketing routes that are ill-suited to local seed systems. The key question should be whether commercialisation expands farmers’ options without undermining non-commercial and local forms of circulation. 3.5.5 Effects on genetic diversity require stronger indicators

ACB welcomes the study’s caution that registration and listing data are poor proxies for genetic diversity outcomes. This point should be strengthened. A variety may be registered without being cultivated widely; it may be conserved in a catalogue but disappear from farmers’ fields; it may be marketed in small quantities without contributing meaningfully to production-system diversity. Conversely, many unregistered farmers’ varieties may continue to sustain very high levels of diversity within FMSS. The study should therefore recommend indicators that capture dynamic, in-situ, and on-farm diversity. These could include the number and range of farmers’ varieties maintained in fields, the area cultivated over time, the diversity of crops and varieties within farming systems, farmer seedsource diversity, the strength of seed exchange networks, community seed-bank activity, farmer-led selection and adaptation, the participation of women and youth, and farmers’ perceptions of resilience, nutrition, and cultural value. 3.5.6 Farmer-led evidence and lived experience should be central

ACB recommends that the effects section be revised to prioritise farmer-led evidence. Desk-based legal analysis cannot adequately capture how seed laws are experienced by farmers, communities, women seed custodians, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and small-scale producers. The effects of a law depend on whether farmers know about it, whether officials enforce it restrictively, whether seed inspectors or police intervene in local markets, whether seed fairs are permitted, whether registration offices are accessible, and whether farmers can participate without cost, fear, or dependence on intermediaries.

3.5.7 Article 9.3 and UNDROP should guide the interpretation of effects

ACB recommends that the effects analysis be explicitly interpreted in light of Article 9.3 of the ITPGRFA and the right to seeds under UNDROP. The question is not only whether a law provides a pathway for registration or marketing, but also whether it protects farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed and propagating material, and whether national law is being used to enable or restrict those rights. Seed laws that narrow exchange, local sale, community seed-bank circulation, or farmer-led selection should be treated as restrictive even if they include limited recognition of farmers’ varieties. The desk study’s focus on “registration, commercialisation and use” should therefore be explicitly read through Article 9 of the ITPGRFA and the right to seeds under UNDROP. Article 9.3 should not be treated as a weak, optional, or merely nationally conditional provision. Properly understood, it affirms that nothing in the Treaty should be interpreted as limiting farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed and propagating material, subject to national law and as appropriate. ACB emphasises that the phrase “subject to national law” must not be used by States to justify restrictive seed laws that criminalise, narrow, or administratively burden farmers’ seed practices. Rather, national laws should be interpreted, developed, and reformed in a manner that gives full effect to Farmers’ Rights by actively protecting and expanding farmers’ practical ability to save, use, exchange, barter, gift, sell locally, select, improve, conserve, and govern seed within FMSS. A measure that eases entry onto a variety list, creates a special farmer-variety register or permits limited marketing may still fall short if it does not protect farmers’ decision-making power, traditional knowledge, benefit-sharing rights, community governance, and the everyday practices through which seed diversity is sustained. (ITPGRFA Article 9; OHCHR, 2026)

3.6 Knowledge gaps, limitations, and methodological challenges The knowledge gaps section should more clearly identify the lack of farmer-led evidence on implementation and lived impacts. Future research should document how seed laws affect women seed custodians, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, pastoralists, and small-scale farmers; how enforcement operates at local level; how plant variety protection interacts with seed-law exemptions; and how catalogues, registers, databases, DSI, and digital seed platforms affect community control over seed and knowledge. 3.6.1 Digitalisation, seed data, and community control should be treated as a distinct knowledge gap

ACB recommends that the knowledge gaps section include a distinct discussion of digitalisation. The desk study refers to registers, catalogues, varietal descriptions, documentation, and information systems, but it does not yet sufficiently examine how digital tools may alter control over farmers’ varieties, landraces, associated knowledge, and genetic information. Digital catalogues, seed databases, traceability systems, DSI, genomic datasets, advisory platforms, and artificial intelligenceenabled seed tools can make farmer seed more visible, but they can also facilitate data extraction, bioprospecting, commercial targeting, platform dependency, and claims by breeders, companies, or research institutions.

Future work should therefore ask: who controls digital seed data, who determines what is documented, who has access to databases, whether communities have given FPIC, whether community protocols govern use, whether benefit-sharing applies, and whether documentation creates new risks of enclosure. FAO should not treat digital documentation as inherently protective. It should recommend safeguards for data sovereignty, community governance, non-proprietary documentation, restrictions on commercial appropriation, transparency, accountability, and the right of farmers and communities not to document seed or knowledge where doing so would expose them to risk. The study should therefore clearly distinguish between protective and absorptive recognition. Protective recognition removes legal barriers, prevents criminalisation, protects customary exchange, supports farmer-led conservation, funds public-interest extension and participatory breeding, and recognises community governance. Absorptive recognition, by contrast, makes farmer seed systems legible to formal law only by forcing them into registration, certification, traceability, catalogue, DUS, VCU, QDS, or market-integration frameworks. ACB recommends that the study expressly warn against this second pathway. Where the accompanying FAO draft summary table refers to lighter or alternative marketing and registration routes, these should be treated as illustrative rather than conclusive examples of farmersupportive regulation. Such measures may lower some formal barriers, but the final study should not equate a lighter formal route with farmer control. Even simplified registration, labelling, or declaration-based pathways may still impose traceability, administrative compliance, and institutional oversight that are not appropriate for customary farmer seed exchange unless they are voluntary, accessible, and clearly protective of FMSS.

3.7 Conclusion and possible future work ACB welcomes the desk study’s conclusion that future work should move beyond legal mapping and registration counts. Rather than adding an expansive list of possible activities, ACB recommends that FAO organise future work around a small number of strategic priorities that are realistic, farmer-led, and capable of testing whether seed laws protect FMSS in practice. •

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Farmer-led country studies and implementation evidence. FAO should support a limited number of country case studies, including in Africa, to examine how seed laws are experienced by farmers, communities, women seed custodians, and small-scale producers. These studies should focus on access, affordability, enforcement, institutional support, public budgets, seed fairs, community seed banks, farmer-to-farmer exchange, and local sale. Rights-based indicators beyond registration counts. Future work should develop indicators that assess whether farmers can save, use, exchange, barter, gift, sell locally, select, adapt, conserve, document, and govern seed as lawful and protected practices. Indicators should also capture on-farm diversity, seed-source diversity, community control, gendered knowledge, and continued cultivation over time. Policy coherence across related legal frameworks. FAO should examine how seed laws interact with plant variety protection, patents, access and benefit-sharing, biodiversity laws, biosafety, phytosanitary rules, public procurement, digital policy, and regional harmonisation.

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Such analysis should identify whether these frameworks reinforce or undermine a rightsbased enabling environment for FMSS. Enabling public support and farmer-led quality systems. Future work should identify practical models for public support that do not subsume FMSS within commercial seed law. This includes farmer-led quality assurance, participatory breeding, agroecological extension, community seed-bank support, farmer-to-farmer learning, and public procurement that strengthens local seed systems. Democratic exchange and policy guidance. Any future guidance should be developed with farmer organisations, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women seed custodians, community seed-bank networks, and agroecology movements. It should help policymakers distinguish protective recognition from absorptive recognition and provide safeguards against criminalisation, IP capture, digital enclosure, and inappropriate formalisation.

4. Consolidated recommendations for FAO’s future work and final revisions •

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Apply a rights-based test to all regulatory approaches. The study should assess whether legal recognition, registration, marketing, quality standards, and documentation protect or restrict farmers’ practical seed freedoms. Recognise FMSS as autonomous systems. FMSS should be framed as living, dynamic, and biodiversity-generating systems, not as informal systems awaiting formal accommodation. Ensure recognition protects rather than absorbs. Registration, cataloguing, certification, digitalisation, or varietal description should be voluntary, community-led, non-proprietary, and protective, and should never become conditions for legality or support. Protect legally guaranteed seed freedoms. Seed laws should affirm farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, barter, gift, and locally sell farm-saved seed and propagating material, consistent with Article 9.3 of the ITPGRFA and UNDROP. Support farmer-led quality assurance and public investment. FAO should recommend public financing for community seed banks, participatory plant breeding, agroecological extension, farmer-to-farmer training, and quality assurance systems rooted in FMSS. Assess related legal and political-economic pressures. The study should consider plant variety protection, patents, biosafety, access and benefit-sharing, trade, regional harmonisation, public procurement, and digital policy as part of the wider seed governance landscape. Safeguard against digital and IP enclosure. The study should address biopiracy, data extraction, DSI, seed databases, traceability systems, and the need for FPIC, community protocols, data sovereignty, and benefit-sharing. Ground future work in farmer-led evidence. Follow-up research should be country-specific, gender-responsive, and based on farmers’ lived experience of implementation, enforcement, costs, institutional discretion, and chilling effects.

5. Conclusion—overall response to the draft desk study The draft desk study comes at an important moment for global and African seed governance. It usefully brings together a range of laws, policies, and regulatory approaches that seek, directly or indirectly, to accommodate farmers’ varieties and landraces. This mapping is valuable. However, the final study will be stronger if it moves beyond descriptions of accommodating measures and subjects each measure to sharper effects- and rights-based assessments. The central question should be whether a measure enhances farmers’ access to and use of diverse, locally adapted seed in practice, or whether it narrows FMSS through registration, listing, marketing, quality-control, data, IP, or harmonisation requirements. ACB’s overarching concern is that the language of “accommodation” can obscure the difference between protecting FMSS and incorporating them into formal seed regulatory architectures. Legal recognition may be useful where it is voluntary, community-led, non-proprietary, protective, and backed by public support. But recognition may also become harmful where it functions as a precondition for legality, requires registration or varietal description, imposes certification-like quality controls, channels seed into narrow marketing routes, or exposes farmers’ varieties, landraces, and associated knowledge to digital, commercial, or IP enclosure. For this reason, FAO should place legal space for farmer-managed seed practices at the centre of the study’s conclusions and possible future work. Legal space should not be treated as a single regulatory issue among others, but as the primary benchmark for assessing whether seed policies, laws, and regulations comply with Farmers’ Rights and the right to seeds. The most important policy test is whether farmers and communities can continue to save, use, exchange, barter, gift, sell locally, select, improve, adapt, conserve, document, and govern seed as lawful and protected practices, without criminalisation, confiscation, surveillance, excessive cost, inappropriate administrative burden, forced registration, loss of community control, or dependence on state, expert, market, or digital approval. This requires attention not only to written law, but also to implementation, enforcement, public budgets, extension services, participatory breeding, community seed banks, farmer-to-farmer learning, women seed custodians’ knowledge systems, and agroecological production. ACB further urges FAO to make future work explicitly farmer-led, gender-responsive, and contextspecific. Desk-based mapping can identify legal models, but it cannot adequately determine whether those models protect farmer autonomy, seed diversity, and community governance. Future work should therefore document farmers’ lived experience of seed laws; examine the interaction between seed regulations, plant variety protection, digital catalogues, data systems, and regional harmonisation; and assess whether legal reforms are expanding or constraining FMSS over time. ACB therefore urges FAO to strengthen the final study by placing Farmers’ Rights, the right to seeds, agroecology, community governance, public support, gender justice, digital justice, and noncriminalisation at the centre of its analysis. The final study should make clear that the test of seed policy is not whether it makes farmers’ varieties visible to formal institutions, but whether it protects the autonomy, diversity, knowledge, collective rights, and political agency of the farmers and communities who continue to sustain the seed commons. Recognition must serve protection, not absorption. 18

6. References ACB. Seed Laws and Policies resource page, including recent resources on Africa’s FMSS agenda, digital seed governance and continental seed and IP architecture. https://acbio.org.za/seedsovereignty/seed-laws-policies/ ACB (2018) UPOV 1991 and the ITPGRFA: Key issues for FMSS in South Africa. https://acbio.org.za/wpcontent/uploads/2022/04/UPOV-1991-and-the-ITPGRFA-Key-issues-for-farmer-managedseed-systems-in-South-Africa-WEB.pdf ACB (2026). Critiquing the African Union’s FMSS Policy Framework and Strategy: Why FMSS need protection, not absorption. Johannesburg: African Centre for Biodiversity. APBREBES. From UPOV 78 to UPOV 91. https://apbrebes.org/content/upov-78-upov-91 FAO. Seeds. https://www.fao.org/seeds/en/ FAO (2006). Quality Declared Seed System. FAO Plant Production and Protection Paper No. 185. Rome: FAO. https://www.fao.org/4/a0503e/a0503e00.htm FAO (2026) Effects of Seed Policies, Laws and Regulations on Farmers’ Ability to Access and Use Diverse, Locally Adapted Farmers’ Varieties and Landraces – Draft Desk Study, CGRFA/WGPGR-13/26/3/Inf.1. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy. https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/CE0514EN FAO Knowledge Repository. Draft Summary Table of Policies, Laws and Regulations Accommodating Farmers’ Varieties and Landraces. Supplementary information to the draft desk study on The effects of seed policies, laws and regulations on farmers’ ability to access and use diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces (CGRFA/WG-PGR-13/26/3/Inf.1). https://openknowledge.fao.org/bitstreams/41ddf3f2-f095-4dea-918be8c2f7978c4d/download ITPGRFA. Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. https://glis.fao.org/glis/static/en/art9.html Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (2026) Right to Seeds: Call for input by the Working Group on peasants, presented to the Human Rights Council at its 63rd session, 01 September 2026. https://www.ohchr.org/en/calls-for-input/2026/rightseeds United Nations Digital Library. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, A/HRC/RES/39/12. UN Human Rights Council (39th session: 2018, Geneva) https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1650694

United Nations General Assembly (2018) United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, A/RES/73/165. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1661560?v=pdf UPOV. Farmers Section: Plant Variety Protection. https://www.upov.int/en/plant-varietyprotection/learn/farmers/