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New report by GRAIN warns of growing corporate control over seeds via free trade agreements.
Powerful economies — including the US, EU, Japan and the UAE — are pushing harsh IP rules on plant varieties.
The UAE emerges as a new player promoting UPOV 1991 standards in trade deals with Asia and Africa.
Farmers’ rights to save, exchange and reuse seeds are being undermined globally.
GRAIN’s interactive map tracks two decades of trade deals enforcing restrictive seed laws.
A new report has found that free trade agreements (FTA) are increasingly being used by rich countries to impose harsh intellectual property (IP) rules on seeds and biodiversity, threatening the rights of farmers and accelerating corporate control over agriculture worldwide.
The report, released by GRAIN, a global non-profit focused on food sovereignty and peasant rights, documented how a growing number of FTAs compel countries, particularly in the global South, to adopt plant variety protection standards set by the 1991 UPOV Convention (Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants). The 1991 Act of this Geneva-based treaty is the most recent and restrictive version of the international framework.
According to GRAIN, the UPOV Convention was designed to expand industrial agriculture in Europe and enable seed corporations to claim monopoly rights for 20 to 25 years over new crop varieties they develop. At the same time, farmers are prohibited from freely saving and reusing these seeds, “thereby disrupting their historic practices, rights and knowledge.”
A newly updated global dataset by GRAIN shows that governments across the global South are being pressured to adopt these laws through trade deals negotiated outside the World Trade Organization (WTO) and beyond its international standards.
While the United States, European Union, Australia and Japan have long used FTAs to push UPOV-aligned rules, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has recently emerged as an aggressive new player, the report said. According to GRAIN, the UAE has successfully included UPOV-style clauses in FTAs with Cambodia, Malaysia and Mauritius, though its efforts to influence India were rebuffed.
Highlighting the UAE’s expanding clout in global trade and investment, especially across Africa and Asia, GRAIN noted: “The UAE is also a huge investor in overseas farming and food production, from Brazil to Pakistan. The fact that they are now pushing UPOV standards on trading partners clearly makes Abu Dhabi a new threat to food sovereignty worldwide.”
GRAIN’s dataset identifies dozens of FTAs that have compelled countries not only to join UPOV 1991 but also to adopt patent laws on plants or sign the Budapest Treaty, which facilitates the patenting of micro-organisms. “These also go beyond international standards and bypass any public discussion on whose interests are served by these laws,” it said.
To illustrate the scale of the problem, GRAIN has released an interactive map visualising two decades of FTAs that contain UPOV-style seed clauses, highlighting both the countries promoting such provisions and those being pressured into compliance.