Control over digital genetic data is emerging as a key battleground in global food and agriculture governance
Global South countries are pushing back against “open access” rules, citing risks of digital biopiracy
India, Brazil and African nations are advocating new frameworks linking access to benefit-sharing
Technologies such as blockchain are being explored to track genetic resources and ensure transparency
Stalled treaty negotiations and shifting alliances could reshape global rules on seeds, data and sovereignty
For millennia, the “source code” of human survival was written in the soil — held in the physical seeds exchanged by farmers across the Eastern Ghats, the Andes and the African savannah. Today, that code has been digitised into ATGC sequences, stored on servers largely located in the Global North and increasingly governed by intellectual property regimes that risk excluding the very communities that developed this biological heritage.
The issue is no longer limited to the movement of physical seeds, but extends to control over Digital Sequence Information (DSI). By combining environmental policy frameworks with emerging technologies such as blockchain, countries in the Global South are attempting to shift from a position of historical dispossession to one of digital gatekeeping. They are proving that while the North may own the servers, the South holds the “master key” to the genetic diversity required to feed a warming planet.
Following the 11th Governing Body (GB-11) meeting in Lima, Peru, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) has entered a critical inter-sessional phase. Several Global South countries, including India, Brazil and members of the African Group, rejected an “open access first” proposal on DSI, triggering a new round of negotiations.
For India, these developments have implications for national biosecurity and future negotiations in 2027, where questions of “digital sovereignty” are expected to take centre stage. Proposals such as blockchain-based “fingerprinting” of genetic resources, supported by groups like Scientists for Genetic Diversity (SGD), are increasingly being viewed as potential diplomatic tools.
Proponents of “open access first”, promoted by the Global North at GB-11 (2024), represents a strategic decoupling of resource access from benefit-sharing. By deferring compensation to future discussions, this trajectory reframes the “Common Heritage of Mankind” as a resource for private appropriation, reducing the Treaty to a digital library for Northern biotechnology.
This grievance is actuarial rather than emotional. Since 2004, the Multilateral System has facilitated over 6.2 million sample transfers — 90 per cent originating from Global South genebanks — yet the Benefit-Sharing Fund remains chronically depleted. While academic institutions act as points of entry, the ultimate beneficiaries are the “Big Four” seed corporations.
The shift to Digital Sequence Information (DSI) has effectively legalised biopiracy; using AI-driven in silico screening, firms identify high-value, climate-resilient traits (such as the Sub1 rice gene) from public databases and “edit” them into proprietary varieties via CRISPR, bypassing mandatory links to the communities that developed this biological heritage.
Many in the Global South are increasingly frustrated by the deadlock in Peru, and several “megadiverse” nations are moving towards a bilateral approach. Discussions are intensifying within the Like-Minded Group of Megadiverse Countries (LMMC).
African and Latin American countries are considering withdrawal from the Multilateral System (MLS), a possibility that reflects the developments following the Peru negotiations in November 2025 rather than an exaggeration. There is growing consensus within the African Group, led by countries such as Ethiopia and Namibia, that if MLS 2.0 does not include DSI, they will move their “vulnerable collections” — including locally adapted millets, tubers and medicinal-agricultural plants — out of the Treaty’s Annex 1.
Latin American countries, including Peru and Colombia, have signalled that their participation in the “open access” regime is conditional on recognition of “biocultural metadata”.
By shifting resources back to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) framework, these countries aim to reclaim sovereignty that was ceded over the past two decades under the Plant Treaty.
Under the CBD’s Nagoya Protocol, access is governed by Prior Informed Consent (PIC) and Mutually Agreed Terms (MAT). This allows a country to refuse access unless a contract is agreed — a power that the ITPGRFA framework currently limits.
To counter what has been described as a “digital siege”, countries in the Global South are developing technological and policy mechanisms to safeguard their biological resources from exploitation and invisible extraction.
The evolving landscape of the Plant Treaty following the 2025 deliberations points to a growing convergence between India and Brazil, moving beyond diplomatic rhetoric towards a more concrete techno-legal framework for DSI.
At the centre of this shift is Brazil’s Amazon Bank of Codes initiative, which has evolved from a national project into a potential model for international germplasm governance. It uses distributed ledger technology to tokenise genetic assets, ensuring that each digital sequence is linked to a verifiable record of origin and a pre-configured smart contract.
India’s engagement with this approach is reflected in efforts to align its “Agri-Stack” digital infrastructure with Brazilian traceability standards. Through bilateral cooperation on digital agriculture, India has indicated a move away from paper-based MAT systems towards automated mechanisms, where commercial use of DSI triggers immediate and transparent contributions to a global benefit-sharing fund.
This alignment has been reinforced through recent intergovernmental technical working group discussions, where both countries supported a standardised Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) compatible with blockchain systems.
By positioning blockchain as a central instrument in negotiations, India and Brazil are addressing the long-standing “tracking and tracing” impasse that has stalled the Treaty’s Multilateral System for a decade.
This technical synergy acts as a strategic counterweight to the open-access demands of the Global North, offering a verifiable mechanism to prevent digital biopiracy while ensuring benefits are returned to countries of origin through a secure, decentralised, and corruption-resistant system.
The collapse of negotiations in Peru has accelerated interest in the “subscription model”, a strategic counter-proposal that reimagines the “grand bargain” between the Global South and the commercial seed industry. Instead of technologically complex pay-per-use tracking systems, this model proposes a flat-rate benefit-sharing mechanism, whereby seed companies contribute between 0.1 per cent and 1 per cent of their total revenue to the Benefit-Sharing Fund (BSF).
For industry, the incentive is certainty—guaranteed, litigation-free access to global germplasm. However, the Global North’s dismissal of this proposal as a “tax on innovation” during the November 2025 sessions has effectively stalled progress within the ITPGRFA, widening the divide between agricultural and environmental governance.
While the ITPGRFA remains paralysed in prolonged technical negotiations, CBD has moved ahead, creating a significant “policy pincer” ahead of the 2027 Governing Body meeting. Through the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the CBD has already established a global multilateral benefit-sharing fund specifically for DSI.
This progress serves as a legal benchmark: by refining payment “trigger” mechanisms, the CBD is setting standards for what constitutes “fair and equitable” sharing—standards that developed countries have resisted in the agricultural domain. The obstruction seen in Peru was, in effect, an attempt to prevent this CBD-led momentum from ending the long-standing “free ride” of Northern biotechnology firms.
As 2027 approaches, diplomatic realignments are increasingly shaped by a grounded South–South perspective. Central to this is the rise of “biocultural metadata”—the recognition that DSI is not merely a string of “ATGC” code, but an encoded extension of the traditional knowledge held by farmers who developed these landraces.
By classifying such data as protected intellectual property under national laws, countries in the Global South are effectively bypassing international deadlock. This is further reflected in the emergence of “regional genebank federations” or a “Southern Seed Cloud”—a shared digital repository spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Using common anti-piracy protocols, this system creates a sovereign data ecosystem that could reduce dependence on Northern-controlled databases.
The period from 2026 to 2027 presents both systemic risks and transformative opportunities. A key risk is “systemic fragmentation”, where a proliferation of bilateral arrangements slows global breeding efforts at a time when climate-resilient crops are urgently needed. There is also the risk of “synthetic substitutes”, as AI systems generate novel sequences that replicate Southern traits while obscuring their origins.
However, there is also an opportunity to leverage CBD progress to establish a mandatory DSI fund within the ITPGRFA by 2027. By introducing a “geographic origin premium”—a legal presumption linking sequences to biodiversity hotspots such as India’s Eastern Ghats—the Global South can help ensure that the digital future of agriculture is based on equity rather than extraction.
Over the past two decades, the Global South has shifted from being a “supplier of diversity” to a “regulator of data”. The failure of the 2025 Peru talks has only accelerated this bilateral turn. For the 2027 Governing Body to succeed, developed countries must recognise that the era of “open access” as a euphemism for “free extraction” is over. The “source code” of food security is now digitally secured—and the Global South holds the key.
Sarath Babu Balijepalli is the president of the Plant Protection Association of India and a former principal scientist and head,Indian Council of Agricultural Research – National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, Hyderabad.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth