Implementing Farmers Rights relating to seeds

The concept of Farmers’ Rights recognized the role of farmers as custodians of biodiversity and helped to draw attention to the need to preserve practices that are essential for a sustainable agriculture. This paper examines one particular aspect of such rights. It deals with the component of farmers’ rights referred to the use, exchange and sale of farm-seed seeds. Although that concept was initially introduced –in 1989– with the aim of balancing the rights of farmers as breeders and of commercial plant breeders, a specific reference to the rights relating to seeds was only introduced upon the conclusion of the ITPGRFA in 2001.