Seeds as a Global Commons: An Alternative Path for Growing a Food Secure World

Access to seeds is crucial in creating a food secure world, especially for developing countries. While exchanges of seeds between farmers, breeders and researchers were a usual practice until the 1980s, the commodification of seeds through a number of trends including regulatory mechanisms, such as intellectual property rights and states’ sovereign rights, has pushed seeds further and further into the market place—rendering their access and use increasingly difficult for many stakeholders. In reaction, the agricultural fora within the United Nations (UN) created the multilateral system of access and benefit-sharing (MLS) of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (the Treaty), often referred to as a “plant commons”, in which access rules protect the exchange practices between the above mentioned actors. The present paper assesses this innovative legal framework and provides ways forward to improve the MLS towards the implementation of an effective seed commons that facilitates sharing, best practices and the generation of innovation for food security