Basically, realizing Farmers' Rights means enabling farmers to maintain and develop crop genetic diversity, and recognizing and rewarding them for this indispensable contribution to the global pool of genetic resources and to local and global food security.
This website has been developed as a tool for decision makers, practitioners and others involved in the realization of Farmers’ Rights as they are addressed in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. It is also an information source for researchers, journalists, and other interested individuals. The website is hosted by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute Norway and is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
The Farmers’ Rights website depends on input from you. Please help us keep the site updated by letting us know about new developments and research related to Farmers’ Rights.
Contribute here
DIVERSIFARM-India is a project designed to strengthen community seed banks, farmer-managed seed systems and Farmers’ Rights in India. It will provide an overview of community seed banks, invite them to share experiences through a joint platform, develop solutions to joint challenges and identify how best practices can be scaled out.
Here you will find an overview of community seed banks in India per state, with a brief presentation of each. This is work in progress, and new community seed bank presentations are being added as DIVERSIFARM-India evolves.
At this session the Governing Body took note of the outcomes of the Global Symposium on Farmers’ Rights in India and decided to reconvene the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights to follow up on the implementation of Article 9.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is relevant for the realization of Farmers’ Rights for two quite different reasons. On one hand, the Patent Cooperation Treaty under WIPO enables patents related to plants to be granted simultaneously in a large number of countries, which may heavily affect any rights that farmers’ have to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed of the plants affected by such patents. On the other hand, the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Resources and Folklore (IGC) under WIPO seeks to negotiate one or more international legal instruments to protect traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions and genetic resources.
