The first use of Farmers' Rights as a political concept dates back to the early 1980s, when Pat Roy Mooney and Cary Fowler of the then Rural Advancement Foundation International (now ETC-Group) coined the term to highlight the valuable but unrewarded contributions of farmers to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.

There is a wealth of literature on the management of plant genetic resources. The following list provides some titles of relevance for Farmers' Rights, but is not intended to be exhaustive. It seeks to cover different aspects of the management of plant genetic resources from various perspectives and to provide some points of departure for further reading.

There is a sizeable literature on intellectual property rights to plant genetic resources. The following titles have been selected because they address Farmers' Rights explicitly in this context, or because their findings appear particularly relevant in the context of Farmers' Rights.

Since the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture was adopted, a number of articles and reports have been produced. The titles selected here address farmers' rights within this broader context.