From 19 to 24 September 2022, the ninth meeting of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) was held in Delhi, India; this is a binding treaty that defines the regulatory framework for the management multiplication of agricultural and food biodiversity. An instrument that is supposed to safeguard farmers' practices from the trade rights sanctioned by the World Trade Organisation. In fact, the Treaty, in Article 9, defines farmers' rights around three main aspects:

• The right to participate in decisions at the national level regarding seed management;
• The right to participate equally in the distribution of benefits arising from the use of and access to seeds by research institutes or other actors using varieties stocked within the so-called Multilateral System, i.e. the set of 'seed banks' around the world;
• The collective right to use, store, exchange and sell seeds from farmer to farmer.

Although the ITPGRFA is binding, the report assessing the compliance of public policies with its dictates, presented at the summit in India, indicates that 25 per cent of the contracting parties have not yet implemented any legal measures to defend farmers' rights.

To date, however, the implementation on a national scale of international agreements remains a crucial step to keep human rights strong in the world.

This is why the International Crossroads Centre, an NGO that acts as the secretariat of the world platform of social movements of small-scale food producers (the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty-IPC), organised and facilitated the participation of farmers’ delegations from four continents in the 9^th meeting of the ITPGRFA Governing Body, with two clear objectives:

• to recall the binding character of farmers' rights and
• to resume the discussion on the functioning of the Multilateral Treaty System, to make it effective and avoid cases of legalised biopiracy through the digitisation of material genetic sequences. A practice that companies use to try to circumvent the agreement and in no way compensate the local communities from which that germplasm was originally selected over decades of work.

Regarding the first aspect, after five years the IPC movements have managed - with difficulty - to bring out a contradiction. It is now clear that the interpretation of Article 9 is not the same for everyone: some countries think that legal measures are needed to protect farmers' rights, others that this can be done through patents or rewards due to those who register new varieties.

However, the movements have made the first reading the majority, pointing out that the protection of rights must be done not through commercial law, but in line with the international instruments of the UN Human Rights Council.

It sounds like a quibble, but this implies that the reference for grounding the standards should be - among other texts - the UNDROP, the Declaration of the Rights of Peasants and People Living in Rural Areas. It is a clear sign that it should not be the market rules that guide the binding implementation of human rights.

Regarding the second aspect, i.e. the functioning of the Multilateral System, the situation is much more worrying: the last Treaty Governing Body (held in 2019 in Rome) had ended in stalemate.

The Multilateral System of the Treaty should ensure strict rules for who has access to the material contained in germplasm banks, but also facilitate access by farmers, since the varieties contained in these institutions have been developed by them over decades, or even centuries, by dynamic biodiversity management.

The problems with the mechanism today are twofold: on the one hand, the payment of a kind of fee for those who access these seeds to develop new varieties, a reward for the work of the farmers; on the other hand, the DSI (Digital Sequence Information), i.e. the digitised information of the physical seeds.

All the rules and articles of the treaty apply (for the time being) only to material resources.

This means that if governments decide that the rules for access to seeds do not apply to their digital version, it will be easy for companies to use the immaterial version of the genetic sequences without having to pay a fee. What's more, they could demand intellectual property rights on the physical counterparts selected by farmers and contained in germplasm banks: a real paradox.

These two debates have held up the treaty for the past three years and threaten to wreck it, emptying it of the spirit with which it was approved in 2001. In this tangled situation, the IPC movements have managed to achieve important diplomatic results to relaunch the negotiations:

• A symposium will be organised in India on farmers' rights, to return to discussions on the treaty implementation and its binding nature, and then at a forthcoming Governing Body summit in Rome to seek more precise guidelines.
• A working group on the Multilateral System will be established to clearly define the reward mechanisms for access to seeds.
• A study on the impacts of the DSI on the Treaty and its implementation will be promoted and presented to the next Governing Body.

The preconditions for emerging from the negotiating quagmire are there, now the lobbying work to push governments to deliver on their promises begins again for the movements. As IPC we will continue to follow this battle and fight for farmers' rights, so that biodiversity can continue to multiply in the fields, thanks to the knowledge of farmers and peasants, and against the rapacity of the seed industries.

See, Diplomazia, diritti, biodiversità - Comune-info

Photo. Taken from the Fb of Semi di Comunità - CSA Roma