Learning from the Grassroots focuses on committed grassroots networks that show that truly sustainable changes in the area of food sovereignty are almost always initiated by civil society actors – associations, networks, independent NGOs, committed individuals – while bureaucratic regulations and rules often lag ponderously behind. One area that clearly demonstrates this is the regulation of seed transfer, which is being driven forward by the industrial seed lobby.

The right to pass on local varieties is under threat in the USA, in the global South and increasingly in Europe too. While new genetic engineering is being increasingly deregulated, the rights of farmers and gardeners to pass on seeds of local, climate-resistant varieties are being increasingly restricted by certificates and patents that have to be purchased. However, the reflex to vote for right-wing parties because of the EU’s regulatory frenzy is going in exactly the wrong direction. It is precisely these parties that are particularly receptive to the whispers of the industrial seed lobby.

While the powerful lobby of the seed and pesticide companies is gaining more and more influence in Brussels, a decentralized civil seed lobby has long since emerged: a pan-European network of NGOs, seed banks and alternative seed companies that operate according to strict organic guidelines and completely without genetic engineering and pesticides, also try to influence European seed policy. It is only thanks to the commitment of these civil actors and their networking that the influence of the large corporations has been delayed by several decades in Europe. But what will happen now?

At the end of the day, some [seed sovereignty] activists hold the conviction, born out of the arduous and ultimately failed efforts to secure farmers‘ rights through international negotiations and agreements, that the sole effective way to protect farmers‘ varieties is to work at the grassroots level to keep seeds in farmer’s hands, instead of relying on the courts.

Karine E. Peschard, Seed Activism: Patent Politics and Ligitations in the Global South, page 102