THE AFRICAN UNION’S FARMER-MANAGED SEED SYSTEMS AGENDA AND DIGITAL JUSTICE
The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) is committed to dismantling inequalities and resisting corporate industrial expansion in Africa’s food and agriculture systems.
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Researched and written by ACB executive director Mariam Mayet
Cover and layout design by Vicky-Lee Vermeulen, Align Creative
Acknowledgments
The ACB gratefully acknowledges the financial support of several donors, though the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.
CONTENTS ACRONYMS
Acronyms
Introduction
Locating the AU’s FMSS agenda in Africa’s changing seed data landscape
Producing and capturing seed data in Africa
Who governs Africa’s seed information systems?
Platforms, metrics, and regional digital infrastructures
Digitalisation, AI, and the new seed governance stack—seeds as data systems
Agency, resistance, and data justice
Africa’s strategic position and the future of FMSS
FMSS and the AU policy agenda
Reading the policy framework: recognition without full protection
Reading the strategy: implementation, discipline, and managed inclusion
Digital governance and the politics of implementation
National law reform, financing, and domestication
Bringing the policy and strategy together
ABS Access and benefit-sharing
ACB African Centre for Biodiversity
AGRA Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
AI Artificial intelligence
AFSA Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa
APBREBES Association for Plant Breeding for the Benefit of Society
AU African Union
CAADP Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme
CBD (United Nations) Convention on Biological Diversity
CESSA Centre of Excellence for Seed Systems in Africa
CFS (United Nations) Committee on World Food Security
CIMMYT Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo
COMESA Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa
COMSHIP COMESA Seed Harmonization Implementation Plan
COP Conference of the Parties
CSIPM Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism
CSM4CFS Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for Relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security
DSI Digital sequence information
EIAR Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research
EOAI-Africa Ecological Organic Agriculture Initiative in Africa
FAO (United Nations) Food and Agriculture Organization
FMSS Farmer-managed seed systems
IPLCs Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities
ITPGRFA International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
KM–GBF Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
MLS Multilateral system
NBSAPs National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans
NARO National Agricultural Research Organisation (Uganda)
NGOs Non-governmental organisations
PBR Plant breeders’ rights
PVP Plant variety protection
SeedSAT Seed Systems Assessment Tool
TARI Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute
TASAI The African Seed Access Index
UN United Nations
UNDROP United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas
UPOV (International) Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants
Introduction
This paper examines the African Union (AU)’s emerging agenda on farmer-managed seed systems (FMSS) in light of the revised Policy Framework for Enhancing Farmer-Managed Seed Systems in Africa1 and the FMSS Strategy and Action Plan2 2026-2035. Read together, these texts do more than recognise FMSS at the continental level: they set out an agenda that could reshape national seed law, plant variety protection (PVP) regimes, biodiversity and access-and-benefit-sharing (ABS) governance, agricultural policy, public research, extension services, financing arrangements, and systems of digital administration. On one level, this creates an important opening. It gives Member States a stronger basis to move beyond treating farmer seed systems as informal residues and instead recognise them as central to seed access, agricultural biodiversity, climate adaptation, nutrition, and local seed economies. It also opens space for legal reform, public investment in community seed banks and participatory breeding, support for farmer varieties through recognition pathways that do not force them into commercial categories, protection for continued exchange and adaptation in farmers’ fields, farmer-led documentation and community registers, decentralised and locally grounded quality practices, and stronger support for women and youth leadership within more plural seed regimes.
At the same time, the paper argues that this agenda is double-edged. The very tools through
which FMSS are recognised in law and policy— registration pathways, quality assurance rules, phytosanitary controls, catalogues, traceability systems, data platforms, and performance indicators—can also become mechanisms through which farmer seed systems are incorporated into formal-sector logics without securing robust legal protection for the rights to save, use, exchange, and sell seed.
This is where the convergence of FMSS and digital justice becomes especially important. As seed governance becomes increasingly data-driven, questions of legal recognition cannot be separated from questions of who defines seed categories, who controls seedrelated data and digital infrastructures, how farmer knowledge is documented, and whether visibility leads to empowerment or to new forms of extraction, standardisation, and oversight.
These issues also sit within broader normative frameworks that extend beyond the AU texts themselves, including Article 9 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the United Nations (UN) Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM–GBF), and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). Read alongside these instruments, the central challenge becomes clearer: not only whether FMSS are recognised, but whether continental policy and strategy will be translated into national laws, financing, and
institutional arrangements that actually protect farmer-centred seed governance.
The discussion that follows traces these tensions across the main themes of the paper: the organisation and governance of seed data in Africa; the growing role of digital platforms, metrics, and regional infrastructures; the convergence of digitalisation, biotechnology, and corporate power; the legal and political implications of the AU’s FMSS agenda when read alongside wider continental data and agrifood policy frameworks; and the openings that remain for agency, resistance, and institutional redesign.
Particular attention is given to the relationship between continental soft law and national domestication, including the question of whether the AU FMSS policy framework and strategy will spur revision of restrictive seed and PVP laws, how implementation is likely to be financed, and what role international instruments can play in strengthening claims to farmers’ rights, biodiversity stewardship, participation, and benefit-sharing. The paper also asks what room still exists for African civil society and farmer organisations to influence these drafts before they are finalised, and what role they will need to play once the continental texts move into national law, policy, financing, and institutional practice. The central question is therefore not simply whether the AU has recognised FMSS, but what that recognition will mean as it is translated into practice, and whether its implementation will be shaped by farmer-centred intervention or by administrative and market logics set largely from above. In that sense, the future of FMSS in
Africa is inseparable from the future of digital justice, because the struggle is increasingly over both seed and the data relations through which seed is governed, valued, and transformed. 1 Draft Policy Framework for Enhancing FMSS in Africa: https://t2m.io/Draft-Policy-Framework-for-Enhancing-FMSS-Africa 2 Draft FMSS Strategy and Action Plan 2026-2035: https://t2m.io/Draft-FMSS-Strategy-Action-Plan-2026-2035
Locating the AU’s FMSS agenda in Africa’s changing seed data landscape
Before turning directly to the AU’s policy agenda on FMSS, this paper first examines how seed data are currently organised and governed in Africa and why that matters. The reason for beginning here is that digital systems are no longer a secondary or purely technical layer added onto seed policy; they are becoming part of the institutional machinery through which seed systems are classified, monitored, standardised, financed, and made visible to states, donors, regulators, and markets.
Databases, catalogues, traceability tools, dashboards, and interoperability standards increasingly shape which seeds count, which actors gain authority, and which forms of knowledge become actionable in law and policy. Starting with seed data governance, therefore, helps to clarify the wider terrain into which the AU’s FMSS framework and strategy are entering. If the continental policy agenda is to recognise FMSS; create substantive support for farmer varieties through recognition pathways that do not force them into commercial categories and protect their continued exchange and adaptation in farmers’ fields;
enable farmer-led documentation and community registers; support decentralised and locally grounded quality practices; and strengthen public support for the multiplication, storage, and circulation of locally adapted seed, then that recognition will unfold in a context already structured by data infrastructures and digital governance logics that can either enable farmer-centred support or deepen standardisation, extraction, and top-down control. Examining this terrain first makes it possible to read the AU policy not in isolation but against the institutional and political conditions that will shape its interpretation, implementation, and contestation in practice.
In practice, seed data are drawn from national variety catalogues, ministries of agriculture, national agricultural research institutes, regulatory authorities, seed companies, agro-dealer networks, producer registers, trial plots, and breeding programmes; they are captured through desk-based compilation, document requests, telephone and SMS surveys, guided interviews, geolocated plot registration, digital stock management systems, and, increasingly, through smartphone-based imaging and computer vision tools in field phenotyping (Awuor, Kilroy & Tihanyi, 2023; AGRA, 2024a; AGRA, 2024b; CIMMYT, 2025; TAAT, 2026).
This means that seed data are not simply “out there” waiting to be used: they are actively produced through particular institutional arrangements, reporting chains, categories, and technical devices that determine what is counted, how it is classified, and which aspects of seed systems become visible in the first place. What appears in a database or dashboard is therefore not a neutral reflection of reality, but the result of decisions about indicators, standards, methods, and reporting obligations. These choices matter politically because they shape what policymakers, donors, regulators, and investors can see, compare, and act on; if a seed practice is not captured by the system’s categories, it can easily be treated as marginal, informal, or irrelevant to policy.
At a continental scale, one of the clearest indications of how much formal seed sector
data has already been assembled is the inaugural Seed Sector Performance Index, for which 47 AU member states submitted data across 17 indicators, while AGRA’s Seed Systems Assessment Tool (SeedSAT) process separately assessed 11 focus countries in depth to identify seed system bottlenecks and intervention priorities (AGRA, 2024a; AGRA, 2024b). Taken together, these exercises do more than describe seed systems: they provide a basis for ranking, benchmarking, and steering them, reinforcing the authority of the institutions that define what constitutes good seed sector performance.
What is less visible in these accounts, but of vital importance, is the capture of seed-related data from smallholder farmers and their FMSS. Such data are gathered not only through national catalogues and formal sector assessments, but also through farmer seed registers, community seed bank inventories, participatory varietal selection, local market surveys, seed fair records, geolocated farm profiles, mobile advisory services, and digital agriculture projects that document crop traits, seed performance, farming practices, and local knowledge.
In practice, this information is typically captured by a mix of actors: extension officers and ministry field staff; national agricultural research institutes and CGIAR-linked researchers running varietal trials, participatory breeding, and phenotyping activities; non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development programmes
supporting community seed banks, seed fairs, and local documentation; farmer organisations and community seed bank committees maintaining local registers and inventories; and private platform providers or project contractors operating mobile advisory, traceability, or farm registration systems (EOAI-Africa, 2021; Vernooy et al., 2022; Development Gateway, 2023; Sema et al., 2023; Bronson, Mwesigwa & Ssekandi, 2025).
The methods themselves usually include farmer interviews, household and plot surveys, extension visits, community meetings, field notebooks, variety characterisation forms, seed stock records, focus groups, participatory scoring sheets, smartphone applications, GPS-based plot mapping, image-based crop observation, and project monitoring tools. Increasingly, these local- and project-level records are connected through interoperability tools to wider databases, dashboards, and reporting systems, allowing farmer- and community-level information to circulate beyond the settings in which it was originally generated (Development Gateway, 2023; Bronson, Mwesigwa & Ssekandi, 2025).
The AU-linked FMSS roadmap explicitly envisages farmer seed registers and documentation systems, while wider work on farmer-centric data governance warns that agricultural data are often collected from smallholders by governments, NGOs, researchers, and private platforms without meaningful control, clear data use terms, or fair benefit-sharing for farmers themselves. This matters because once farmer varieties, local seed flows, and associated knowledge are translated into datasets, they can be repurposed for breeding, benchmarking, market development, traceability, or policy steering in ways that may strengthen recognition but also facilitate extraction and external control. The issue is therefore not simply whether FMSS data are captured, but under what governance conditions, with whose consent, and for whose benefit (Posada, 2015; EOAI-Africa, 2021; Development Gateway, 2023; Bronson, Mwesigwa & Ssekandi, 2025).
Who governs Africa’s seed information systems?
In practice, governance over these information systems in Africa is increasingly shared among a small set of influential actors: AGRA and its Centre of Excellence for Seed Systems in Africa (CESSA), national ministries of agriculture and regulatory authorities, national agricultural research systems, CGIAR centres and allied digital initiatives, and, in some value chains, platform providers that manage traceability and seed-flow data.
The national agricultural research systems are not abstract entities here; they include institutions such as the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR), Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), and the Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI), each of which sits within the official research architecture that generates, validates, and circulates varietal information and breeding data in its national context (EIAR, 2026; NARO, 2026; TARI, 2026). AGRA’s Africa Digital Crop Variety Catalogue is a clear example.3 Developed with ministries, national agricultural research systems, and regulatory authorities across an initial set of six countries— Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—the platform creates a single searchable database of officially released varieties and is explicitly designed to address fragmented and inaccessible national crop variety lists (AGRA, 2025a).
The implication is that digital seed catalogues and related information systems do more than improve access to data; they help determine
which seeds are visible, legitimate, and investable within African seed systems. Increasingly, this governance also extends to data originating in FMSS, including information gathered through community seed banks, farmer registers, participatory trials, mobile advisory systems, and local documentation processes, even where farmers themselves have limited control over how those data are classified, shared, or reused. This gives significant power to the institutions that design platforms, define categories, and control data standards. While such systems may improve transparency and coordination, they can also privilege formally released varieties and measurable performance indicators over farmer-managed, locally adapted, and less codified seed practices. In this way, digitisation is not neutral: it reshapes seed governance by concentrating authority within the infrastructures through which seed knowledge is organised and acted upon, including knowledge and data drawn from small-scale farmers and FMSS, which
may then circulate beyond farmer control. CESSA’s wider data infrastructure goes further by curating datasets on Africa’s seed sector, linking SeedSAT assessments, the Seed Sector Performance Index, and other benchmarking tools into a broader architecture for comparing and steering formal seed sector performance across countries (AGRA, 2024a; AGRA, 2024b). In this sense, seed information is not simply being digitised; it is being reorganised through institutions that decide what data matter, which indicators count, and which kinds of seed become visible to policymakers, investors, and market actors. Once such benchmarking architectures begin to incorporate data on farmer varieties, local seed flows, or community seed systems, the politics of governance become sharper: the issue is no longer only visibility but whether farmer-derived data enter continental systems on terms defined by farmers themselves or by external institutions that set the categories, metrics, and purposes of use.
3 AGRA’s Africa Digital Crop Variety Catalogue: https://varietycatalogues.com/
Platforms, metrics, and regional digital infrastructures
Other digital systems reinforce this shift toward platform governance. The African Seed Access Index (TASAI) and related visualisation work are designed to measure, compare, and rank the formal seed sector across African countries, defining performance in terms such as competitiveness, regulatory efficiency, and service to smallholder farmers (Mabaya & Waithaka, 2022; Awuor, Kilroy & Tihanyi, 2023). In rice systems, AfricaRice and partners are rolling out the eProd platform to digitise producer registration, geolocate plots, manage stock flows, and strengthen compliance and traceability in certified seed distribution across multiple countries (TAAT, 2026). These systems can improve transparency and coordination, but they also concentrate authority in the organisations that design databases, set standards, validate indicators, and control access to dashboards and digital records.
The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB)’s recent fact sheets on digital infrastructure usefully widen this picture by showing that digitalisation is not an immaterial layer added to agriculture, but depends on submarine and terrestrial cables, satellites, data centres, land, water, energy, and critical minerals extraction, all embedded in corporate and geopolitical struggles over connectivity and control (ACB, 2026a; ACB, 2026b). In that light, digital seed governance rests not only on software and databases but on wider infrastructures whose ownership and environmental burdens help determine who can shape the terms of visibility, exchange, and accountability in African seed systems. The strategic question for Africa is therefore not only whether seed information
becomes more accessible, but whether the governance of these data infrastructures remains publicly accountable and plural, or increasingly aligns with donor-driven, market-oriented, and technocratic models of seed sector reform.
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) seed harmonisation also has an explicitly digital dimension: the regulations require national authorities to maintain databases of released varieties and seed, and recent implementation under the COMESA Seed Harmonization Implementation Plan (COMSHIP) has introduced regional seed labels and certificates alongside a harmonised seed trading platform intended to support ordering, activation, monitoring, and more traceable cross-border seed movement (UNEP, 2014; COMESA, 2020; ACTESA, 2025). ACB’s analysis warns that this digitalisation of seed trade can reinforce formal sector control by making visibility, compliance, and market access increasingly dependent on regional platforms, labels, and data systems that tend to privilege certified and commercial seed over farmer-managed systems (ACB, 2023a).
Read alongside ACB’s broader analysis of digitalisation and financialisation in African agriculture, the point is sharper still: once seed systems are rendered as interoperable datasets, platform transactions, and digitally standardised assets, they can be drawn more easily into circuits of valuation and investment that distance revenue, accountability, and decision-making from the farmers and places from which seed diversity and knowledge arise (ACB, 2023b).
This matters not only for visibility and compliance, but also for the concentration of market power. When seed systems are re organised around harmonised release procedures, regional certificates, searchable
catalogues, traceability tools, and performance metrics, actors that already possess breeding technologies, legal teams, capital, logistics networks, and cross-border distribution channels are better placed to comply, shape standards, and capture expanding commercial markets. In practice, this can advantage multinational firms and regionally dominant companies able to move seed, data, and intellectual property through integrated pipelines, while public breeders, smaller domestic firms, and FMSS face higher barriers to entry and weaker influence over the rules of the game. The wider pattern is consistent with recent evidence that commercial seed markets are becoming more concentrated globally, with four corporations— Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF—controlling 56% of the global commercial seed market, even as digital platforms, artificial intelligence (AI), and gene-editing tools are deepening corporate reach across the food system (ETC Group & GRAIN, 2025). In Africa, where seed sector reform is often justified in terms of competitiveness and farmer access, the political economy question is therefore not only whether markets expand, but whose power expands through the infrastructures, standards, and alliances that govern that expansion (AFSA, 2017; AU Commission, 2021; AGRA, 2024a; ETC Group & GRAIN, 2025).
Digitalisation, AI, and the new seed governance stack —seeds as data systems
Seeds are increasingly linked to genomic databases, phenotyping and predictive analytics, farm management platforms, and bundled input and advisory services. ACB’s analysis adds a further dimension that is directly relevant here: digitalisation does not only make seed systems more visible and governable, it can also help turn seeds, traits, and associated knowledge into abstracted digital commodities and investable assets, allowing value to be captured at a growing distance from the sites and communities of production (ACB, 2023b). As AI-driven and model-based breeding expands, access to large, high-quality datasets, compute capacity, and proprietary pipelines can shape which traits are prioritised, which environments define “performance”, and whose knowledge is recognised as legitimate evidence. This is evident in Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT)’s recent AI-powered phenotyping work, which uses smartphones, computer vision, and machine learning to standardise trait measurement and accelerate breeding pipelines across Africa (CIMMYT, 2025). New biotechnologies and genomic tools, including genome-based selection and gene editing, further accelerate the pace and capital intensity of technological development, advantaging actors able to mobilise scale, finance, and regulatory influence.
ACB’s analysis of genome editing in Africa argues that these technologies are being advanced through a coordinated push for deregulation, public-private partnerships, communication campaigns, and patent-oriented business models that promise speed and precision while obscuring unresolved biosafety, farmer rights, and political economy concerns (ACB, 2021; ACB, 2025a). That critique becomes even sharper when set against current experimentation on indigenous, so-called “orphan” or “underutilised”, and centre-of-origin crops. As recent work on these crops shows, the attraction for breeders and biotechnology actors lies not only in the possibility of editing traits for drought tolerance, disease resistance, nutrition, or herbicide tolerance, but also in gaining access to the underlying genomic, phenotypic, and trait data associated with crop diversity that has been conserved, selected, and adapted in African farming systems over long periods. Once those data are sequenced, standardised, and fed into breeding and gene-editing pipelines, control can shift away from the communities and territories in which the diversity originated toward laboratories, platforms, and intellectual property claims located elsewhere. This is especially significant where crops that are indigenous to Africa, or for which African regions are centres of diversity and adaptation, become raw material for genomic redesign without robust rules on free, prior, informed consent, traceability, disclosure, or benefit-sharing.
Although much of the genome editing activity remains experimental and many projects are still in laboratory, greenhouse, or confined field-trial stages rather than broad commercial deployment, that does not make the politics less important; if anything, it makes them easier to obscure from public scrutiny while regulatory pathways, data pipelines, and commercial alliances are being assembled in advance. ACB’s work on ‘black box’ biotechnology extends this critique by showing how the convergence of artificial intelligence with synthetic biology opens a new frontier of “generative biology”, in which large digital and biotech firms use vast stores of digital sequence information (DSI) to design novel sequences, intensifying corporate control over DSI, expanding the reach of intellectual property, and potentially moving key stages of genetic engineering further from public scrutiny and democratic oversight (ACB, 2024).
In Africa, the main players in this emerging landscape are not only the global seed and agrochemical corporations, but also the public-private institutions and intermediary organisations helping to build the pipeline, including the African Union Development Agency–New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUD–NEPAD), the African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), CGIAR centres such as the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the CIMMYT, the African Orphan Crops Consortium, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and allied genomics programmes, donors, and national agricultural research institutes.
At the corporate end of the system, firms such as Bayer and Syngenta make this convergence particularly visible. Bayer describes AI as central to a precision-breeding platform that combines genomics, advanced phenomics, drones, imaging systems, and machine learning to design new genetic combinations, simulate plant performance under highly specific environmental conditions, and dramatically shorten breeding cycles (Bayer, 2024; Bayer, 2026a; Bayer, 2026b). Syngenta presents a parallel model in which the Cropwise platform links seed recommendation models, historical weather and soil data, trial results, agronomic models, and generative AI tools to support both seed placement and broader crop management decisions, while collaborations such as its work with InstaDeep aim to use large language models trained on plant genomic data to accelerate trait discovery and improve control over the design of crop traits (Syngenta Group, 2024; Shoots by Syngenta, 2026; Syngenta, 2026). More specifically in Africa, the current push around genome editing has been advanced through training and capacity-building programmes, regulatory advocacy, and
product-development partnerships around crops such as sorghum, banana, cassava, maize, cowpea, and other staples, while newer programmes on orphan and indigenous crops seek to extend gene-editing capability into species that have historically remained outside major commercial breeding systems. These developments matter not only because they may speed up breeding, but because they consolidate value in proprietary data assets, computational capacity, decision-support platforms, and integrated service ecosystems that are difficult for public breeders, smaller companies, and farmer-led systems to match. The result is an emerging political economy in which biology, data, algorithms, and intellectual property converge as infrastructures of enclosure, creating new forms of dependency and lock-in even where the seed is physically present.
For farmers’ seeds and FMSS, the implication is not only that control may shift away from farmers’ own processes of selection, exchange, adaptation, and collective stewardship, but that this shift can now occur through the capture, standardisation, and reuse of seed-related data— including genomic, phenotypic, trait, and local knowledge data—within externally governed breeding, AI, and gene-editing pipelines. This is especially significant where indigenous and centre-of-origin crops become sources of diversity and data for experimental innovation that remains largely outside public scrutiny, even before any broad commercial release. Read in that light, the AU’s emerging FMSS policy framework and strategy acquire added importance, because their emphasis on documentation, registration pathways, quality systems, and implementation architectures could either help secure farmer-centred governance of these data relations or, if not explicitly rights-based and farmer-led, become further vehicles for external oversight and incorporation. The issue, therefore, is not only whether FMSS enters policy, but on what terms seeds, knowledge, and data are made visible, governed, and integrated into wider legal, digital, and biotechnological systems.
Agency, resistance, and data justice
This does not mean that farmers and civil society have already lost the field. It does mean, however, that the institutional and technological terrain is being shaped rapidly by actors with greater resources, policy access, technical capacity, and control over platforms, standards, and data infrastructures, so the space for farmer-led alternatives can narrow unless it is actively defended.
Farmers, food producers, and civil society organisations still retain important forms of agency: they can contest restrictive legal reforms, demand public interest rules for agricultural data governance, build and maintain community seed banks and farmer registers on their own terms, insist on free, prior, informed consent and benefit-sharing in research and digital agriculture projects, and press for digital public goods rather than closed proprietary platforms (ACB, 2023b; Ruder & Wittman, 2025). Recent work on the datafication of African agriculture makes clear that digital tools do not simply collect neutral information; they can reconfigure agrarian power unless farmers’ rights, collective governance, and data justice are built in from the start (OECD, 2024; Bronson, Mwesigwa & Ssekandi, 2025). The window for intervention, therefore, remains open but
only if movements and public institutions act before platform standards, contractual norms, and regional data infrastructures become so entrenched that participation is reduced to compliance within systems designed elsewhere.
In practical terms, this agency can take several forms. Farmer organisations can refuse to participate in breeding trials, digital phenotyping projects, or platform-based seed initiatives unless prior, informed consent, clear data-use terms, and benefit-sharing arrangements are in place. They can establish community seed registers, local variety inventories, and farmer-controlled documentation systems that make FMSS visible on their own terms rather than only through external metrics. They can also press for digital seed catalogues, traceability systems, and public databases to be governed as digital public goods with transparent standards, interoperability, and space for farmer varieties and local knowledge (ACB, 2023b; AFSA, 2025a; OECD, 2024; Bronson, Mwesigwa & Ssekandi, 2025; Ruder & Wittman, 2025).
Civil society can intervene directly in seed law reform, data governance debates, and regional harmonisation processes—as seen, for example, in resistance to International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV)-style reforms in Benin and Zambia— to argue that farmers must not be reduced to data providers within systems whose rules are made elsewhere (AFSA, 2023; AFSA, 2024a; Bretton Woods Project, 2024; ZAAB, 2024). These are not abstract possibilities. They are concrete ways of insisting that participation in digital seed systems must include rights over how seed-related data are defined, captured, shared, and turned into value.
The Kenyan Constitutional challenge to the Seed and Plant Varieties Act shows that resistance can also succeed in court. In Wathome & 14 others v Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service & another, filed in 2022 and decided by the High Court at Machakos on 27 November 2025, smallholder farmers challenged provisions that criminalised the saving, use, exchange, and sale of indigenous, farm-saved, unregistered, uncertified, and protected seed, as well as enforcement powers that allowed inspectors to seize and dispose of seed (APBREBES, 2025a; Kenya Law, 2025; Peschard, 2026). The court held that key parts of the law were unconstitutional, reading the Kenyan Constitution together with Article 9 of the ITPGRFA and Article 19 of UNDROP and finding that the impugned provisions impermissibly restricted farmers’ rights linked to food, livelihood, culture, property, privacy, and fair administrative action (Kenya Law, 2025; OHCHR, 2025a). The ruling matters beyond Kenya. It demonstrates that restrictive seed legislation is not immune from constitutional review, affirms that FMSS can be defended not only as matters of policy preference but as rights-bearing systems grounded in constitutional, human rights, and food security
principles, and offers an important counterpoint to UPOV-style legal models that subordinate long-standing seed practices to commercial breeders’ rights. For this paper’s argument, the judgment is significant because it shows that national courts may still create legal space for farmer seed exchange and indigenous seed stewardship even where seed law reform has moved in a strongly formalising and proprietary direction.
It is important to note, however, that criminalisation of farmers’ seed practices under seed and plant breeders’ rights (PBR) laws is not limited to formal prosecution. As Peschard (2026) shows, it can also operate through technological surveillance, inspection practices, anti-infringement campaigns, harassment, intimidation, and the threat of sanctions that chill ordinary seed-saving and exchange, even when few cases result in convictions.
South Africa provides a different but equally significant example of how sustained civil society engagement can shape the legal and regulatory terrain around farmers’ rights and FMSS, even without a
Constitutional judgment on the scale of the Kenyan case. Over several years, ACB, alongside several other civil society actors, has intervened repeatedly on the PBR Act 12 of 2018 and its Regulations, as well as the Plant Improvement Act 11 of 2018 and its Regulations, arguing that both regimes are structurally oriented toward commercial breeding, certified seed, varietal uniformity, and stronger proprietary control, while treating smallholder and farmer seed practices as narrow exceptions rather than systems deserving positive legal recognition and support (ACB, 2019a; ACB, 2019b; ACB, 2022; ACB, 2025b; Peschard, 2026).
The significance of this work lies partly in its attention to legal detail. ACB has not merely criticised the statutes in principle; it has tracked the implications of definitions, exemptions, categories of farmers, the treatment of landraces and traditional seed, limits on farm-saved seed, and the practical effects of the Regulations on whether farmers may continue to save, use, exchange, and, in limited ways, sell seed without being pushed outside the law (ACB, 2022; ACB,
The final regulatory outcomes were mixed. On the positive side, the PBR Regulations did not eliminate the farmers’ rights exemption altogether and, as ACB notes, the final schedules reduced some of the previously proposed thresholds and clarified categories of farmers who may still save and use farm-saved seed of protected varieties under limited conditions, rather than leaving this entirely undefined (ACB, 2022; ACB, 2025b). Likewise, the Plant Improvement framework leaves some room for the continued circulation of landraces, traditional, and heirloom seeds outside the most formal commercial channels, which means that farmer seed practices were not wholly extinguished in the final rules (ACB, 2022; ACB, 2025c). But the negative results are more substantial. The final PBR regime still sharply narrows farmers’ rights by tying them to tightly defined farmer categories, prescribed crops, and low quantity limits, while preserving a UPOV-style system that strengthens breeders’ rights, extends exclusive control, and leaves most farmers’ exchange and sale of protected seed outside the protected space of legality (ACB, 2019a; ACB, 2025b). The final Plant Improvement Regulations likewise continue to organise seed governance around registration, certification, varietal conformity, and commercial seed marketing logics, while treating farmer seed, landraces, and local varieties as marginal exceptions rather than as positively protected systems with their own legal status and support measures (ACB, 2019b; ACB, 2022; ACB, 2025c).
At the same time, ACB has argued that the issue cannot be reduced to technical exemptions within commercially oriented seed law. Its interventions consistently call for a broader, rights-based and agroecological framework that explicitly recognises and strengthens FMSS, aligns domestic law with Article 9 of the ITPGRFA and UNDROP, and avoids locking farmer seed systems into a future where they survive only as tolerated residual practices at the margins of formal seed markets (ACB, 2019a; ACB, 2019b; ACB, 2025b; ACB, 2025c).
For this paper’s argument, the South African experience is significant in two respects.
First, it shows that regulatory struggle matters not only in litigation but also in the slower arenas of drafting, consultation, mobilisation, and implementation, where the legal space for FMSS is often quietly narrowed or occasionally partially defended.
Second, it shows that detailed engagement with regulations is politically crucial, because it is often in subordinate rules—not only in Acts themselves—that the actual boundaries of farmers’ rights, seed exchange, seed-saving, and the treatment of farmer varieties are determined.
These openings are not confined to seed law in the narrow sense. The KM–GBF, especially Target 22, provides a broader normative basis by linking biodiversity governance to participation in decision-making, access to information and justice, and respect for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local
Communities (IPLCs) over resources and traditional knowledge. This does not by itself guarantee data justice for farmers, but it strengthens the argument that farmers and civil society should not be treated merely as sources of biodiversity data, local knowledge, or genetic resources; they must also be recognised as rights-bearing actors entitled to shape the institutional terms under which such information is documented, governed, and used.
The same point is strategically important in the revision and implementation of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), because NBSAPs are the primary national vehicle through which the KM–GBF is intended to be translated into domestic law, policy, monitoring, and institutional design. They therefore create a potential, if uneven, arena in which farmer organisations and civil society can intervene on participation, traditional knowledge, ABS, biodiversity monitoring, and the governance of biodiversity-related data.
The CBD’s recent decision on DSI adds a further layer by moving it from a largely abstract policy dispute into an agreed institutional mechanism for benefit-sharing and governance. In Decision 16/2, adopted at Conference of the Parties (COP)16 in Cali, Colombia, Parties agreed to operationalise a multilateral mechanism for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of DSI on genetic resources, including a global fund, while also addressing how publicly accessible DSI databases will be governed and how benefits are meant to flow back toward biodiversity conservation, sustainable use, and IPLCs. This matters for the present argument because it formally locates questions of database governance, accountability, and benefit-sharing for digitised genetic resources inside biodiversity governance itself, rather
than treating them as external or purely technical matters (CBD, 2024). At the same time, these spaces should not be romanticised: existing evidence shows that rights-based participation in NBSAP processes is often weak, uneven, and procedural rather than transformative. Precisely for that reason, however, they matter as sites of struggle in which demands for farmer agency, collective governance, and data justice can be advanced before new digital rules and infrastructures become entrenched.
The ITPGRFA remains another highly contested arena. The collapse in Lima in November 2025 of the package to enhance the multilateral system (MLS) underlined how unresolved the core questions remain around benefit-sharing, Annex I expansion, and the place of DSI within the ITPGRFA architecture, even as decisions on Farmers’ Rights and conservation and sustainable use deferred rather than resolved the underlying conflicts (FAO, 2025; IISD, 2025). What is at stake here is not merely a technical question about whether DSI sits “inside” or “outside” the MLS but a deeper conflict over whether digitised genetic information linked to plant genetic resources can circulate globally for breeding, modelling, and commercial innovation without reproducing the same asymmetries of extraction that have long characterised physical germplasm flows (IISD, 2025; IPC, 2025; OHCHR, 2025b).
For Africa, the implications are particularly sharp. If genetic resources originating in African farming systems enter collections, gene banks, breeding programmes, or research pipelines that feed the MLS, and the associated sequence data, trait data, passport data, or other linked datasets then circulate through databases and AI-driven breeding systems without consent, traceability, disclosure, or enforceable benefit-sharing, the result is a form of digital extraction in which value travels while accountability thins out. This is why the issue belongs squarely within a digital justice analysis: the struggle is not only over access to seed, but over control of the data relations through which seed diversity is rendered legible, recombined, and turned into intellectual property, breeding assets, and platform advantage. In that context, Article 9 remains a terrain of ongoing struggle over the legal and policy meaning of Farmers’ Rights, including whether digital seed systems, DSI governance, and benefit-sharing arrangements will, in practice, erode or protect farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, sell, and improve seed.
UNDROP adds an important human rights framework by affirming peasants’ rights to seeds, biodiversity, participation in decision-making, and the protection of traditional knowledge. It therefore strengthens the case that digital seed systems and related data governance arrangements must not dispossess farmers of control over seed, knowledge, and the conditions under which these are documented, shared, and turned into value.
Civil society, therefore, has a clear role in these debates. It can press African governments not to accept any ITPGRFA outcome that expands access without first securing effective rules
on DSI, traceability, disclosure, and monetary and non-monetary benefit-sharing. It can insist that Farmers’ Rights under Article 9 and peasants’ rights under UNDROP be treated as substantive constraints on any MLS reform, and demand that African negotiating positions address linked datasets—not only raw sequence data but also metadata, trait information, and digital identifiers associated with African plant genetic resources (IPC, 2025; OHCHR, 2025b). It can also build alliances across seed, biodiversity, digital rights, and peasant movement spaces so that debates on MLS reform are not left to technical negotiators and breeding institutions alone. In practical terms, this means pushing for transparency over how African germplasm and associated data enter global databases, challenging patent and disclosure regimes that sever digital innovation from the communities and territories that generated the underlying diversity, and making the case that no credible future settlement on DSI under the ITPGRFA can be legitimate if it treats African farmers mainly as upstream providers of diversity and data while downstream control over analytics, breeding pipelines, and commercialisation remains elsewhere.
The strategic importance of these forums lies in their being among the few places where seed governance, data governance, farmers’ rights, and peasant rights under UNDROP can still be contested together before platform standards and policy architectures become too entrenched to reshape. At national level, important openings also remain in the interpretation and reform of seed laws; the domestic realisation of Article 9 of the ITPGRFA and ABS rules; the use of UNDROP as a normative benchmark in litigation, advocacy, and policy reform; the design of agricultural data governance strategies; and the use of public procurement, extension, and research funding to recognise farmer seed systems, support community seed banks and registers, and build public digital infrastructures on terms that strengthen rather than subordinate FMSS.
A further opening worth naming explicitly is the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS). Although the CFS does not make binding law, it is the principal inclusive intergovernmental forum in which states, UN agencies, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, researchers, and other actors negotiate policy guidance on food security and nutrition, and it is expressly oriented toward policy convergence, uptake, and the progressive realisation of the right to food (FAO, 2026a; FAO, 2026b). That makes it a useful strategic venue for raising the implications of restrictive seed law, digitalisation, data governance, farmers’ rights, biodiversity stewardship, and the place of FMSS within wider food systems governance. This is especially relevant because the forthcoming CFS 54 plenary in October 2026 is expected to discuss, among other things, resilient food systems, the outcomes of the High-Level Forum on artificial intelligence, digitalisation and data governance for food security and nutrition, and the next phase of the Committee’s programme of work—each of which creates an entry point for linking FMSS to broader struggles over rights, resilience, and governance (CSM4CFS, 2026a; FAO, 2026c).
The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSIPM) is not a decision-making body, but it is the autonomous channel through which organisations of those most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition participate in the CFS, transmit demands from “home to Rome and back again”, and
intervene across negotiations on rights, governance, and policy uptake (CSM4CFS, 2026b; AFSA, 2025b). In that sense, CSIPM matters less as a technical actor on seed policy narrowly conceived than as a political and procedural vehicle through which peasant, small-scale producer, Indigenous People, women, and other grassroots constituencies can situate FMSS, seed sovereignty, and digital justice within the broader global governance of food security. The CSIPM offers an important, if indirect, route for raising these issues at the global level: not because it can itself settle the legal questions, but because it can help keep farmers’ rights, participation, and accountability on the agenda in one of the few multilateral spaces where these questions are still debated in relation to food security and the right to food.
Alongside these multilateral openings, an equally important question lies beyond seed-specific law and policy—namely whether the AU Data Policy Framework creates broader spaces in which civil society can intervene on agricultural data rights, interoperability, public interest governance, and accountability before digital infrastructures harden into default rules, and how that continental framework is likely to relate to, shape, or be mediated through national data policy and regulatory frameworks in practice.
The issue then is not only whether farmers and civil society can resist exclusion, but how that agency encounters the institutional architectures through which seed data are already being organised. The practical struggle over seed-related data therefore sits at the intersection of two questions: rights and participation from below, and governance and standard-setting from above. Once seed information is consolidated into catalogues, dashboards, certification systems, and regional trading platforms, the political stakes shift from data collection alone to the authority to define categories, validate knowledge, and decide which seeds become visible, legitimate, and actionable within the formal system. It is at this point that questions of agency connect directly to questions of platform governance and institutional power in Africa’s emerging seed data economy.
Africa’s strategic position and the future of FMSS
These dynamics have particular force in Africa because FMSS still supply most seed for smallholder farming, support local experimentation and adaptation, and remain essential where public breeding, extension, and distribution systems are unevenly resourced. At the same time, Africa is positioned globally as a climate frontline, a major repository of crop biodiversity and wild relatives, a potential data and trial landscape for agricultural development and experimentation, and a future growth market for commercial seed. In this context, control over seed rarely operates through seed alone. It increasingly travels through linked chokepoints—fertiliser, agrochemicals, credit, insurance, extension services, public procurement, digital connectivity, and data infrastructure—where bundled inputs, digital advisory systems, platform dependencies, and compliance standards can shift risk onto farmers while stabilising returns for upstream firms and platform providers.
ACB’s recent analysis of digital infrastructure sharpens this point by showing that the expansion of digital agriculture depends on resource-intensive physical systems—cables, satellites, data centres, land, water, energy, and critical minerals—whose ownership patterns and extractive burdens are themselves politically consequential for African food systems (ACB, 2026a; ACB, 2026b). The geopolitical stakes are therefore concrete: they concern not only who defines the terms of adaptation and who governs genetic and agricultural
data, but also whether African countries and farming communities have any meaningful say over the infrastructures through which data, connectivity, and platform power are organised, or remain primarily markets, trial sites, extraction zones, and data providers.
Against this backdrop, the struggle to secure protection and recognition for FMSS is not a residual or “traditional” issue; it is central to how future seed governance in Africa will be organised. Farmer seed networks sustain varietal diversity, experimentation, and decentralised adaptation—functions that become more valuable as climate uncertainty deepens. Yet they are routinely rendered invisible or non-compliant by laws and standards that privilege uniformity, traceability, registration, and certification, and by digital systems that recognise only what can be captured in formal catalogues, metrics, and platforms. As seed governance becomes more data- and infrastructure-driven, farmers risk being positioned as end-users, contract growers, or data providers rather than as breeders, custodians, and decision-makers in their own right. The issue is therefore not only recognition in principle, but whether enclosure through law, standards, and digital visibility will narrow Africa’s adaptation pathways to externally governed models.
The central strategic question is therefore whether African countries and farming communities will govern the genetic resources, data infrastructures, and innovation pathways
on which future seed systems depend, or be positioned mainly as markets, trial sites, and providers of biological and agronomic data within externally structured systems (AFSA, 2025a; GRAIN, 2025).
Conflict further shows why farmer-managed and community-based seed systems matter. In war-affected settings, formal supply chains can collapse, certified seed may not arrive, and centralised storage and research facilities can be looted or destroyed. Seed security work
in places such as South Sudan increasingly emphasises locally sourced seed, farmer cooperatives, seed fairs, informal quality control, and the strengthening of local seed systems because decentralised seed networks are often more likely to function when central systems fracture. Community seed systems are not immune to violence, but diversified and distributed seed stewardship is often a critical condition of survival, recovery, and renewed breeding capacity in conflict-affected landscapes.
FMSS and the AU policy agenda
The most useful way to assess the AU’s emerging FMSS agenda is to treat the policy framework and the strategy in turn before bringing them together. Although they are clearly linked, they do different kinds of work. The draft policy framework is primarily a normative and legal instrument: it defines what FMSS are, identifies the principles on which they should be recognised, and signals the kinds of reform that Member States may be encouraged to pursue. The strategy and action plan, by contrast, is an implementation instrument: it translates that normative recognition into objectives, interventions, financing arrangements, monitoring systems, timelines, and institutional responsibilities. Keeping that distinction clear matters analytically, because the risks and openings are not identical at each level.
Reading the policy framework: recognition without full protection
The policy framework is therefore best read as opening recognition while also setting the terms on which recognition may occur. Seed quality is a particularly revealing example. It is entirely reasonable for policy to address germination, seed health, varietal integrity, storage, and farmer confidence, especially where climate stress and weak extension systems heighten risk. Yet if “quality” is defined solely by certification logics and laboratory-style compliance, many farmer varieties and locally exchanged seeds may still be treated as inferior or unlawful, even when they perform well under local conditions.
The more constructive route would be to distinguish clearly between commercial certification and fit-for-purpose quality assurance for FMSS, including community-based qualitydeclared systems, farmer-led selection, local testing, and participatory guarantee approaches.
the areas where farmers’ seed systems already function. Nor does it squarely confront the wider structural pressures bearing down on FMSS, including UPOV-style PVP, harmonised seed trade rules, proprietary breeding models, and digital forms of classification and traceability that can gradually narrow the room for farmer-governed seed circulation. This silence matters because relevant international norms already point further than the draft policy currently does.
Article 9 of the ITPGRFA recognises Farmers’ Rights, including the protection of traditional knowledge, the right to participate in decision-making, and the need for equitable benefit-sharing, while national measures in many countries also engage the contested question of farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed. UNDROP goes further in terms of normative clarity by affirming peasants’ rights to seeds, biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and participation in decisions that affect them. The CBD and
the KM–GBF likewise strengthen the case for protecting agrobiodiversity, respecting knowledge holders, ensuring participation, and preventing the appropriation of biodiversity-related resources and information without fair governance. Read against those instruments, what remains weak in the policy draft is therefore as important as what is included. There is no strong protection for non-market seed exchange; no clear safeguard against enclosure through PVP and certification regimes; no explicit requirement of free, prior, and informed consent over seed-related knowledge and data; no serious treatment of local seed markets as legitimate public interest spaces; no firm call for revision of national seed and PVP laws that criminalise ordinary farmer seed practices; and no robust farmer-led governance mechanism with decision-making authority. The danger is not that FMSS are ignored, but that they are conditionally included on terms set largely from above.
Similar concerns arise around variety recognition, farmer-led documentation, and knowledge governance. Tanzania’s recent recognition of farmer varieties is politically understandable as a breakthrough against exclusion, but it also shows the double edge of official recognition: once farmer varieties enter systems built around registration, cataloguing, and administrative validation, they risk being converted from living, collectively governed practices into governable seed objects (TOSCI, 2023; KCOA, 2025).
This is one of the clearest ways in which the framework still falls short of a stronger farmer rights and seed sovereignty position. It acknowledges farmer-managed systems, but it does not clearly treat them as systems entitled to autonomous legal space, positive protection for exchange and local sale, or presumptive priority over commercial regulatory models in
Reading the strategy: implementation, discipline, and managed inclusion
Digital governance and the politics of implementation
If the policy framework is principally about recognition and legal-political framing, the FMSS Strategy and Action Plan 2026–2035 is about implementation, sequencing, and institutionalisation. Here, the picture is more concrete. The strategy operationalises the policy through a ten-year pathway tied to the domestication of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), investment, coordination, evidence, and accountability, and it situates FMSS within agrifood systems transformation, biodiversity conservation, climate adaptation, nutrition, and local seed economies. It proposes legal and institutional mapping, farmer variety recognition pathways, investment in community seed banks and local seed enterprises, support for participatory breeding, fit-for-purpose quality assurance, women’s and youth leadership targets, financing windows, baseline data, and CAADP-aligned monitoring and evaluation.
On paper, this appears to be a significant advance because it moves beyond symbolic endorsement toward an implementation architecture with objectives, outputs, responsible actors, and timelines. It also explicitly recognises important risks, including over-commercialisation, elite capture, misappropriation of indigenous knowledge, weak ABS systems, and the loss of farmer control over seed resources. Those are not minor additions; they show that some of the underlying political-economy dangers are at least visible within the strategy itself. At the same time, however, the strategy remains some distance from a more transformative position because it is still organised primarily as a managed inclusion project. It seeks to bring FMSS into continental planning, investment,
and performance systems, but does not fully reverse the hierarchy whereby farmer-managed systems must still be rendered compatible with state, donor, and administrative priorities to receive support. In that sense, it moves closer to a substantive programme for FMSS than the policy framework does, yet it also risks subjecting FMSS to closer administrative control through the very mechanisms meant to support them: documentation requirements, indicators, reporting systems, coordination structures, and investment criteria can help secure visibility and resources, but they can also reshape farmer-managed systems so that they are recognised mainly when they fit external categories, institutional priorities, and measurable forms of performance.
At the same time, the strategy is also where the politics of implementation become sharper, precisely because it is here that the paper’s earlier concerns about digitalisation and governance move from abstract risk to institutional design. Organised around objectives, indicators, budgets, coordination mechanisms, documentation pathways, digital tools, and reporting systems, the strategy is the instrument most likely to determine whose institutions actually govern FMSS in practice and on what terms farmers become visible within those systems.
Several of its proposed measures are potentially enabling: support for community seed banks, farmer seed enterprises, participatory breeding, community protocols, and fit-for-purpose quality assurance could strengthen farmer-managed systems if implemented in a genuinely rights-based and farmer-led way. Yet the strategy also deepens the role of documentation, cataloguing, databases, traceability, baseline indicators, digital knowledge platforms, and CAADP-aligned reporting. It calls for farmer variety documentation, knowledge platforms linked to gene banks and national systems, digital tools for monitoring, and indicators on documented varieties, functional community seed banks, budget lines, and reporting through continental processes. Seen in light of the broader discussion above, these are not merely technical or neutral administrative devices. They are part
of the wider digital governance architecture through which seed systems are rendered legible, comparable, and governable, and they will shape whether recognition becomes a route to public support and farmer agency or a route to tighter oversight, standardisation, and data extraction. They may improve visibility, learning, and investment, but they can also increase compliance burdens, privilege what can be counted and digitised, and shift authority toward ministries, seed authorities, gene banks, research institutions, and continental coordination bodies unless farmers have meaningful power over how seed-related data, knowledge, and categories are defined, governed, shared, and converted into value.
The strategic design also reveals where future struggles are likely to lie. Much will depend on how Member States interpret “farmer variety recognition”, “quality assurance”, “knowledge platforms”, “community protocols”, and “investment windows” in their own domestic settings. The strategy contains useful safeguards—participatory governance, grievance mechanisms, transparency criteria, benefit-sharing where applicable, and measures against misappropriation and elite capture—but these remain vulnerable to dilution during national domestication. This is especially important for national law reform. If domestication is confined to administrative inclusion, pilot projects, and reporting systems, restrictive seed and PVP laws may remain substantially intact even while FMSS are recognised in principle. The strategy, therefore, creates an opening for legal review, but does not yet amount to a clear continental commitment that Member States should revise seed, marketing, and PVP regimes that criminalise or unduly restrict the saving, use, exchange, and sale of farmers’ seed. That is a serious gap, because without such reform, recognition can remain largely symbolic while farmers continue to operate in legal grey zones or under threat of sanction. Article 9 of the ITPGRFA, UNDROP, and the CBD/GBF all strengthen the case for going further. Together, they support a domestication pathway in which FMSS are not merely documented and monitored, but protected through positive legal recognition, participation in decision-making, benefit-sharing, biodiversity stewardship, and stronger safeguards for farmer knowledge and seed circulation.
The same is true of financing, and here the political economy deserves more attention than the strategy itself currently provides. In practice, FMSS implementation is unlikely to be funded through a single dedicated continental stream. It will more likely be assembled from a patchwork of national agricultural budgets, CAADP and agriculture investment plan allocations, climate adaptation and biodiversity finance, donor and philanthropic programmes, public research and extension budgets, development bank lending, and, in some cases, blended finance or private sector windows tied to local seed enterprises, value chains, digital platforms, or climate-smart agriculture programmes. This kind of mixed funding landscape matters because finance is not neutral. Funding routed through public budgets and farmer-accountable institutions could materially strengthen community seed banks, participatory breeding, decentralised quality assurance, farmer-led registers, public extension, and digital public goods. By contrast, funding channelled mainly through projects, enterprise support, matching grants, or data-driven performance programmes may reward what is scalable, measurable, investable, and market-facing, while leaving less visible forms of collective seed stewardship underfunded. There is also a clear risk that implementation costs will be offloaded downward: governments may endorse FMSS rhetorically but fail to provide sustained recurrent funding, leaving farmer organisations, NGOs, and community institutions to carry the burdens of documentation, compliance, data collection, and local coordination without adequate public support. Likewise, support for interventions such as enterprises, branding, market linkages, and regional collaboration could pull the agenda toward commercialisation if protective boundaries are not kept clear.
The indicator framework matters politically for the same reason. If success is interpreted mainly through documentation counts, registered pathways, enterprise support, bankable projects, and integration into reporting systems, FMSS may be rewarded most when they become administratively legible, donor-compatible, and market-compatible.
A stronger approach would require financing commitments that protect the non-commercial functions of FMSS as public goods: biodiversity conservation, local adaptation, seed access, knowledge transmission, and farmer autonomy. It would also require transparency on who
pays, who sets conditions, whether digital infrastructures remain publicly governed, and whether the benefits actually reach farmer organisations rather than being absorbed by intermediaries, consultants, platform providers, and reporting systems. The crucial issue is therefore not whether the strategy contains progressive language—it clearly does—but who will control its implementation, whether it will be translated into actual revision of restrictive national laws, what kinds of evidence and visibility it will privilege, and whether civil society and farmer organisations will have sufficient power to shape its financing, accountability, and digital governance in practice.
Before turning directly to the issue of national domestication, it is important to clarify the relationship between these two instruments. Neither the policy framework nor the strategy is legally binding on Member States in the way a treaty, regulation, or directly applicable legislative instrument would be. Their significance lies elsewhere: the policy provides the continental normative frame and political justification for recognising FMSS, while the strategy supplies the programmatic pathway through which that recognition may be translated into national reforms, investment priorities, administrative routines, and reporting practices. In other words, they do not automatically determine domestic outcomes, but they do shape the terms on which domestication is likely to occur by defining legitimate policy objectives, preferred implementation models, and the kinds of evidence, indicators, and institutional arrangements that may come to be treated as best practice. National domestication
should therefore be approached not as a neutral process of technical adoption but as a contested site of legal translation and political struggle in which continental soft law is mediated against the backdrop of existing international commitments. Article 9 of the ITPGRFA, the CBD, the KM–GBF, and UNDROP provide important normative resources that national actors can use to argue for stronger protection of farmers’ rights, agricultural biodiversity, participation, benefit-sharing, and farmer control over seed-related knowledge and data. That is precisely why the interaction between the policy, the strategy, and domestic legal orders matters so much: the real question is not whether Member States are formally bound but how these instruments will be taken up, reinterpreted, narrowed, or expanded in national settings, whether they will trigger actual revision of restrictive seed and PVP laws, and whether farmers and civil society will have the power to influence that process on rightsbased and farmer-centred terms.
Bringing the policy and strategy together
Brought together, the policy framework and the strategy form a layered continental governance package in which recognition and implementation reinforce one another. The policy creates the normative opening; the strategy builds the institutional machinery through which that opening may be realised, narrowed, or redirected. This combined reading helps explain why the AU’s FMSS agenda is both politically significant and deeply contested.
On the one hand, it offers the strongest continental acknowledgement to date that FMSS matter for biodiversity, resilience, nutrition, local seed economies, and agrifood transformation. On the other hand, both instruments still remain noticeably short of a fully farmer-centred, anti-enclosure, and agroecological approach. The policy does not clearly secure autonomous legal space for farmer seed exchange, local markets, and collective governance, while the strategy does not yet guarantee that implementation, finance, monitoring, and national law reform will be organised around farmer power rather than managed incorporation into state, donor, and market systems. Instead, the package embeds FMSS more firmly within legal, technical, and digital architectures of recognition—registration pathways, quality systems, documentation platforms, investment plans, indicators, and interoperable administrative systems—that could either support plural, farmer-centred seed governance or incorporate FMSS more tightly into bureaucratic and market-oriented forms of control. Read alongside Article 9 of the ITPGRFA, the CBD and the KM–GBF, and UNDROP, the gap becomes sharper: these continental instruments create political space for stronger protection of farmers’ rights, biodiversity stewardship, participation, benefit-sharing, and rights over seed-related knowledge and data, but they do not yet clearly require Member States to secure the right to save, use, exchange, and sell seed through revision of restrictive national seed and PVP regimes. The decisive question is therefore not simply whether FMSS are being recognised, but how that recognition will be translated into national law, financing, data governance, and institutional practice, who will finance the transition, and on whose terms that translation will occur.
These debates are also moving quickly in institutional terms. In the first two weeks of October, Eswatini is expected to host a heads-of-state and government seed summit covering the seed sector as a whole, including FMSS, and the process is expected to be open to civil society organisations. At the same time, the AU Commission’s launch of the FMSS framework and strategy, previously planned for Harare, Zimbabwe, is now under discussion, with the options being either to hold it back-to-back with the Eswatini summit or to return it to Harare as a separate event. This fluid institutional calendar matters because it may shape how visibly FMSS enters continental seed politics, how closely it is framed in relation to the wider seed sector, and what space civil society has to intervene at the point of public launch.
Revisiting FMSS therefore requires more than defending FMSS against formal encroachment. It requires recognising FMSS as strategic public interest infrastructures for resilience, biodiversity, and democratic control over adaptation pathways. In practical terms, that means legal recognition of farmer seed exchange and sale, protection from enclosure through PVP and certification regimes, support for community seed banks and participatory breeding, farmer-led registers and local documentation systems, and public investment in decentralised seed knowledge and digital infrastructures. The underlying issue is one of power: whether Africa’s future seed systems will be organised around enclosure, compliance, and platform control, or around coexistence, distributed innovation, and farmer-centred resilience.
For African civil society and farmer organisations, the central question is now a practical one: how to influence both drafts before they are settled, and how to shape what follows at the national level once they begin to be domesticated. The answer is that the window
is still open. Because the policy framework and the strategy are not yet self-executing legal instruments, they can still be influenced at the stages of consultation, public launch, political endorsement, and the preparation of domestication pathways. This means there is still room to press for stronger language on farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell seed; clearer protection for non-market seed systems and local seed markets; firmer safeguards on consent, data governance, and benefit-sharing; stronger recognition of farmer-led documentation, community seed banks, and participatory breeding; and more explicit commitments that national seed and PVP laws should be reviewed where they criminalise or unduly restrict farmer seed practices. The task does not end at adoption. It may become even more important afterwards, because national implementation is where the real content of these instruments will be determined: farmer organisations and civil society will need to intervene in law reform, budget processes, implementation plans, monitoring frameworks, data systems, and institutional design so that the strategy is not reduced to documentation, reporting, and managed inclusion, but instead helps secure genuine legal space, public support, and decision-making power for FMSS.
CONCLUSION
The most important conclusion for African civil society and farmer organisations is that these two drafts should be treated not as settled outcomes but as active sites of intervention. There is still scope to influence them before adoption by pressing for clearer and more enforceable commitments on farmers’ rights, non-market seed exchange, local seed markets, consent and benefit-sharing over seed-related knowledge and data, public-interest digital governance, and the review of restrictive seed and PVP laws. In practical terms, this means engaging the remaining consultation and endorsement processes with concrete amendment proposals, coordinated advocacy, and alliances that connect seed movements with biodiversity, digital rights, agroecology, and farmers’ rights networks. The goal should be to prevent the drafts from being finalised in a form that recognises FMSS rhetorically while leaving the decisive questions of legal protection, data governance, and implementation power unresolved.
Their role after adoption will be just as critical. National domestication is the stage at which the meaning of both instruments will be fixed in practice—through seed law reform, PVP rules, biodiversity and ABS measures, agricultural data strategies, public budgets, implementation guidelines, indicators, and reporting systems. If farmer organisations and civil society are absent from those arenas, recognition may easily be translated into new layers of registration, documentation, and oversight without real protection for farmer seed systems. If they are organised and present, however, they can insist that domestication delivers more than managed inclusion: revision of laws that criminalise ordinary seed practices; financing for community seed banks, participatory breeding, local seed enterprises, and public extension; governance rules that keep digital infrastructures accountable and protect farmer control over seed-related data; and monitoring systems in which farmers are not merely data providers but decision-makers. The real test therefore is whether African civil society and farmer organisations can use this continental moment to shape both the final text and the national implementation architecture so that FMSS enter the future as rights-bearing, publicly supported, and farmer-governed systems rather than as administratively recognised but externally managed remnants.
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