Towards redesigning the plant commons : a critical assessment of the multilateral system of access and benefit-sharing of the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture

The overall goals of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture are food security and sustainable agriculture. The Treaty entered into force in 2004 and regulates the conservation, sustainable use, and access and benefit-sharing of seeds for food and agriculture. Due to the “special nature” of plant genetic resource for food and agriculture, Contracting Parties to the Treaty consider seed management as a “common concern of all countries”, which necessitates a multilateral regime approach. To this end, they created the multilateral system of access and benefit-sharing of the Treaty. This dissertation analyses the common management system of seeds within the Treaty in order to evaluate if and how the Treaty reaches its set objectives. The research methodology is transdisciplinary, and contains three steps. First, a historical and contextual analysis of the international seed management rules is carried out. Second, the Treaty is studied in detail following two methods: a legal and a stakeholder analysis of the Treaty and of its implementation instruments. This second step leads to the identification of specific conceptual constraints preventing the effective implementation of the Treaty to reach its objectives. Third, following this double reading of the Treaty, the research results are analyzed in light of the theory of the commons, with the aim to assess if and how the literature on the commons can contribute to helping the Treaty reach its overall goals: food security and sustainable agriculture, by improving what was qualified as a Global Seed Commons. This last step is the basis for the formulation of a number of solutions to the identified constraints. The thesis leads to two main results. First, there is a clear will to design an effective global seed commons where seeds would be accessible for all its stakeholders, including smallholder farmers, in order to reach food security and sustainable agriculture. However, practice shows that the seed commons is only effective for researchers and breeders. Second, a clear contradiction exists within the Treaty, between its objectives and the designed obligations to reach them, in particular regarding the limited recognition of Farmers’ Rights at the international level. As it does not mitigate the imbalance of rights opposing smallholder farmers and big agro-chemical multinationals on the issue of the appropriation of seeds and their related knowledge, the Treaty is not able to reach its objectives. Building on these results, I identify specific underlying principles from the analysis of the global seed commons. These underlying principles should be better expressed in the rules and procedures of the global seed commons in order to mitigate the identified conceptual constraints and contribute to the realization of the Treaty’s overall goals. I plea for a real “global seed commons”, i.e. that involves all its stakeholders, in order to face major social challenges such as producing sufficient and quality food in times of climate changes and persisting world hunger and poverty.