CALL FOR SOLIDARITY

seeds Law in lebanon

PROTECT LEBANON’s AGRICULTURAL HERITAGE AND FOOD SOVEREIGNTY!

Although Lebanon has been spared the full onslaught of multinational seed hoarders in the past years due to its precarious security situation, Lebanon’s current government, riding the wave of reform promises and scapegoating particular national components, has decided it was time to propose a new law regulating the trade and exchange of seeds and seedlings under pressure from foreign actors.

The law’s timing betrays the regime’s incompetence in addressing the impact of a multidimensional economic crisis, the collapse of the local currency, and 4-figure inflation rates in food prices. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s food security remains critically compromised, with approximately 1.17 million people facing acute food insecurity in early 2025, due to the economic collapse, damaged agricultural infrastructure, and ongoing Israeli aggression.

Neglecting all the above facts, the proposed Seeds and Seedlings Trade Regulation Law threatens to worsen the situation, dismantle thousands of years of agricultural tradition, and reshape the future of our food system. While presented as a neutral regulatory tool, it is designed to commodify and privatize a vital public common.

According to Sara Salloum, President of the Agricultural Movement in Lebanon, “we must reject this fundamentally flawed legislation and demand its complete reformulation to protect our farmers, our biodiversity, and our national resilience.”

The proposed law was drafted in collaboration with foreign governments and organizations without consulting with farmers, their associations, or any rights-based civil society organizations. Yet, representatives of large seed companies seemed to be in tune with the ministry in the only publicly announced meeting to discuss the prepared drafts.

As part of the Fertile Crescent, Lebanon’s agricultural heritage dates back 11,000 years. Throughout those years, these traditions were preserved by farmers and farming communities, in tune with nature and community needs. Today, they are considered essential to transition into agroecology and sustainable practices.

However, this heritage is under imminent threat due to pressures from the global market and Western interests. The proposed framework is engineered to systematically marginalize small farmers, who are the backbone of our agriculture, and push them out of the formal market, favoring industrial seeds and threatening to trap small farmers in a vicious cycle of dependency, debt, and seed slavery. The framework establishes a deliberate barrier of financial and bureaucratic burdens (complex licensing, registration requirements, inspection fees) that the vast majority of small producers cannot overcome. This structure is explicitly designed to ensure that only large, well-capitalized entities can dominate the seed market.

The monopolistic legal structure proposed by the law opens the door to granting IPRs over seeds, potentially the “most dangerous” development. Needless to say, this practice is responsible for the further impoverishment and disenfranchisement of farmers around the world.

The law prioritizes uniformity over diversity, critically weakening our ability to adapt to climate change. The core exclusionary power of the law lies in the mandatory registration standards of Distinctness, Uniformity, and Stability (DUS), which are tailor-made for homogenous, standardized seeds produced by large corporations. It will lead to the marginalization of local varieties, which are inherently dynamic, adapting constantly through farmer-led selection and local conditions, a situation that systematically marginalizes the local seeds that form the foundation of our national agricultural biodiversity. The law also creates a situation of chemical dependency and environmental degradation by supporting an industrial model that relies on costly “technological packages” and mandates the concurrent use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to achieve advertised yields.

Finally, by systematically undermining the exchange and use of diverse local seeds, the law actively destroys the most important asset the country possesses for climate change adaptation.

The solution is not a minor amendment to a flawed document, but the adoption of a fundamentally different framework rooted in the principle of Food Sovereignty. This approach places the right of people to define their own food systems above corporate commercial interests.

We call for immediate and fundamental reformulation of the proposed Seeds Law based on the following demands:

  1. Prioritize Farmer Rights and Food Sovereignty: The primary objective of the law must be redefined to grant absolute priority to protecting farmers’ rights to save, store, use, and freely exchange their local seeds, and to safeguard agricultural biodiversity.
  2. Legally Recognize Farmer-Managed Seed Systems (FMSS): The law must include a dedicated chapter explicitly recognizing and strengthening Farmer-Managed Seed Systems (FMSS), which uphold seeds as a common good. This must guarantee the right to use and exchange local seeds for non-commercial purposes without unfair legal or financial burdens.
  3. Reject Commercial Standards and IPR: All clauses linking local and traditional varieties to commercial DUS criteria or intellectual property mechanisms must be abolished. Traditional varieties must be excluded from registration requirements imposed on commercial seeds.
  4. Enact an Explicit Ban on GMOs: The reformulated law must include a clear definition and an explicit, final ban on the import, production, or trade of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in all their forms.
  5. Ensure Fair Representation: The composition of the National Seeds Committee must be revised to ensure mandatory and effective representation of farmers’ organizations, networks for food sovereignty, and civil society groups (at least 1/3 of the members).

The above issues were echoed by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), which also noted the proposed law’s impact on rural women and girls, who are “particularly affected by these conditions, facing higher levels of poverty, violence, and marginalization. They lack equal opportunities in education, scientific research, and participation in agricultural decision-making, despite their essential and ongoing contribution to food production and the preservation of agricultural genetic diversity.”

NHRC also stressed that “any legislation relating to seeds and agriculture should be included within the context of the State’s obligations towards rural populations and farmers, including promoting the right to adequate food, the right to sustainable development, and the right of farmers to preserve and exchange their traditional seeds.”

Thus, we must reject the false promises of the industrial model, demand our fundamental right to manage our local resources, and build a resilient food system that serves people and the planet, not multinational corporations and market mechanisms hostile to small farmers.

We call on all concerned groups to exert pressure on the governments of Lebanon and Italy (under whose auspices and experts the law was developed) and stand in solidarity with the farmers of Lebanon by spreading the message, directly contacting the responsible parties and other EU governments, or sending us a copy to share in the media and among our constituency.

Network Siyada

Campaigns

food sovereigntyLebanonUPOV

FacebookXWhatsappEmailPrint

Related posts: