Penalising peasant seed systems threatens global food supply by UN Working Group on the rights of peasants   16 Sep. 2026   Farmers across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America face fines and imprisonment for saving, exchanging and selling seed under laws written for industrial seed markets, the UN Working Group on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas said today.   Punishment for seed sharing goes up to 15 years in prison in some jurisdictions, the Working Group said.   In its latest report to the UN Human Rights Council, the Working Group said almost all the world's food comes from seeds, and traditional systems supply 70 to 90 per cent of the seed sown in many countries.   "Saving and sharing seed are among humanity's oldest agricultural practices, and the reason crops can still withstand drought, floods and disease," said Shalmali Guttal, Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group. "Criminalising them is unacceptable and counterproductive."   Plant variety protection laws punish farmers who trade seed of a company's protected variety. Certification rules go further, permitting the sale or exchange only of catalogued seed. Peasant varieties, intentionally diverse and continually adapting, do not meet standards for industrial seeds. Peasants trading their own traditional seed thereby become traders of "counterfeit" seed.   The experts noted that women, as the principal custodians of seed, are particularly affected. They select, adapt and make available local varieties, protecting families from debt arising from purchased seeds and expensive inputs. Rules penalising traditional practices undermine their income and food autonomy.   "Traditional seed systems should be celebrated, not prosecuted," Guttal said. "By exercising their right to seeds, peasants feed the world, protect nature and find sustainable ways forward through the climate crisis.”   Enforcement has hardened in recent years, the report found. Infringements once settled as private disputes are now pursued as crimes against industrial property, with molecular markers, drones, satellite imagery and anonymous tip lines inviting reports of "suspicious seed activity."   The report traces the pressure to the 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 1991), which trade agreements increasingly require States to adopt, and to World Bank financing conditioned on UPOV-aligned reform.   The report also examines the concentration of the seed market, where four corporations, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta and BASF, control more than half of US$81 billion in annual sales. Patents are staked on digital sequence information, which allows companies to claim traits without ever obtaining the seed.   “Laws should penalise biopiracy, commodification of seeds and prevent seed monopolies,” the Working Group said.   “War and occupation destroy seed systems outright. In December 2025, military raids forced the closure and seizure of the only Palestinian community-managed seed bank, which held more than 70 varieties collected across the West Bank and Gaza; its seed-multiplication unit had been bulldozed five months earlier.”   The experts said peasant seed survives only by being grown, exchanged and reselected. Varieties kept but not planted stop adapting and knowledge not passed on is gone in a generation. “What is at risk is not only the seed already collected but the knowledge and capacity to go on producing more,” they warned.   In November 2025 the High Court of Kenya at Machakos held that seed sharing is not a crime. In 2021 the Supreme Court of Honduras struck down the country's plant variety protection law, citing articles 19 and 20 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants for violating the right to nutrition, among the first judgments anywhere to invoke the Declaration.   The Working Group urged States to write article 19 of the Declaration into national law, refrain from implementing UPOV 1991 in ways which contravene the rights of peasants, repeal provisions criminalising peasant seed practices, and exempt traditional seed systems from industrial-market rules.   "Seeds are the material basis of the rights to life, food, health, culture and a healthy environment before they are articles of commerce," Guttal said. "Laws and policies must therefore unconditionally protect peasant right to seeds."   http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/09/penalising-peasant-seed-systems-threatens-global-food-supply-un-experts Visit the related web page
	When politics replaces medical science as the arbiter of truth, the casualty is public health by Gavin Yamey and Boghuma Titanji British Medical Journal USA   7 August 2026   The vilification of Anthony Fauci by U.S. Senate Republicans will erode trust in science, curtail international research collaborations, and deter scientists and health experts from entering public service, say Gavin Yamey and Boghuma Titanji.   At last week’s U.S. Senate committee hearing, Anthony Fauci, former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), faced hours of hostile questioning from Republican Senators. They accused the 85 year old physician-scientist of lying, covering up evidence, and misleading the American public during the covid pandemic.   Republican members of the Senate committee have now voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress. The hearing, including Fauci pleading the fifth amendment, fuelled anger among the MAGA political base and conservative influencers, energising them ahead of the upcoming midterm elections—but a more lasting harm from the hearing will be damage to science and trust in public health.   Fauci has devoted more than 50 years to public service, leading NIAID and the US through the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the 2001 anthrax attacks, SARS, pandemic influenza, Ebola, Zika, and other infectious disease threats.   Beyond the White House briefing room, he helped transform HIV from an almost uniformly fatal disease into a manageable condition through sustained investment in clinical trials, basic science, and global research infrastructure.   Yet to many Senate Republicans and the US secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr—whose book The Real Anthony Fauci reportedly got a sales boost from the show trial—Fauci is a villain. The Republican senator Rand Paul, chair of the committee hearing, has said that he wants to see Fauci behind bars, baselessly arguing that Fauci has lied to Congress.   During the hearing the Republican senator Ron Johnson accused Fauci of “sabotaging” access to ivermectin (a parasite treatment) and hydroxychloroquine (for treatment of malaria), despite rigorous evidence showing that neither drug provides meaningful clinical benefit for covid-19.   Paul revived claims that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory in China that had US research funding and that Fauci helped to cover up these origins, despite the lack of evidence supporting those allegations and the substantial body of scientific evidence consistent with zoonotic origin. Johnson pushed vaccine misinformation, arguing that the covid vaccine was highly deadly and calling it “experimental gene therapy.”   This was juicy entertainment for vaccine sceptical viewers, but the political theatre risks causing lasting damage to public health in at least four ways.   Firstly, trust in lifesaving science will be affected. When research shows that a vaccine is effective and safe but Republican politicians say that scientists are lying, it drives down public trust in vaccines, especially among Republican voters.   Over a 15 month period in 2021-22, an estimated 232,000 US deaths could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults had they been vaccinated with at least a primary series of the covid vaccine.   When the next pandemic hits, we fear that the politicisation of science will lead Republican voters to demand unproven treatments and eschew vaccination.   Secondly, even before the trial, the Trump administration had set its sights on destroying international research collaborations. Republicans doubled down on this wish at Fauci’s hearing. They expressed particular suspicion about collaborations involving virology, China, or both. But while safeguards must always be in place, banning international collaborations on infectious disease research will make pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response harder.   Through international sharing of viral samples, Bundibugyo virus Ebola—currently causing an outbreak concentrated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—was discovered and sequenced by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in collaboration with Ugandan researchers. The US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority is now supporting evaluation of a monoclonal antibody for treating this strain of Ebola, which was patented by US CDC scientists.   Shutting down international research collaborations will make it harder to rapidly develop safe and effective vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics in the next pandemic.   Thirdly, watching Republican senators cursing at Fauci and knowing that he and his family receive harassment and death threats will deter scientists and health professionals from public service.   In August 2025 a man fired more than 180 shots into the CDC headquarters to protest about covid vaccines. Instead of dampening down the antivaccine rhetoric, Republican politicians have continued it.   Young scientists and public health academics watch these hearings closely and witness the worsening rhetoric. They see a career servant portrayed as a criminal, subjected to harassment, and public health leaders requiring security protection.   This is hardly an advertisement for a career in public service, at a time when Kennedy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director, Jay Bhattacharya, have already decimated the NIH and CDC by laying off thousands of critical federal staff.   Finally, the show trial distracts people from Trump’s own missteps in managing covid and from the damage of Trump, Kennedy, and Bhattacharya dismantling US public health.   While lawmakers revisit the covid pandemic, the immediate challenges facing public health today demand congressional attention—including falling childhood vaccination rates, annual measles cases in 2026 hitting a 35 year high, and uncontrolled cyclospora outbreaks making more than 11,000 people sick and killing two.   More than a million Americans died during the covid pandemic. That tragedy deserves rigorous, bipartisan inquiry to understand what worked and what failed. It would generate lessons on preparing for the next pandemic rather than fuelling political theatre. It would examine supply chains, public communication, structural inequities, workforce protection, data systems, and scientific decision making.   Scientists are not beyond criticism, but any criticism must be grounded in evidence and not conspiracy theories. When politics replaces science as the arbiter of truth, the ultimate casualty is not Fauci: it is the health of the American public.   * Gavin Yamey, is professor of global health and public policy at the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health, Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University. Boghuma Titanji is assistant professor of medicine at the Division of Infectious Diseases, Emory University School of Medicine.   http://www.bmj.com/content/394/bmj-2026-100529 http://www.acponline.org/acp-newsroom/leading-medical-professional-societies-patient-sue-hhs-robert-f-kennedy-jr-for-unlawful-unilateral http://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/32580 http://oneill.law.georgetown.edu/press/professors-michele-bratcher-goodwin-and-lawrence-o-gostin-on-the-trump-administrations-termination-of-key-health-advisory-committees-and-members/   * World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has issued a statement underscoring the critical role of vaccination for public health.   “Every parent wants to keep their children safe, and vaccines are among the most powerful tools for doing that, making deadly diseases preventable.”.. “Vaccination policy should be guided by rigorous, independent and transparent review of the best available science, not by political influence.” http://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168124 Visit the related web page
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