As EU lawmakers prepare to rewrite rules governing the production, exchange and sale of seeds, two opposing worlds collide. In one, seeds are intellectual property, carefully regulated and protected as engines of innovation. In the other, they are living commons, saved, exchanged and adapted by farmers across generations. To dig into the seedy underbelly of the agrifood world, ARC2020’s Natasha Foote travelled between two major seed gatherings held just days (but worlds) apart, each offering a radically different vision of the future.
(Updated June 17, 2026)
It’s just after 9.30am and I’m sitting in a vast conference centre overlooking Lisbon’s River Tagus, surrounded by seed industry executives, breeders and lobbyists.
The World Seed Congress kicks off somewhat unexpectedly with a live fado performance, the mournful traditional Portuguese music, steeped in saudade, a longing for something absent, lost or unattainable. It’s hauntingly beautiful and, for a moment, it feels less like the largest annual gathering of the global seed industry, and more like a meditation on memory, inheritance and loss.
It’s a fitting setting. From the fifteenth century onwards, Lisbon was a crossroads of empire, trade and biological exchange. Crops, plants and agricultural knowledge moved through Portuguese maritime networks linking Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, reshaping landscapes and diets across continents.
Now, some 1,800 delegates gathered in the same city to discuss the future of seeds, and to strike the closed-door trade deals behind the €90 billion seed market.
And still today the core questions about seeds revolve around this same major concept: power. Who moves them, who controls them, and who benefits from them.
The silent seed
Any illusion that this is not, in fact, a gathering of agrifood giants – including the four major agrochemical and seed companies that collectively dominate some two-thirds of the global commercial seed market – is broken when the speeches start.
But amid the standard corporate spiel, there’s one speaker that stands out: a seed Youth Ambassador named Jade Alexis Sands from the Bahamas. “Seeds carry the knowledge of the ancestors and the future of what things are going to be,” she starts. It is the first time that morning that seeds are spoken as part of humanity’s collective story, rather than a technology or a technical input to be ‘improved’.
For Sands, seeds are a “botanical legacy that define our culture, the way we celebrate, make our national meals and, most importantly, our personal identities”. “Every decision we make has the power to protect cultures, traditions and heritage, not just in our countries but globally,” she says.
She points out that we have lost much of our crop varieties and, for Sands, it’s “not just a statistic”, but about “cultures disappearing, identities eroding and our grandmother’s seeds going silent”.
There are different ways to interpret a seed going silent. For instance, a silent seed might be one which is dormant, or dead.
But it could also be a lost variety, a forgotten tradition, a broken lineage of knowledge when seeds are no longer able to be passed between hands and generations.
The question cuts to the heart of ongoing debates in the EU in the run-up to two definitive seedy decisions.
After years of deliberating, this week European lawmakers will take a stance on new genomic techniques (NGTs) and new sweeping seed legislation governing the marketing and exchange of seeds. Together, these are set to fundamentally reshape the future of farming across the continent.
For instance, if approved once and for all this week, reforms could expand the patenting of NGT-derived plants, with critics warning this poses a threat to farmers’ rights to seeds while concentrating control into fewer hands.
The illegal seed
As I ponder this, a warning flashes across the screen: “Illegal seed practices can hurt all of us.” But what does it mean for a seed practice to become illegal – and illegal for who?
The International Seed Federation defines illegal seed practices as the unauthorised production, distribution, or commercialisation of seeds that infringe intellectual property rights, violate agricultural trade regulations, or fail to meet government quality standards. This ranges from counterfeit seed sales to patent infringements.
The seed industry has long argued that intellectual property rights are a precondition for continuous innovation in plant breeding, while more widely illegal seed practices are seen as threats to both food security and farmers’ livelihoods.
But for many seed advocates, such as the campaign groups No Patents on Seeds! and ARCHE NOAH, the real threat is to farmers’ fundamental right to seeds, and the age-old practice of saving, exchanging, and replanting seeds to collectively shape crop diversity.
The Association for Plant Breeding for the Benefit of Society (APBREBES) has been mapping the expanding global landscape of seed criminalisation. Its recent study traces what it calls an “industry-led effort” to strengthen the enforcement of Plant Breeders’ Rights (PBR) through cooperation with police, customs authorities, and other law enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, countries hosting many of the world’s largest seed companies are using trade agreements and development programmes to encourage stricter PBR enforcement in countries across the Global South, the report notes.
It tallies with a recurring ambition heard at the conference to “green the map” – aka, bringing all countries into regulatory alignment for the latest seed technologies and protections – along with the repeated assertions that farmers themselves do not, or do not want to, save and share seeds.
Among the 1,800 delegates gathered in Lisbon to discuss the future of seeds, I did not meet a single farmer to test that assumption.
To find one, I had to leave the conference centre.
The seeds that will not be silenced
The seeds are anything but silent on Rosario Floriddia’s farm.
I’m standing in the rolling Tuscan foothills just a few days later as part of the Let’s Liberate Diversity conference wondering how I ended up somewhere so breathtakingly beautiful, baking under the sweltering Italian sun.
Two seed gatherings, two days apart, yet two completely different planets of thought. The journey from Lisbon to Tuscany may have only been a short plane ride, but it felt like travelling between different universes.
Here, farmers, breeders, seed savers and seed enthusiasts gathered in an old castle in Scandicci to imagine new ways to build a future around diversity rather than uniformity.
If the World Seed Congress was concerned with controlling the movement of seeds, Let’s Liberate Diversity was concerned with keeping them moving, adapting and growing.
In Lisbon, I heard seeds described as inventions to be protected. In Tuscany, they were described as relationships – between plants, places and people, constantly evolving across borders and generations, carrying the imprint of the farmers and communities that have selected, saved and exchanged them over generations.
One looked to standardisation, protection and control; the other to diversity, adaptation and exchange. Both claim to offer resilience in an increasingly unstable world, yet the visions are fundamentally at odds with one another.
And, for Rosario and the many farmers and seed savers I was to meet over the course of my time in Italy, only one of these visions leads anywhere worth going.
Diversity is the key to Rosario’s success. Across the yellow and green hillsides, he grows heritage grain varieties that he says help him weather fertiliser price shocks, adapt to a changing climate and produce more nutritious food. Seed sharing, in this view, is not just a relic of the past but a practical tool for the future.
And the diversity doesn’t stop at his fields. Rosario is involved in every stage of the process, from cultivation and milling to selling directly to customers, creating a system he says is healthier, more independent and more resilient.
His commitment to diversity extends beyond the varieties he grows today. Rosario is also involved in a breeding programme with the Italian organisation Rete Semi Rurali exploring the future potential of more heritage grains — some tall, some short, all carrying genetic traits shaped by centuries of cultivation, crossing borders and passing through countless generations of farmers’ hands.
The two worlds rest on fundamentally different understandings of how resilience is created in our seed and food system. In Lisbon, it was rooted in control, ownership and competition. In Tuscany, in diversity, exchange and cooperation.
Europe’s proposed reforms to seed laws arrive at a moment when these two worlds collide.
Standing among Rosario’s fields, I think again of Jade’s warning about seeds going silent. In Tuscany, it means the loss of diversity, memory and the ability of seeds to adapt through the hands of those who grow them.
And the decisions now being made in Brussels this week will determine which seeds continue to grow, and who has the power to silence them.
In other words, the EU is about to decide who gets to keep seeds speaking, and who has the power to silence them.
This article is produced in cooperation with the
Heinrich Böll Stiftung European Union.
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