MONIC NABYONGA: East Africa's new seed bill could make it a crime for farmers to save their own seed

KAMPALA – When the East African Legislative Assembly held regional public hearings on the East African Community Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025 across all eight Partner States in late August, one document spoke for the people the Bill will affect most. The Joint Civil Society Position on the Draft EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025, addressed to the Speaker and Members of EALA and endorsed by a coalition of farmer networks and civil society organizations, is not a rejection of regional seed cooperation. It is a warning that, as drafted, this law is built for the commercial seed companies and against the smallholder farmers who grow most of East Africa's food. That warning deserves to be heard, because on paper the Bill reads like housekeeping. Published in February 2025 and tabled before EALA in June, it promises to harmonize how plant varieties are evaluated, released, certified, tested and marketed across Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. Its sponsors present it as a fix for a genuine problem, farmers tired of buying seed that fails to germinate, and a fragmented market that raises everyone's costs. Those are worthy aims. But a law is judged by who it lifts up and who it quietly writes off. The coalition behind the position paper is broad, CEFROHT, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers' Forum (ESAFF), PELUM, the Seed Savers Network, FIAN, Slow Food, CONSENT, TABIO and others. Their message is direct. They argue that this bill is dangerously slanted towards protecting corporate seed systems and intentionally neglect farmer-managed seed systems, and rights of farmers who have for centuries produced, preserved and exchanged indigenous seed. If left unchanged, Dr. David Kabanda (Ph.D) the executive director of CEFROHT, who led Uganda's civil society submissions, warns that the bill could deepen inequality, erode biodiversity and undermine food sovereignty for millions. The paper does not merely object. It sets out four amendments the Bill must carry to be fit for the region it claims to serve,protect farmers' rights to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seed, recognize and support indigenous and farmer-managed seed systems, and promote agroecology and biodiversity conservation and guarantee the meaningful participation of farmers and civil society in seed governance. Read against the Bill's actual clauses, it becomes clear why all four are necessary. The right to their own seed. The heart of the Bill is a certification chokehold. Clause 8 provides that seed for a catalogued variety may be produced, imported or exported within the Community only if it is certified by a national seed authority, and Clause 10 allows marketing only where a certificate has been issued. The Bill does not talk about the fate of uncertified seeds and, as Dr. Peter Munyi observes in a legal analysis published by SWISSAID and APBREBES, that silence cuts the wrong way, by reasonable implication, seed that is not certified cannot lawfully be produced within the EAC. For the millions who save, select, exchange and sell seed among themselves each season, that is an existential threat dressed as quality control. A regime designed for commercial hybrids is simply the wrong tool for the staple food crops families grow largely to eat. Their varieties, locked out by design. Clause 6 permits a variety to be released only after it passes Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability testing plus Value for Cultivation and Use trials. The standard gatekeeping tests of the formal system, and precisely the tests that farmers' varieties and landraces are built to fail. The genetic diversity that makes a traditional variety resilient to drought, pests and shifting climate situationsare the very 'non-uniformity' the tests screen out. With no alternative evaluation route on offer, the crops best suited to marginal, rain-fed, smallholder conditions can never enter the catalogue the Bill then makes a precondition for legal trade. Tanzania's own submissions to EALA made the point, asking that the law recognize farmer-managed seed systems and extend to plant genetic resources and traditional knowledge. No farmers' rights, and the risk of criminalizing tradition.Part IV extends plant variety protection to 'all plant genera and species' (Clause 11) and creates breeders' rights, but it contains no farmers' privilege, no explicit guarantee that a farmer may save and reuse the seed of a protected variety on their own holding. The draft is vague on the scope of these rights, Dr. Kabanda notes, and without clear exceptions smallholders could be criminalized for practices as old as farming itself. Worse still, Clause 12(4) hands the essential content of these rights, the conditions of protection, the scope of a breeder's right, the exceptions, to regulations made by the Council of Ministers, pushing decisions that determine whether a farmer commits an offence out of the primary law and beyond the reach of EALA's elected scrutiny. No remedy when the promised seed fails. The Bill builds an elaborate architecture of rights and standards for breeders and certifiers, yet, as civil society told the Uganda hearings that it offers farmers no clear path to redress when certified or commercial seed fails and a season's income is lost. The people asked to abandon a system they trust are given no recourse in the one they are pushed into. Higher costs, thinner diversity, weaker resilience. Put these pieces together and the direction is unmistakable, farmers become buyers rather than savers, dependent on purchasing certified seed each season, agrobiodiversity narrows as uniform commercial varieties crowd out landraces, and the resilience that lives in that diversity erodes just as climate shocks intensifyacross the region. This is not hypothetical as seed diversity is already declining across the region, and punitive seed laws are part of the reason. The Bill's defenders point to Article 106 of the EAC Treaty, under which Partner States pledged to strengthen cooperation in quality seed development. But that anchor is only half the sentence. Article 106 sits inside the Treaty's agriculture and food-security chapter (Articles 105 to 110), whose purpose is food and nutrition security and food self-sufficiency for the region's people. A seed law that narrows farmers' access to seed, in the name of quality, turns the chapter against its own object. The deeper conflict is with the Treaty's foundational commitments. Article 5(3) binds the Community to a better quality of life for its citizens, to the sustainable use of natural resources and protection of the environment, Article 114 has Partner States adopting common policies for the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity. The very biodiversity this Bill's uniformity tests are engineered to filter out. And Article 7 makes people-centered cooperation, popular participation and subsidiarity operational principles of the Community. A law that designs out the more than 80 percent of the population who farm, and that relegates the definition of farmers' and breeders' rights to Council regulations beyond EALA's representative reach, is the opposite of people-centered lawmaking. The civil society coalition pushes the point further, and rightly. The Bill, they argue, sits at odds not only with the Treaty but with East Africa's binding human-rights obligations like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants (UNDROP), which protects the right to seed, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, to which every EAC state is party and which obliges them to protect farmers' rights. It also runs directly against EALA's own course, the Assembly has already adopted a motion urging Partner States to embrace agroecology to strengthen food sovereignty and food security. One arm of the Community cannot champion farmer-managed seed systems while another legislates them into the shadows. None of this is beyond scrutiny. Under Articles 27 and 30 of the Treaty, residents of any Partner State may ask the East African Court of Justice to test whether a law infringes the Treaty, and a recent Kenyan court challenge to seed-sharing restrictions is a reminder of how sharply these questions can land in court. The position paper's demands are not a plea for exemption from good regulation, they are a blueprint for a better law. Recognizeboth formal and farmer-managed seed systems, in the primary text rather than the fine print. Create an evaluation route that fits the region's diverse staple crops. Consider farmers' rights to save, use, exchange and sell seed into the law, and give farmers a genuine remedy when purchased seed fails, build the law with the people it governs, not over their heads. East Africa's farmers are not asking to be spared quality standards. They are asking not to be legislated out of their own fields. The joint civil society position has told EALA exactly how to avoid that. Before this Bill moves to its second reading, the Assembly should listen or risk passing a law that harmonizesthe region's seed system by hollowing out the farmers who keep it alive. The author, Monica Nabyonga is a Communications Officer at the Center for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT), a non-profit organization based in Kampala, Uganda