Who Keeps Seeds Alive?

Seeds have birthed civilisations. From cacao-centred Mesoamerican cultures to rice-planting communities in Asia, seeds have always been there, quietly shaping human societies. Carried across seasons, borders, and generations, embedded in ritual, memory, and care, seeds were kin, shaping not just what people ate, but how they lived in relation to the world. Seed diversity and people’s cultures evolved together—widely unique, deeply local, intrinsically intertwined. In this interspecies relationship, sustained over millennia, seeds were never owned. They belonged.

Today, the sacred bond between seeds and communities is at risk. Restrictive laws can put farmers in jail or impose heavy fines for the simple act of saving their own seeds. The world’s biodiversity is vanishing. Diets have become homogenous across the globe. Peasants and Indigenous peoples, who have stewarded the healthiest relationships with land, plants, and animals, are constantly under threat. They, who feed 70 percent of the world and conserve the most varieties of plants and biodiversity. They, who are among the most impoverished and food-insecure communities globally. They, who receive less than 0.8 percent of the global climate finance funds and less than 1 percent of all industrial food research and development funds. 

Seeds lie at the core of all these struggles.

Seed-made peoples

Seeds express themselves in relation to the environments they inhabit. As highly adaptive vessels of environmental data, seeds serve as messengers, passing information down from one generation to the next and acclimating to changes in conditions they encounter as they root, grow, and bloom. In the natural drive for survival, they attune and rewrite themselves to thrive—thus diversifying their gene pool in an intrinsic relationship to land.

Farmers’ collaboration with domesticated plants has allowed plant varieties to thrive—in a mutual agreement established long ago when most of our food items shifted from wild to farmed. This on-site adaptation is what makes farmer-led seed banks crucial to biodiversity and climate resilience. 

Corn wouldn’t exist without human hands: teosinte, its scraggly wild ancestor, was slowly cared for until it reached the full-sized corn cob we know today, in a process that took thousands of years. Bananas are the progeny of a wild plant whose fruits barely carry pulp and are full of bullet-sized seeds—it was through the laborious insistence of Indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea that we inherited the most-eaten fruit in the world. Potatoes were mere tiny bulbs filled with bitter, toxic alkaloids—selected for size and reduced toxicity in the Chilean and Andean foothills until they gained the world’s palate. Wild tomatoes bore tiny, sour fruits until Indigenous Andean communities cultivated them for larger fruit and greater sweetness. 

Most edible plant bloodlines carry the human fingerprint: farmers have been guiding their nutrition, saving the most resilient specimens, and preserving their seeds in safekeeping until the next growing season. Farmers made sure plants thrived. Plants, in turn, made sure farmers were nourished.

One seed to rule them all

Today, from celebrated deities, praised by the hands that tended them, seeds have been imprisoned as commodities: standardised as far as genetic manipulation allows, deprived of their uniqueness and soul. Only four corporations (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta and BASF) control 60 percent of the global seed market, in a consolidating trend that eradicates diversity from the fields and our plates. The diverse, poly-cultural fields that once covered farming landscapes were replaced by homogeneous monocultures, which today cover nearly 80 percent of the world’s farmland, creating a uniform scenery alien to the biodiverse environments fostered by small farmers, peasants and Indigenous Peoples.

Not surprisingly, most of these fields are owned by a minority: 70 percent of the world’s farmland is operated by 1 percent of farms, either through direct ownership or contract farming. From these large monotonous fields, planted with the promise of “feeding the world”, only 24 percent of what is harvested goes to feeding people—the remaining 76 percent is diverted for animal feed, wasted along the vast global supply chain, or appropriated to produce industrial commodities. 

The industrial agriculture covering all this land is currently the largest driver of biodiversity loss worldwide—both for crop and wild diversity. Designed to be inhospitable to most plant and animal life, the single-seed premise leaves behind nothing but a trail of devastation. 90 percent of crop varieties have been lost from our farming fields, and 75 percent of the world’s plant biodiversity has disappeared between 1900 and 2000.

The result is right there on our plates—12 crops and 5 animal species constitute 75 percent of our modern diets, with over 60 percent of calories coming from just wheat, rice and corn. Supply chains across the globe have narrowed down to just a handful of crops, weakening the resilience of food systems. Agriculture, once a major embodiment of the sacred relationship between humans and the living world, is now estranged. 

Preservation severed from its source

As commodity crops and monocultures wreaked havoc on fields, eroding biodiversity, the human-plant relationship collapsed. But the answer to restoring balance has not been the obvious choice of strengthening local farmers and Indigenous Peoples. Instead, millions of dollars have been invested in seed vaults, to store thousands of varieties in isolated spaces. Although there’s value in safeguarding genetic materials, these are static portraits of what nature once was; still museums removed from the living world. Seeds stored in such spaces serve as study material, but their real-world effectiveness is limited, as they miss out on the slow, gradual adaptation provided by environmental factors. Farmer-saved seeds, on the other hand, face the bustling living reality of natural environments, where adaptation is pushed by ever-changing conditions.

Beyond that, seeds that compose most of the seed vaults’ archives are collected from communities, but rarely find their way back to their original grounds. On the contrary, these materials are given over to corporations to edit their genes and incorporate the most profitable traits into new market releases. The same genetic materials taken from communities are then sold back to them, in the form of patented commodified products attached to the Green Revolution package of synthetic fertilisers and agrochemicals.

Conservation soon became extraction. Farming communities are still guardians of varieties not used in commercial agriculture—and exactly these unsung seeds hold immeasurable genetic value. Landraces—local cultivars stewarded by traditional agricultural methods—are being sought after by breeders’ laboratories to update their private germplasm banks to the conditions of the living world. Traits found only in local varieties are privatised without any acknowledgement of their origins, in a clear practice of biopiracy. 

Saline-tolerant rice offers a telling example. Coastal communities in India and Bangladesh have been planting indigenous rice varieties adapted to saline waters for centuries. More recently, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a leading institution of the Green Revolution, collected hundreds of these local cultivars, isolated genes associated with salt tolerance, and incorporated them into its breeding programmes. The resulting cultivars were then promoted as the “first successful salt-tolerant variety”, obscuring the crucial farmer-led selection that cultivated salinity-resistant rice for generations.

One needs to stop and ask: why are those stewarding the world’s biodiversity and guaranteeing generations-long food security not acknowledged for their historic and current role? Indigenous cultivars are continuously hijacked, land is entrenched by uniform monocultural fields, and poverty spreads across rural communities. How can we restore this balance?

Where true regeneration happens

True regeneration happens on the ground — in the hands of the peasant food web: farmers, seed savers, Indigenous peoples and communities who have stewarded seed and bred new varieties for millennia. Their daily practice of tending land, planting seeds, and cultivating their community’s own nutrition keeps the ancient ties to the living world. However, what was once an unburdened everyday day of care now carries new meaning. It is resistance.

These communities are standing on the frontlines of defence against the climate crisis and safeguarding the world’s biodiversity. And still, they are criminalised, their lands taken, their seeds prohibited. Resourcing and defending these innovators is not charity, it is a commitment to the global ecology. It is survival.

Even with all the pressure against them, the ground is shifting. Last December, a Kenyan court struck down a law that criminalised seed sharing, marking a milestone for seed sovereignty. 

This January, over 26 delegates gathered for the first People’s Tribunal on seeds, to make visibilise and denounce the privatisation of life through imposed, highly restrictive intellectual property laws. 

Since 2021, a growing network of farmers’ groups and civil society organisations around the world have come together to oppose the corporate takeover of seed systems and demand the dismantling of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), an international treaty signed by 80 countries to protect private plant breeders’ rights. There are now over 500 members in the Stop UPOV Alliance. 

In 2026, the United States’ natural industries are taking a solidarity step by creating a Seed Solidarity Fund, channeling financial resources to seed guardians on the frontlines. The fund is part of the Free the Seed campaign, which is open to new signatories.

Farmer-managed seed systems are gaining ground across the globe. Rooted in local cultures and daily practices, these systems allow seeds to be saved, freely exchanged and collectively held. As they always have been. Each struggle won and each seed planted carries the promise of a future that is irrepressibly alive. Not one imagined anew, but one already alive in the ground beneath our feet.

This essay by Bianca Villanova was originally published a limited-run zine created in support of two aligned efforts: Stop UPOV and Free the Seed. While the print edition now circulates hand to hand, this version brings the conversation into a wider, digital space.