Tanzania Wants the EAC's New Seed Law Rewritten to Protect Farmers' Right to Save Their Own Seed

DAR ES SALAAM — Tanzania has told East African lawmakers that a regional seed law meant to unify trade across eight countries needs a more fundamental rewrite before it proceeds, arguing that the current draft protects commercial seed interests far more thoroughly than it protects the millions of smallholder farmers who still save, share and replant their own seed every season. The objection came through formal submissions on the EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025, filed as part of regional public hearings the East African Legislative Assembly's responsible committee conducted across all EAC partner states in late August 2026. In Kenya, the session was led by Hon. David ole Sankok on behalf of committee chairperson Hon. Gideon Gatpan Thoar, with the EAC Secretariat's Acting Director of Productive Sectors, Simon Kiarie, representing the Secretariat and reaffirming its commitment to a participatory drafting process. Uganda ran parallel consultations the same week, and stakeholders in several partner states, Kenya included, raised comparable concerns about balancing plant breeders' rights against smallholder farming realities. What the Bill Actually Does The EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025 is designed to create a single regional framework for testing, certifying and evaluating seed varieties, plus a harmonised system for protecting plant breeders' rights, replacing the patchwork of national rules that currently governs seed trade across the bloc. Proponents describe the benefits in straightforward commercial terms: seed certified in one EAC country could move to another without repeating the same testing process, reducing duplication, cutting costs for seed companies, and making it easier for investment to flow into regional plant breeding. Agriculture remains the economic backbone of every EAC partner state, and a predictable, integrated regulatory environment is a genuine prerequisite for attracting the kind of investment that expands seed production and variety development at scale. Tanzanian stakeholders don't dispute that logic. Their submission explicitly supports harmonising seed testing, certification, variety evaluation and regional trade. Their objection is about what the bill leaves out. The Gap Tanzania Wants Closed At the center of Tanzania's concern is Farmer Managed Seed Systems, the informal, community-based practices through which farmers save, select, conserve, exchange and trade seed outside any commercial certification process. These systems are not a marginal feature of East African agriculture; across much of the region, they remain the primary way smallholder farmers actually access the seed they plant each season, precisely because farm-saved and informally exchanged varieties are affordable, locally adapted and resilient in ways many commercial varieties aren't for a given community's specific soil, climate and pest pressures. Tanzania's submission argues the bill, as written, was built primarily around commercial seed regulation, and that applying the same regulatory logic to farmer varieties risks real harm. Conventional distinctness, uniformity and stability testing, the standard technical requirements used to register and protect commercial plant varieties, was designed for seed produced through controlled breeding programmes with predictable genetic characteristics. Farmer varieties, developed and maintained through generations of selection within a community, often don't fit that mould, and testing regimes built for one type of seed can become an expensive, technically inappropriate barrier when applied to the other. Tanzania wants farmer varieties explicitly exempted from those commercial requirements, with alternative recognition mechanisms developed in direct consultation with smallholder farmers, pastoralists and other affected communities instead. The submission goes further on a specific practical point: it wants the bill to state plainly that selling or exchanging non-commercial varieties through farmer-managed seed systems within a partner state cannot be prohibited. Without that explicit protection, a commercially oriented seed law could, even unintentionally, criminalise or restrict a practice that has functioned as informal regional food security infrastructure for generations. Renaming the Bill to Match Its Real Scope Tanzania's proposals aren't limited to specific clauses. Stakeholders want the legislation itself renamed, from the EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill to the EAC Seed, Plant Varieties and Plant Genetic Resources Bill, 2025, arguing that a title focused only on seed and plant varieties doesn't reflect what a comprehensive regional framework actually needs to cover: genetic resources, the traditional knowledge tied to them, and farmers' documented historical contribution to developing and conserving both. The Provisions Tanzania Wants Added AreaTanzania's Proposed Change Farmer variety testingExempt farmer varieties from commercial distinctness/uniformity/stability testing; develop alternative recognition mechanisms with farming communitiesSale and exchangeExplicitly guarantee that non-commercial variety sale/exchange within a partner state cannot be prohibitedPlant breeders' rights applicationsRequire disclosure of genetic resource origin, associated traditional knowledge, proof of lawful access, and benefit-sharing termsRegional registerRequire documentation of free, prior and informed consent from communities that provided genetic resource accessOwnership clarityClarify that breeders' rights do not confer ownership of underlying genetic resources or extinguish farmers' existing rightsNew legal sectionAdd provisions covering plant genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and access-and-benefit-sharingCommunity Plant Variety CatalogueAdd safeguards against misuse of variety information, including in gene-editing or GMO developmentBill titleRename to EAC Seed, Plant Varieties and Plant Genetic Resources Bill, 2025Source: Tanzanian stakeholder submissions to the EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025 public consultations, August 2026. Who Owns Knowledge That Took Generations to Build The plant breeders' rights section carries the submission's most technically significant proposals. Modern commercial plant varieties are frequently developed using genetic material and accumulated knowledge that originated with farming communities, sometimes generations earlier, without any formal record of where that material came from or whether the community that developed it consented to its commercial use. Tanzania wants applications for plant breeders' rights to disclose the origin of any plant genetic resources used, any associated traditional knowledge, details of how access was obtained, and what benefit-sharing arrangement, if any, exists with the originating community. The submission also wants the proposed regional Community Register to require the same disclosure, including documented proof of free, prior and informed consent from any community that provided access to genetic material. And it draws an important legal line: granting a breeder rights over a new variety should not be treated as granting ownership over the genetic resources, genetic material, or traditional knowledge that variety was built from, nor should it override farmers' existing rights or any benefit-sharing obligations tied to that resource's origin. That distinction matters economically, not just symbolically. If breeders' rights implicitly absorbed the value of the underlying genetic material and traditional knowledge without compensation or attribution, communities that spent generations developing locally adapted varieties could see that accumulated value captured entirely by whichever company or institution formally registers a commercial variety derived from it, with no share of the resulting revenue, licensing fees or research partnerships flowing back to the originating community. An Entirely New Legal Chapter Beyond amending existing sections, Tanzania is proposing an entirely new part of the bill dedicated specifically to plant genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and access-and-benefit-sharing. The proposed text would promote conservation of local, indigenous and farmer varieties, support community seed banks and gene banks, and encourage research, breeding and capacity building built around those resources rather than displacing them. Under this framework, any access to genetic resources or traditional knowledge would require prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms, with fair and equitable benefit-sharing where resources are actually used, potentially including royalties, research partnerships, technology transfer, training and support for community conservation work. The proposal would formally recognise farmers and local communities as contributors to genetic resource conservation and development, not merely end users of whatever commercial seed companies eventually produce, a reframing that partner states would be encouraged to build into their own national support for farmer varieties, community seed systems and farmer participation in formal plant breeding. Guarding Against a Digital-Era Risk Tanzania's submission also engages with a newer concern the original bill drafters may not have fully anticipated: the risk that a proposed Community Plant Variety Catalogue, intended to record which varieties have been released in which partner states and under what agro-ecological conditions, could itself become a vector for extracting value from farming communities rather than protecting them. Tanzania wants safeguards against extraction or misuse of catalogue information consistent with data governance and digital rights principles, and flags specific concern about that information being used to develop or market gene-edited or genetically modified varieties without the originating community's knowledge or consent, an issue that will only grow more relevant as gene-editing techniques become cheaper and more widely accessible to commercial breeders globally. Farmers Speaking for Themselves The technical and legal proposals are backed by farmers describing what's actually at stake for them directly. Irene Liborious of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum argued that the regional framework needs to recognise smallholder farmers as custodians and developers of seed, not simply consumers of commercially produced varieties, and that harmonisation should strengthen regional seed systems without stripping away farmers' rights to save, use, exchange and develop their own seed. Apollo Chamwela, a smallholder farmer from Morogoro and member of MVIWATA, Tanzania's National Network of Small-Scale Farmers Groups, framed the issue in terms of resilience and heritage rather than legal technicality: locally adapted seed is affordable, resilient, and passed down through generations specifically because it works for the conditions farmers actually face, and a regional law that makes saving and exchanging that seed harder would weaken systems that have sustained communities for decades. He urged the East African Legislative Assembly to treat formal and farmer-managed seed systems as complementary rather than competing. Why This Debate Extends Beyond Tanzania The consultation process that produced these proposals was genuinely regional. The Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum coordinated smallholder farmer participation across all EAC partner states, supporting national networks in reviewing the bill and developing country-specific submissions during the 27-28 August consultations, with Emmanuel Justine of ESAFF describing the goal as ensuring smallholder farmers' perspectives are meaningfully reflected in the final legislation rather than treated as a formality. Similar tensions between plant breeders' rights and farmer seed systems surfaced in Kenya's own consultations, and Uganda ran comparable public hearings the same week, suggesting Tanzania's position reflects a broader regional pattern rather than an isolated national objection. That pattern matters because it captures a genuine, substantive policy tension rather than a simple dispute to be resolved in one country's favour. Regional seed harmonisation genuinely could reduce costs, cut duplicated testing, and attract investment into East African plant breeding, benefits that could ultimately reach smallholder farmers too, through greater availability of good-quality certified seed and lower prices from increased regional competition. At the same time, a regulatory framework built primarily around commercial seed, without explicit protection for farmer-managed systems, risks formalising away practices that already function as the de facto seed security system for a large share of the region's population, and doing so through a single piece of regional legislation that would bind eight countries at once rather than remaining a matter each government could adjust nationally. What Happens Next The submissions gathered across the EAC's regional public hearings are now expected to inform the East African Legislative Assembly's committee report ahead of the bill's second reading. Whether Tanzania's specific proposals, the renamed title, the farmer variety testing exemptions, the genetic resources and benefit-sharing chapter, actually make it into the version EALA ultimately votes on will determine whether this becomes a genuine test case for how African regional bodies can write commercial regulation without erasing the informal systems still doing most of the practical work of feeding their populations, or whether the tension raised in these hearings gets absorbed into a bill that changes little from its original commercial-focused draft. FAQ What is the EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, 2025? A proposed regional law that would create a common East African Community framework for testing, certifying and evaluating seed varieties and protecting plant breeders' rights, replacing the current patchwork of national seed regulations across the bloc's partner states. What is Tanzania's main objection to the bill? That it is built primarily around commercial seed regulation and plant breeders' rights, without adequately protecting Farmer Managed Seed Systems, the informal community practices through which most smallholder farmers in the region save, select, conserve and exchange seed outside formal certification. What specific changes is Tanzania proposing? Exempting farmer varieties from commercial testing requirements, guaranteeing farmers' right to sell and exchange non-commercial seed within a country, requiring plant breeders to disclose the origin of genetic resources and traditional knowledge used in new varieties, and adding an entirely new section covering genetic resources, traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing. Why does Tanzania want the bill renamed? Stakeholders argue the current title, focused only on seed and plant varieties, doesn't reflect the broader scope they believe the law needs, covering genetic resources and traditional knowledge as well, and are proposing it become the EAC Seed, Plant Varieties and Plant Genetic Resources Bill, 2025. Is Tanzania opposed to regional seed harmonisation? No. Tanzanian stakeholders explicitly support harmonising seed testing, certification and regional trade. Their concern is that the current bill's design favours commercial seed systems without equivalent legal protection for farmer-managed systems. What happens next with the bill? Submissions gathered during the regional public hearings, held across all EAC partner states in late August 2026, will feed into the East African Legislative Assembly committee's report ahead of the bill's second reading, where lawmakers will decide whether to incorporate proposals like Tanzania's before the law is finalised.