Seed commons—the collective management of seeds and associated knowledge—is a major aim of food sovereignty, that crucial alternative to the dead end of industrialized agriculture. To reclaim the commons explains Michel Pimbert in this wide-ranging policy analysis, there is a need to enable community control over growing, trading and consuming food. That will demand mutually supportive transformations in agriculture, economies, rights and political systems towards agroecology, the economics of solidarity, collective notions of property and direct democracy.

Drawing on sources such as the Nyéléni Declaration on food sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, this document outlines a radical approach to seed governance outside the capitalist and patriarchal paradigm.

The proposals, while scarcely featuring in global and national fora on seed governance, offer a fresh framework for needed change at a time of social exclusion, poverty and deepening environmental crises. 

The article concludes that the food sovereignty paradigm—with its emphasis on transformative agroecology, the commons, direct democracy, and economics of care and solidarity—offers hope and a framework for action.