WHO OWNS THE SEED?
Why Trinidad and Tobago Must Protect Farmers and Consumers in Amending Its Plant Variety Laws
By CAIR – Consumer Advocacy and Information Resource
There is a deceptively simple question at the heart of Trinidad and Tobago’s proposed plant-variety legislation:
Who should have the greater power over the seed that produces our food—the farmer who grows it, saves it, and depends upon it, or the commercial breeder whose variety is legally protected?
For CAIR (Consumer Advocacy and Information Resource), this is not an abstract debate about legal technicalities. It directly affects:
Consumer Food Prices: What Trinidadian and Tobagonian families pay at the market and supermarket.
National Food Security: Whether we can strengthen domestic agricultural production and reduce our dependence on imported food.
Farmer Livelihoods: Whether small farmers can continue producing food without facing unnecessary increases in input costs.
Agricultural Resilience: Whether Trinidad and Tobago maintains access to diverse, locally adapted seed and the ability of farmers to preserve and reproduce it.
This is not an argument against plant breeding.
It is an argument for balance.
Plant breeders have a legitimate interest in being rewarded for developing new varieties. Farmers have an equally legitimate interest in producing food, saving seed, preserving agricultural biodiversity, and continuing to farm without becoming unnecessarily dependent upon proprietary seed.
When seed and other production costs rise, farmers face pressure to recover those costs through the prices they charge, creating potential upward pressure on consumer food prices.
The danger is that in the pursuit of stronger intellectual-property protection, a country can protect commercial interests while weakening the very agricultural resilience that food security and affordable food require.
This is why Trinidad and Tobago’s move toward the UPOV 1991 framework deserves far more public and consumer scrutiny than it is receiving.
UPOV 1991 Is Not Simply “The Same System With an Update”
This distinction matters.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has explained that the 1991 Act strengthened plant breeders' rights compared with the earlier framework. Among other changes, UPOV 1991 expanded the scope of breeders' exclusive rights and narrowed the space available for certain traditional farmer seed practices.
Most importantly, the treatment of farm-saved seed changed.
Under UPOV 1991, the ability of farmers to reuse harvested seed of a protected variety on their own land is not an automatic right.
Article 15(2) makes it an optional exception. A country may permit farmers to use farm-saved seed within reasonable limits and subject to measures that safeguard the legitimate interests of the breeder.
UPOV itself confirms that farm-saved seed is an optional exception under the 1991 Act.
That single provision should cause every policymaker concerned about food security and food affordability to stop and ask:
If the protection of farm-saved seed depends upon how national legislation exercises an optional exception, what safeguards will Trinidad and Tobago actually give its farmers?
The answer cannot simply be: “Trust the regulations.”
If farmers' rights matter to national food security, those protections should be visible in the legislation itself.
The Legal Reality for Trinidad and Tobago
To have an honest debate, we must be accurate about where Trinidad and Tobago stands legally.
Trinidad and Tobago enacted its Protection of New Plant Varieties Act, 1997 and became a UPOV member under the 1978 framework in 1998.
The current legislative effort seeks to update the domestic framework and bring it into conformity with the UPOV 1991 Act, facilitating Trinidad and Tobago's accession to that Act.
There is an important legal point here.
The UPOV 1978 Act is no longer open to new accessions. Therefore, Trinidad and Tobago cannot simply decide today to become a new UPOV 1978 member.
But that does not mean that UPOV 1991 is the only possible legislative model for protecting plant varieties.
The WTO TRIPS Agreement requires members to provide protection for plant varieties either by patents, by an effective sui generis system, or by a combination of those approaches.
That means the policy question is larger than:
“UPOV 1991 or no plant-variety protection?”
There are other possible legal approaches.
India is a particularly important example.
India Proves There Is Another Way
India is not a member of UPOV.
That does not mean India has abandoned plant-variety protection.
India created its own Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act.
The Indian system protects plant breeders while also expressly recognizing farmers' rights. Under the Indian framework, farmers have statutory rights concerning the saving, use, sowing, resowing, exchange and sale of farm produce, including seed, subject to the law.
That is important because it destroys a false choice:
A country does not have to choose between protecting breeders and protecting farmers.
It can design a system that recognizes both.
India therefore gives Trinidad and Tobago a legitimate policy question:
Why should our legislation move toward a model that gives stronger exclusive rights to breeders without first examining whether a national system could better balance breeders' rights, farmers' rights, biodiversity and food security?
Food Security Is Not Seed-Company Security
A country can have commercial seed options available and still remain vulnerable if farmers become excessively dependent on costly imported or privately controlled seed.
True food security requires reliable and affordable access to diverse seed suitable for local conditions.
What happens when:
foreign seed suppliers raise prices?
international shipping is disrupted?
foreign exchange becomes scarce?
a major supplier experiences a production failure?
a plant disease affects a dominant variety?
climate conditions change?
locally adapted varieties disappear because they are no longer commercially attractive?
farmers lose the practical ability to maintain their own seed stocks?
These are not theoretical questions.
They go to the heart of agricultural resilience.
A farmer-managed seed system provides one form of resilience.
Commercial breeding provides another.
Sound public policy should protect both rather than treating them as competing interests in which one must surrender to the other.
The September 2026 Warning Trinidad and Tobago Should Not Ignore
There is a particularly important development that should be part of the public discussion.
On September 16, 2026, the United Nations Working Group on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas presented its report on the right to seeds to the UN Human Rights Council.
The discussion addressed the relationship between seed laws, farmers' rights, agricultural biodiversity and food security.
The UN Working Group raised concerns about legal regimes that can restrict traditional farmer seed practices and emphasized the importance of protecting farmers' ability to maintain and use seed systems that support food security and biodiversity.
It called attention to the risks of treating seed merely as a proprietary commercial asset and recommended approaches that recognize the rights of peasants and the importance of farmer-managed seed systems.
That matters enormously for Trinidad and Tobago.
Because two days later, on September 18, 2026, Trinidad and Tobago introduced the Protection of New Plant Varieties (Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the Senate.
The Bill seeks to amend Trinidad and Tobago's legislation in order to align it with the 1991 UPOV framework and facilitate accession to that Convention.
The timing does not prove that the Bill is wrong.
But it raises an unavoidable public-interest question:
If an international UN human-rights body is warning governments about the implications of restrictive seed regimes at precisely the moment Trinidad and Tobago is strengthening its plant-variety protection system, why has there not been a serious public examination of those concerns?
Trinidad and Tobago should not simply ignore that discussion.
Our policymakers should explain why the concerns raised internationally do—or do not—apply to our agricultural circumstances.
Colombia Shows Why Consultation Matters
Colombia provides another important lesson.
Colombia's Constitutional Court reviewed legislation approving UPOV 1991 and declared it unconstitutional because Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities had not received the constitutionally required prior consultation.
The decision is important because it demonstrates that plant-variety legislation is not necessarily a narrow technical matter.
Where legislation affects communities whose livelihoods, cultural practices and agricultural systems are connected to seed, consultation can become a constitutional and human-rights issue.
The lesson for Trinidad and Tobago is straightforward:
Farmers and affected communities should not be consulted after the legal framework has already been determined.
They should have a meaningful voice before the system is finalized.
African Countries Raised Similar Concerns
The concern is also not unique to Latin America.
The Organization of African Unity historically raised concerns about plant-variety protection regimes that did not adequately recognize the cultivation practices and interests of African farming communities.
The underlying concern was not opposition to agricultural innovation.
It was that intellectual-property systems designed primarily around commercial breeding could fail to recognize the realities of smallholder agriculture.
That distinction remains important today.
The question should not be:
“Are farmers against innovation?”
It should be:
“Does the innovation system recognize the farmer as a participant, or merely as a customer?”
The Real Issue: Cost, Concentration and Consumer Impact
Consider what could happen if Trinidad and Tobago implements UPOV 1991 without strong farmer safeguards.
1. Production costs
If farmers face greater restrictions or costs associated with the reuse of protected seed, their input expenses can increase.
2. Pressure on food prices
Farmers operate businesses.
When input costs increase, they face pressure to recover those costs through the prices received for their produce.
That can place upward pressure on consumer food prices.
3. Greater dependence on external suppliers
If farmers increasingly depend upon proprietary commercial seed rather than maintaining diverse local seed systems, the agricultural sector may become more exposed to international supply chains, foreign exchange pressures and external pricing decisions.
4. Loss of agricultural diversity
If locally adapted varieties receive less attention than commercially protected varieties, genetic diversity can decline.
That can make agricultural systems less resilient to pests, diseases and climate change.
5. Market concentration
If a small number of companies control important seed varieties, farmers may have fewer practical alternatives.
This is why plant-variety protection should also be examined through the lens of competition policy.
The Government Must Prove the Benefits
If stronger plant-variety protection is justified on the grounds that it will stimulate innovation, attract investment, increase yields, strengthen food security and expand exports, then the Government should demonstrate those benefits with Trinidad and Tobago-specific evidence.
Where is the assessment of:
expected seed-price impacts?
expected farmer-income impacts?
effects on small and medium-sized farmers?
effects on local seed production?
effects on traditional varieties?
effects on agricultural biodiversity?
expected foreign investment?
expected local breeding activity?
expected changes in food production?
expected effects on consumer food prices?
expected contribution to reducing the food-import bill?
These are reasonable questions.
They are not anti-business.
They are not anti-breeder.
They are basic questions of public policy.
What Trinidad and Tobago Must Require
CAIR is not calling for the abolition of plant breeders' rights.
CAIR is calling for consumer-centric and public-interest safeguards before stronger intellectual-property controls are implemented.
Before the amended legislation is fully implemented, Trinidad and Tobago should require:
1. A Consumer and Food-Security Impact Assessment
Government should publish an independent assessment showing how the new framework could affect seed prices, agricultural production costs, local food production and consumer prices.
2. Explicit Protection for Farm-Saved Seed
If Trinidad and Tobago chooses to exercise the Article 15(2) exception, the protection should be clearly established in national law.
Farmers should not have to guess whether they can save and reuse seed.
3. Protection for Traditional and Locally Adapted Varieties
The law should recognize the importance of farmer-maintained varieties and agricultural biodiversity.
4. Competition Safeguards
Government should monitor seed-market concentration and prevent the development of abusive market power over essential agricultural inputs.
5. Meaningful Farmer Consultation
Small farmers, agricultural organizations, cooperatives and consumer representatives should have a genuine opportunity to participate in the development of the regulations and implementation framework.
6. Transparency About Commercial Benefits
If the principal argument for UPOV 1991 is that it will attract investment and stimulate agricultural innovation, Government should publish the evidence and projections supporting that claim.
7. Examination of a Sui Generis Alternative
Parliament should examine whether a Trinidad and Tobago-specific system could provide effective plant-variety protection while giving stronger statutory recognition to farmers' rights, traditional seed systems and national food-security objectives.
This Is About More Than Farmers
Consumers should pay attention.
Every discussion about agricultural inputs eventually becomes a discussion about food.
Seed affects what farmers can plant.
Seed affects production costs.
Production costs affect farm viability.
Farm viability affects domestic food production.
Domestic food production affects import dependence.
And import dependence exposes consumers to international prices, shipping costs, foreign exchange pressures and external supply disruptions.
The seed question therefore eventually becomes a consumer question.
CAIR's Position
Food security and affordable food must come before commercial convenience.
Seeds are not simply another commercial product.
They are the beginning of the food system.
They determine what farmers can plant, what varieties survive, what agricultural knowledge is maintained, what production costs farmers face and, ultimately, what food is available to consumers.
CAIR therefore believes that Trinidad and Tobago should not strengthen plant-variety rights without simultaneously strengthening the protections available to the farmers who produce our food.
The Government should answer a fundamental question:
Will this new framework make Trinidad and Tobago's farmers more secure and our food supply more resilient—or will it make farmers more dependent upon proprietary seed and external suppliers?
That question deserves evidence, not assurances.
The answer should be determined in the public interest—not solely from the perspective of breeders, investors or commercial seed companies.
Protect breeders.
Protect farmers.
Protect agricultural biodiversity.
Protect consumers.
Above all, protect Trinidad and Tobago's food security.
CAIR – Consumer Advocacy and Information Resource
Watch this UN address on the matter:
When Control of Seeds Becomes a Human Rights Issue
Submitted by: C. Patrick
Edited by: CAIR Digital
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