Bolivia’s resistance to modification and commodification of seeds: challenges in aligning domestic situation with its international position

Based on the concept of vivir bien, Bolivia has developed laws resisting modification and commodification of genetic resources. It has played an important role in international forums in promotion of these ideas and has been contributing to international law-making for farmers’ rights. From the perspective of farmers’ rights to seeds, this article examines Bolivia’s Plant Variety Protection (PVP) legislation and the cultivation of genetically modified soybean, the crop most frequently protected under PVP.
This article argues that, while Bolivia has laws discouraging the modification and commodification of seeds and has been internationally resisting the same in favour of farmers’ rights, domestically the soybean farmers cannot exercise their minimally recognized rights of saving seeds under the PVP law.
This article shows that mere exception to save seeds is not adequate to retain farmers’ ownership over the seeds, particularly in industrial farming. Therefore, the seed suppliers can exercise more rights than granted by law, ultimately securing the repeated purchase of seeds even from the smallholders. Besides, this article shows how the agro-industrial sector has influenced the government and has successfully accommodated their interest in the broader political objectives of food sovereignty and farmers’ rights. This article ultimately proposes that enabling smallholders soybean farmers to exercise their legally recognized right to save and repeatedly use their own seeds could be one of the means to protect them from the agricultural exclusion currently happening in the soybean sector in Bolivia.