Seed saving, a thousand-year-old practice which forms the basis of farming is fast becoming criminalised. A new report released by GRAIN and La Via Campesina on Wednesday shows how agribusiness and governments are moving to stop farmers from saving and exchanging their seeds and how farmers are fighting new seed laws. According to the booklet, free trade agreements, bilateral investment treaties and regional integration initiatives are hardening ‘soft’ forms of ownership rights over seeds. Under corporate pressure, seed laws and plant variety rights in many countries are being revised to adapt to the new demands of the seed and biotechnology industry, limiting what farmers can do with their seeds and the seeds they buy. These laws are being reinforced by other regulations that are supposed to ensure seed quality, such as regulations related to the health of plants or seed certification. Guy Kastler commented for La Via Campesina that, “control over seeds must remain in peasants' hands”. Over centuries, peasant farmers have created the thousands of varieties of crops that are the basis of the world's food supply and diversified diets. Peasant seeds guarantee the food sovereignty of rural communities and urban populations. GRAIN and La Via Campesina therefore stress the need to replace these new laws with regulations that guarantee the rights of peasants to conserve, use, exchange, use and sell their seeds and protect them from biopiracy. The publication also shows how social movements worldwide, especially peasant farmers organisations, have resisted and successfully mobilised to prevent such laws from being passed. In 2014, after four years of mobilisation, Chilean farmers organisations and social movements won an important victory against an attempt to privatise peasant seeds. In Ghana, students and trade unions have joined small-scale farmers organisations in mobilising against a Plant Breeders’ Rights (PVP) Bill, popularly hailed as the ‘Monsanto Law’. GRAIN and La Via Campesina hope their document will help strengthen resistance worldwide. They say that it is important to block the legislative process, because once the laws are passed, resistance becomes harder and more complex. However, according to the report, “the best way to defend seeds – and to defend the practices of using and sharing that keep seeds alive – is to continue to grow them, look after them, and exchange them, in every locality. Keeping farming systems alive is the best way to keep seeds alive.” (ab)