Strengthening
Farmer-Led Seed Systems

At SEARICE, we believe farmers are custodians of biodiversity and key actors in shaping resilient food systems. Through partnerships with local governments, universities, and farmer associations, we support community-based initiatives that safeguard agrobiodiversity and strengthen food sovereignty.

Capacity Building

Farmer Field Schools

SEARICE organizes participatory, season-long training where farmers learn by doing. They conduct hands-on seed selection, breeding, conservation, and storage practices in their own fields.

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Strengthening Local Knowledge

Farmers—especially women and youth—gain confidence in applying scientific and traditional methods to improve seed quality, test resilience, and evaluate yield performance.

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Community Empowerment

FFS graduates often become resource farmers, mentoring others and ensuring that seed conservation skills are sustained and replicated in the community.

Result

More resilient farmer groups, reduced dependence on commercial seed, and the preservation of farmer-led innovations in agriculture.

Crop Improvement

Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)

Farmers co-develop new varieties with breeders, ensuring crop varieties are locally adapted to climate stresses, soil types, and cultural preferences.

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Participatory Variety Selection (PVS)

Communities directly test and select from multiple varieties, allowing farmers’ priorities (taste, yield, pest resistance, cooking quality) to guide decisions.

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Gender and Youth Inclusion

Women and youth are not only participants but leaders in these processes—bridging generational knowledge and ensuring future continuity of seed conservation work.

Impact

Development of farmer-preferred varieties that are climate-resilient, diverse, and rooted in community culture, reducing vulnerability to market or environmental shocks.

Community Seed Banks

SEARICE CONSERVE: A community-based seed research center preserving over 1,100 rice varieties. Farmers and researchers collaborate to maintain, evaluate, and multiply seeds for community use.

Farmer-Led Seed Management: CSBs thrive when managed by farmers themselves. By putting seeds back in the hands of farmers, CSBs ensure that rice varieties remain accessible, relevant, and truly adapted to local agro-ecological conditions. This farmer-led system strengthens self-reliance, protects farmers’ rights, and challenges the dependence on costly corporate seed systems.

Dynamic Conservation: SEARICE promotes CSBs not as static storage facilities, but as living systems where seeds are continuously planted, improved, and shared across communities. This dynamic approach keeps rice diversity alive, nurtures local innovation, and equips farmers with the resilience needed to face climate change and market pressures.
Linkages to Genebanks: CSBs are directly connected with institutional back-up systems, such as the Central Philippines State University (CPSU) genebank and SEARICE-managed safety storage, ensuring long-term preservation and continuity of local diversity.

CSB Model

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Seed Conservation at Farm Level

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Community Seed Bank Management

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Institutional Linkages

Knowledge Sharing

Policy Feedback

Policy Advocacy

National Level –

Seed Law Reform

SEARICE is actively advocating to amend the Seed Industry Development Act (RA 7308), which currently prioritizes the formal seed sector. Through House Bill 3638, SEARICE and partners push for laws that:
- Recognize farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seeds.
- Give equal support to both formal and farmer-managed seed systems.
- Ensure that national agricultural policies include farmers as central actors in seed development.

Local Governance – Legal Recognition of CSBs

SEARICE works with local governments to create ordinances that institutionalize community seed systems. Examples include:
Arakan, North Cotabato: The Sustainable Agriculture Code, which formally recognizes CSBs, protects farmer-bred varieties, bans GMOs, and creates a Farmer’s Trust Fund.
Bilar, Bohol: Establishment of a community seed registry, legitimized by local councils, which affirms farmers as innovators and protects their seeds from misappropriation.

Emerging Issues – Digital Sequence Information (DSI)

SEARICE calls for fair benefit-sharing in the use of genetic data (DSI), warning against the risk of corporations profiting from farmers’ genetic resources without recognition or compensation.

Regional & International Engagement

SEARICE links local farmer voices to regional and global policy spaces:
Participates in international processes such as the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and FAO regional consultations as part of the Philippine Delegation.
As a member of a global network of civil society organizations, SEARICE advocates to ensure that farmers’ perspectives and realities meaningfully shape global policies on agricultural biodiversity.

Challenging Restrictive Intellectual Property (IP) Regimes

SEARICE opposes UPOV-based plant variety protection (PVP) laws, which limit farmers’ rights to use. exchange and sell seeds. Instead, it encourages countries to adopt sui generis PVP systems—flexible, locally adapted legal models that respect seed sovereignty and biodiversity.

Impact

Through these efforts, SEARICE has helped:

Influence legislation and ordinances that embed seed rights into law.
Strengthen farmer-led governance of seeds.
Put farmers’ voices at the center of national and global seed policy debates.

Good Practices to Strengthen and Scale Institutionalization of Community Seed Banks

Institutionalization of community seed banks

Recognition of women as seed custodians in agricultural policies

Legal reform explicitly protecting farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds Integration of agroecology into national climate adaptation strategies

Integration of agroecology into national climate adaptation strategies

Public funding for participatory plant breeding

Seeds are power. Seeds are life.

Through farmer-led innovation, community seed banks, and strong policy advocacy, SEARICE affirms that farmers are custodians of biodiversity and central to food sovereignty.

We call on governments, institutions, and communities to uphold farmers’ rights to seeds and support farmers' seed systems for a sustainable future.

Strengthening
Farmer-Led Seed Systems

Capacity Building

Crop Improvement

Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB)

Participatory Variety Selection (PVS)

Gender and Youth Inclusion

Impact

Community Seed Banks