Seeds of resistance: The fight to preserve Europe’s peasant seeds
- Written by Raluca Besliu and Katharina Wecker
- Illustration by Suryaa Rangarajan
- Edited by Ruby Russell
Before industrialized farming conquered the continent, the crops that fed Europe were adaptable varieties that evolved as peasants freely exchanged seeds, from harvest to sowing, generation after generation. Reviving these seed systems could protect our food supply from future climate shocks – if EU regulations don’t strangle them out completely.
Panagiotis Sainatoudis’ journey began with a chance encounter in his ancestral village. After many years living in Thessaloniki, he was back for a family occasion and visiting a local farmer when something caught his eye: a small cob of corn with black seeds. It looked unlike any he had seen before, and he wondered what other unusual varieties of produce might be growing. When Sainatoudis returned to the city, he brought with him a haul of treasure: corn, beans, watermelon seeds and more.
“I discovered my home village through this connection,” he reflects. But it took him to other villages, too. “In 1995, I started hitchhiking everywhere to collect seeds from local farmers. In five years, I collected 1,200 varieties of plants, mostly from continental Greece, with some from Bulgaria and Turkey as well,” he says.
Hungry rodents and poor storage conditions destroyed Sainatoudis’ first collections. But he persevered and gradually learned the art of preserving seeds. By 1999, he was ready to share them. “I invited a few people to a gathering where we could exchange not just seeds but also stories and music,” he recalls.
Peasant seeds are more than just genetic material. These lineages, reaching back into the past, also represent a potential solution to the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future.
That first meeting laid the foundation for what would become the Peliti Seed Festival, which will mark its 25th anniversary this spring. Each year, hundreds of people from across Greece and beyond gather in the tranquil hills near Drama on Greece’s Macedonian border to share peasant grains and the seeds of local strains of fruit and vegetables.
In doing so, they perpetuate an age-old practice that was once the bedrock of European agriculture. Generation after generation, farmers saved seeds from their best harvests and exchanged them with their neighbors, resulting in myriad strains, each uniquely adapted to local conditions and hardy against pests, diseases and other environmental stressors. But peasant seeds are more than just genetic material. These lineages, reaching back into the past, also represent a potential solution to the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future.
The industrialization of agriculture, as well as strict EU laws that favor uniformity over diversity, mean that most of the food Europeans buy in supermarkets is grown from ever-fewer commercial seeds. And that doesn’t just mean the loss of agricultural heritage and local flavor – as the climate crisis puts farming under increasing pressure, relying on so few genetic strains could also endanger food security.
How seeds became big business
Commercial plant breeding in Europe dates back to the 19th century. It was the post-World War II era, however, that ushered in a new agricultural paradigm, geared toward feeding a growing population. Seed companies focused on breeding varieties that produced higher yields and bigger harvests. Other qualities that had previously been valued, such as resistance, flavor and local suitability, became less important.
Most of the new seeds were hybrid varieties: plant breeders intentionally cross-pollinate two distinct varieties to produce a hybrid containing the best traits, such as larger fruit or greater yield, of each parent. But hybrids also come at high financial and environmental costs.
Breeders can carefully control the traits of hybrid plants. But farmers cannot reproduce them. The offspring of hybrid seeds have different traits from their parents. A farmer could save the seeds of hybrid cocktail tomatoes with a fruity flavor, but the crop grown from them could be bland and mushy. So, farmers must buy the seeds each season, and as the seed market has become dominated by ever-fewer suppliers, they are dependent on a few multinationals with disproportionate control over prices.
The focus on high-yield crops has also led to widespread adoption of monocultures – where vast areas are planted with just one or two crop varieties. The result? A loss of biodiversity in both the crops and the surrounding ecosystems. By drastically reducing the diversity of plant species in a given area, monocultures result in fewer food sources and habitats for various other species, including essential pollinators like bees and butterflies.
Dependence on monocultures can also hit human food supplies. In the short term, monocultures and standardized crops might represent commercial stability – but if a crop fails, it fails on a far bigger scale. The vulnerability of this type of industrialized farming was laid bare in 1970, when a corn blight epidemic destroyed more than 15 percent of the North American harvest. Around 70 percent of the corn planted was of the same variety and susceptible to the disease, allowing it to spread rapidly through the continents’ agricultural land.
As the global climate heats up, not only are crops more likely to be hit by extreme weather conditions, outbreaks of crop diseases are also on the rise, and pests are shifting their geographic range. In this context, depending on a shallow genetic pool for our food security could be disastrous.
Back to the land
It was anxiety over the consequences of a warming world that first drew Irini Simeonidou to the Peliti Seed Festival. A single mother of two, she used to travel all the way from Ioannina in northwestern Greece each year. Now she lives a two-hour drive away in Thessaloniki, where she grows produce on land belonging to the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki – one of 450 plots distributed to locals as part of an initiative to reconnect people with the land. Each participant is given 100-square-meters on the university farm to cultivate without the use of synthetic chemicals.
“I exclusively use Peliti’s traditional seeds for my garden,” Simeonidou says. “My zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants and other seasonal produce come entirely from these seeds. It’s a 100 percent-homegrown supply. I don’t need to buy anything at the supermarket anymore.”
“Peasant seeds were pushed into a niche. Policymakers forgot that farmers have been ensuring biological diversity for thousands of years.”
Simeonidou not only reconnecting with the land, but also with a tradition of farming practices that, for thousands of years, sustained human communities without laying waste to broader ecosystems. Just as “peasant seed systems,” according to a 2023 briefing by the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, refers not just to planting, but an ensemble of “practices, knowledge, innovations, and rules developed by peasant communities to access, produce, disseminate, and manage their seeds.”
This might mean a farmer saving seeds from their best-performing plants each season, but it can also involve exchanging seeds with neighbors – or participating in seed fairs, where people swap different varieties that are adapted to the local environment – in a way that takes seeds to be common property.
From collective commons to regulated market
The shift from treating seeds as a part of nature accessible to everyone, to seeds as commodities, came with the arrival of large-scale, industrial agriculture. Seeds became private property, protected by new “seed laws,” proposed by the EU and adopted into national law by member countries. These regulations created strict intellectual property rules, such as “plant breeders’ rights,” which allow only the breeder to sell a new variety for a number of years.
New laws also regulated how seeds should look, and how they could be certified and marketed. The idea was to create a unified regulatory system to make it easier to buy and sell seeds internationally. But the entire system, geared toward commercial strains, is at odds with peasant seed systems.
Between them, Syngenta, Bayer and Corteva control more than half the global seed market.
Take seed catalogues. National seed catalogs are official lists of seeds approved for sale and use within a country, ensuring they meet standards of quality and uniformity. But these catalogues limit the variety of seeds available. “The [seed] catalogue is only for industrial products, not for living products – they are not compatible,” says Veronique Chable, a scientist at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment.
To be listed in seed catalogues, seeds must be tested and certified by national authorities, a process that takes up to five years. This works for industrial seeds because they remain the same, year after year. But peasant seeds adapt to local conditions – often rapidly. They might not look the same from one year to the next. This is what makes them so resilient. But it also means they don’t stand a chance in standardized testing. As a result, peasant seeds cannot be legally bought or sold in most EU countries.
Advocates for increasing genetic resources to bolster a resilient food supply say that by effectively forbidding trade in peasants seeds in most EU countries, seed laws have strangled the peasant seed system. “Peasant seeds were pushed into a niche. Policymakers forgot that farmers have been ensuring biological diversity for thousands of years,” says Magdalena Prieler, a policy expert at Austrian seed-saver organization Arche Noah.
There are some exceptions. Austria hasn’t fully adopted EU seed directives into national law, meaning Austrian farmers are permitted to buy and sell small quantities of peasant seeds to preserve diversity, Prieler explains. But globally, the trend is toward an ever-more regulated seed market.
Some of Europe’s lost biodiversity is being brought back, reviving indigenous plant species that are better adapted to local conditions than non-native varieties and can play a crucial role in restoring damaged landscapes and stabilizing ecosystems.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), worldwide, over 75 percent of plant genetic diversity has been lost as farmers have moved to an industrialized system relying on high-yield seeds. What remains is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few multinational corporations: between them, Syngenta, Bayer and Corteva control more than half the global seed market.
“European biodiversity is in great distress, as nobody is preserving our indigenous plants, which are the genetic heritage of each state,” says Costel Vînătoru of the Plant Genetic Resource Bank in Buzau, Romania. “Companies only have their own profit in mind. Then, of course, they do not care about preserving the genetic resources of a country.”
Biological investments for an uncertain future
As they stand, however, seed laws don’t affect the freedom of European farmers to exchange seeds for free – meaning gatherings like the Peliti Seed Festival could be vital to the continent’s future food security.
The festival has may have grown since Sainatoudis’ first brought a group of friends together in the hills to cook, sing and enthuse over heritage seeds, but it has kept its informal spirit. Over two days, guests stay in small houses of one or two rooms on the Peliti community site, sometimes sleeping three or four to a room. The spirit of cooperation over commerce extends to meals, which are prepared by a group of volunteers, using produce grown from the community’s own seeds and are offered free of charge. During the day, workshops cover best practices, cultivation and preservation techniques. As evening falls, Greek folk music fills the air. Almost everyone joins in, singing and celebrating in unison.
Open to anyone interested and sharing both seeds and knowledge for free, Peliti has fostered a growing community of small-scale producers and home gardeners who also maintain a year-round seed bank: a living archive of agricultural heritage. “We have a vast network of farmers across Greece who cultivate and supply seeds to Peliti,” Sainatoudis says. And these days, Peliti is just one meeting point in a much bigger movement.
Greece has other seeds festivals – including an annual one in Athens – and there are many more across the EU. Inspired by the Peliti Seed Festival, volunteers have started hosting the annual Independent Free Festival of Seeds and Saplings in Elin Pelin, a town in Central Bulgaria. In the Netherlands, the Reclaim the Seeds fair, which began in Amsterdam in 2012, brings together participants who swap seeds.
Across Europe, seed banks have also rapidly proliferated since 2005. Many are initiated by farmers or private gardeners, but there are also state-run initiatives, like the Plant Genetic Resource Bank in Buzau, Romania, and the German Gene Bank Gatersleben, which has one of the largest collections in the world, with over 150,000 plant samples from 2,912 species. Since 1948, Gatersleben has provided more than 1.1 million samples to farmers and gardeners at home and abroad.
Genetic archeology
Vînătoru oversees Plant Genetic Resource Bank in Buzau, which, in addition to preserving seeds, carries out scientific work that is beyond the capacity of community seed banks: restoring local varieties to their original, indigenous forms.
“Even if you obtain seeds from your grandfather, that does not guarantee they are originally from the area,” Vînătoru explains. “For instance, a tomato from a local village might be claimed to be indigenous, but genetic testing could reveal its origins elsewhere.” Vînătoru calls this work, which requires specialist equipment and expertise, “genetic archaeology” and says it can only be done with state investment.
The new law includes the free exchange of seeds in its definition of “marketing” – subjecting peasant seeds to the same standards as commercial ones, and effectively outlawing festivals like Peliti.
“At the Bank, we document how a variety looks, what its characteristics are,” he says. “We then search in the existing literature everything that we can gather about that variety. Then we start collecting more and more genetic resources. We start cultivating and comparing them, understand which resources are more suitable for what, and then through improvement work, we restore the original characteristics.”
In this way, some of Europe’s lost biodiversity is being brought back, reviving indigenous plant species that are better adapted to local conditions than non-native varieties and can play a crucial role in restoring damaged landscapes and stabilizing ecosystems.
Essential regulation or oppressive bureaucracy?
Containing a vast wealth of genetic material for farmers to draw on if common crops fail, national and community seed banks alike are also an insurance policy against future climate shocks. Yet there is no legal framework on EU level on how to collect, store and save peasant seeds.
Vînătoru believes there is a need for “national and European laws, which will primarily aim at the conservation of biodiversity.” This would require each state to conserve its agricultural biodiversity, “protecting the indigenous varieties, local populations and genetic resources which represent the heritage of each state.” A complementary measure, he says, should legislate to establish seeds banks meeting specific standards on preserving peasant seeds that reflect EU soil and climate conditions.
In Romania, seeds must adhere to standards set by the FAO, which provides guidelines on the temperature and humidity needed to store seeds, keep out pests and monitor their viability. But Vînătoru says these standards are too general and do not address the specific requirements of local seeds in Europe.
In 2023, the European Commission proposed a new regulation with the unwieldy title of “regulation on the production and marketing of plant reproductive material” (plant reproductive material, or PRM, refers to seeds, cuttings, seedlings and young plants used for plant reproduction).
The idea is that a legal framework for peasant seeds would make it easier for people to save and exchange them. But not everyone agrees. In its current form, the law includes the free exchange of seeds in its definition of “marketing” – subjecting peasant seeds to the same standards as commercial ones, and effectively outlawing festivals like Peliti, or even gardeners passing seeds between their neighboring plots.
Just nine plant species currently account for around 66 percent of food produced around the world.
Responding to criticism, the European Parliament has proposed changes to address this, and other shortcomings. “In its revised definition, the Parliament proposes that only the production of seeds intended for commercial exploitation will be classified as marketing,” explains Fulya Batur, an associate fellow at the Geneva Academy who researches peasant seed rights.
“While still open to interpretation, this would allow farmers to explain to their governments that their activities constitute mutual aid and breeding rather than commercial exploitation,” she says. Importantly, the amended bill would also permit the sale of peasant seeds, which remains prohibited in the Commission’s original proposal.
For Sainatoudis’ such wrangling over bureaucratic definitions seems far removed from the seeds his community gathers and shares at Peliti – and intends to keep sharing regardless of what EU institutions say or do. Yet Prieler, the policy expert at Arche Noah in Austria, says the new law could have an impact far further afield. “It’s really important to get this regulation right,” she argues. “EU seed laws are often adopted partly or fully by other countries, mainly to make it easier to do business with EU countries.”
Big Ag vs. biodiversity
Whatever form the law finally takes, it is conceived around seeds as a commercial industry in need of regulation, rather than an aspect of the environment that happens to be entwined with human needs and heritage. And yet big agribusiness is resistant to the law being passed at all.
COPA-COGECA, Europe’s largest farming lobby – representing mostly large-scale farmers and the agri-food industry – responded to the Commission’s proposal by insisting that the exchange of farm-saved seeds must be absolutely prohibited or strictly regulated. Thor Gunnar Kofoed, a representative of COPA-COGECA, says his “biggest concern” is that “some of the old, traditional varieties might not be resistant to various types of fungus. They could kill people.”
Peasant farmers’ movement Via Campesina argues that fast-growing commercial seeds – which require heavy pesticide use and lack nutritional value – are more likely to pose a threat to public health than traditional varieties that have nourished land and people alike for thousands of years. And as far as community seed banks go, most do test their seeds for quality, viability and to make sure they are disease-free – not to mention recording seed origins, local names, and other relevant data to trace seed quality over time.
“The seed market is already so concentrated, there are only a handful of powerful companies. The peasant seed system could co-exist with the industrial system. There is no need to fight it.”
Aristeidis Alestas, a representative from the Sito Seeds Community Seed Bank in Athens, which organizes an annual seed festival that gives out seeds to locals, explains the work that goes into this. “If someone comes to us and tells us they have cultivated this variety for ten years and that they took it from their great-grandparents, we are not going to give it to people right away. We try it for three or four years in one specific area to see how it behaves,” he says, adding, “It’s not a legal commitment, it’s an ethical commitment.”
In any case, under the kind of regulatory framework and standards Vînătoru advocates for, regimes like Sito’s would likely become mandatory. Prieler suspects COPA-COGECA’s real motive for opposing the new regulation is simply to perpetuate a system that’s profitable for its members – why, after all, would they want to open their market up to any new competition? – an impulse she believes is misguided.
“The seed market is already so concentrated, there are only a handful of powerful companies,” she says. “The peasant seed system could co-exist with the industrial system. There is no need to fight it.”
The European Parliament isn’t expected to vote on the law until late 2025, and it is likely to see further revisions before then. But if Europe were to heed warnings from other parts of the world, it should be wary of listening to the demands of agribusiness.
In India, the introduction of high-yield varieties beginning in the mid-20th century during the Green Revolution had a profound impact on biodiversity: only 1 percent of the 200,000 peasant rice varieties that used to feed India remain. And the human impact has been equally devastating. Crushed by crippling debt incurred trying to keep up with rising cost of seeds, fertilisers and other agricultural necessities purchased from private companie, around 4 million farmers committied suicide in India between 1995 and 2018.
Around the world, just nine plant species currently account for around 66 percent of the food produced, according to the FAO, and crop diversity is in continual decline, driven by unsustainable agricultural practices, industrialization and increased urbanization. According to Via Campesina, commercialization poses a severe threat to in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Yet the situation is worst in Europe and North America where “the commercial monopoly of industrial seeds has already done away with the majority of local varieties.”
As bleak as this all sounds, the community at Peliti believe that grassroots education, awareness-building – and the nurturing of every seedling grown beyond the constraints of corporate farming – offer a hopeful vision of the future. “If we say everything is bad or difficult, nothing happens. We have to focus on our dreams and work to achieve them without fear,” Sainatoudis says.
About the authors
Raluca Besliu is a freelance journalist originally from Romania. Her areas of focus include climate, geopolitics, and human rights.
Katharina Wecker is a freelance investigative journalist based in Germany. She reports mainly about the climate crisis and agriculture.
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