Tanzanian small-scale farmers’ organizations and civil society groups are raising concerns over the proposed East African Community (EAC) Seed and Plant Varieties Bill of 2025, warning that the legislation could marginalize farmer-managed seed systems unless specific protections and exemptions are introduced.
In a submission to public hearings on the proposed bill, the Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima (MVIWATA) called for the legislation to explicitly recognize and protect farmer-managed seed systems (FMSS), arguing that the current draft is largely designed around commercial and certified seed systems.
MVIWATA, established in 1993, which has more than 500,000 smallholder farmer members across Tanzania, has previously participated in discussions on seed legislation and harmonization at both national and regional levels, including the earlier draft EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill of 2018.
The organization says the 2025 draft is an improvement over the 2018 version, but argues that gaps remain, particularly regarding the recognition of farmer-managed seed systems and the rights of farmers to save, use, exchange, share, and sell their own seed.
According to MVIWATA, the draft bill is primarily oriented towards commercial seed, with requirements such as registration, certification, variety release, and quality assurance. The organization warns that applying these requirements broadly could inadvertently place farmer-managed seed systems under the same regulatory framework as commercial seed.
MVIWATA says this is particularly problematic because farmer-managed seed systems are a major source of seed for farmers in Tanzania and across East Africa.
The organization maintains that farmer seed systems should instead be explicitly excluded from commercial seed regulations, including formal registration, certification, variety release, and other requirements designed for commercial seed. It proposes the development of alternative, farmer-centered, and community-led mechanisms at the national level.
Sabrina Masinjila, senior program officer at the Society for International Development (SID), told BreakThrough News the concerns raised by MVIWATA were driven by the continued lack of policy recognition of farmer-managed seed systems at both national and regional levels.
She said the concern was also heightened by the possibility that legislation regulating commercial seed systems could contain provisions that inadvertently affect farmers’ traditional practices, including the sale and exchange of seed.
“The aim for seeking changes was to ensure that farmer seed and systems are exempted from any regulation including registration, certification and variety release that apply to commercial seed,” Masinjila said.
But she stressed that simply exempting farmer seed from regulation would not be enough.
“Exemptions are not sufficient as farmer seed systems still need enough support for their continued development, maintenance, conservation and protection,” she said.
According to Masinjila, the push is therefore for the bill to go beyond exemptions and create policy space for an alternative framework that can support farmer seed systems.
“We sought to establish not just clauses that exempt small-scale farmers from the Bill but also clauses that will start to provide opportunities to develop an alternative framework for farmer seed systems which will ensure they are conserved, maintained, protected and even supported for multiplication and distribution,” she said.
Such a framework, she argued, would have wider implications for agroecology, agricultural biodiversity, climate resilience, dietary diversity and nutrition.
MVIWATA makes a similar argument in its submission, saying farmer-managed seed systems play an important role in food security, nutrition, biodiversity conservation, and farmers’ livelihoods. The organization says recognition should not mean forcing farmer seed into the same regulatory system as commercial seed, but should acknowledge the contribution of farmers to the conservation and development of genetic resources.
The debate is also closely linked to farmers’ rights under international agreements. MVIWATA points to the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), particularly Article 9, which addresses Farmers’ Rights. Its submission also cites the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), including provisions relating to farmers’ rights to seed.
MVIWATA argues that the EAC Bill should therefore be aligned with these commitments and explicitly recognize farmers’ rights to save, use, reuse, conserve, multiply, develop, exchange, share, and sell farmer-managed seed.
The organization has proposed that the bill state explicitly that it applies to commercial seed systems and does not prohibit or restrict the saving, use, exchange, sharing, or reuse of farmer seed and non-commercial varieties.
Masinjila said the protection of farmers’ rights was inseparable from the wider discussion around seed regulation.
Adding that clauses should be included to protect farmers’ rights as recognized under the ITPGRFA and UNDROP, where access to and control over seed is connected to broader human rights.
“Without these changes, small-scale farmers and their seed system will continue to be neglected, marginalized and criminalized. And this is why we needed to intervene,” she said.
The current debate is not entirely new. MVIWATA says it was strongly involved in discussions around the 2018 draft EAC Seed and Plant Varieties Bill, raising concerns about several provisions. The organization says its review of the 2025 version found improvements compared with the earlier draft.
Masinjila said one difference is that the previous bill contained provisions that were compliant with the 1991 Act of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), a plant variety protection regime that civil society and farmer organizations have criticized for being restrictive of farmers’ rights.
“The previous bill contained clauses that were compliant to UPOV 1991. A restrictive Plant Variety Protection regime which has been rejected by CSOs and farmer organizations globally as it undermines farmers rights,” she said.
However, she said concerns around regional harmonization remain under the current EAC Bill, particularly because legislation at EAC level is legally binding on partner states.
MVIWATA also warns that a binding regional framework could reduce the ability of individual countries to develop alternative approaches for farmer seed systems.
The organization is calling for the explicit recognition of farmer-managed seed systems, it has also proposed that farmer varieties should not be subjected to mandatory commercial registration or certification, while alternative mechanisms should be developed in consultation with smallholder farmers, pastoralists, and farming communities.
On seed marketing, MVIWATA wants the bill to make clear that farmers can sell and exchange farmer varieties at the national level and facilitate limited cross-border seed exchange among farmers within the EAC.
The organization is also seeking safeguards against the appropriation of farmers’ genetic resources, including requirements for the disclosure of origin, as well as free, prior, and informed consent from communities. Lastly, they want benefit-sharing agreements where genetic resources are acquired from farming communities.
The enlargement of BRICS presents Africa with a wider field of economic possibilities by bringing the continent into closer relationship with some of the world’s largest markets, important sources of development finance and countries possessing substantial capabilities in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and advanced technologies. At a time when international economic relations are becoming increasingly fragmented, this wider range of relationships gives African countries greater room for maneuver.
But a wider choice of trading partners, financiers, and technological partners will mean considerably less if Africa continues to export raw materials, import sophisticated technologies, and occupy the lower reaches of global value chains, because the destination of our commodities may become more diversified without fundamentally altering our position in the international division of labor. It is not the direction of extraction that has ever been the problem, but its structure.
This should therefore be the central African question about BRICS as it enters its third decade: how do we use this changing configuration of economic relationships to build productive power on the continent? The measure of Africa’s engagement with BRICS cannot simply be the increase in trade, investment or infrastructure finance, but must increasingly be whether these relationships enable African economies to convert their minerals, energy resources, labor, knowledge and expanding continental market into greater productive, technological and institutional capability.
Africa’s experience gives this question particular historical significance. The continent has been deeply integrated into the world economy for centuries, but largely through an economic structure in which minerals and agricultural commodities traveled enormous distances while much of the processing, manufacturing, technology, and financial value associated with them accumulated elsewhere. That structure remains recognizable in economies that export crude oil while importing refined petroleum products, export mineral ores while importing machinery and manufactured components and export agricultural commodities while importing processed goods derived from the same productive base.
The post-colonial challenge has therefore never been to trade more but to build the productive capabilities that allow African economies to retain more value from what they produce. Yet this has become more difficult as several economies have experienced premature deindustrialization before manufacturing reached the scale needed to absorb large numbers of workers and sustain productivity growth. Domestic firms are frequently small, supplier networks remain shallow, and the relationship between universities, technical institutions and industry is often weak. Infrastructure still too often reflects the historical logic of moving commodities from sites of extraction to ports rather than connecting African centers of production.
The African Continental Free Trade Area creates the possibility of changing the scale at which we approach some of these problems. A continental market can support forms of industrial specialization that smaller national markets cannot, but the agreement will acquire its full developmental significance only when African firms possess the productive capacity to supply that market. Lowering tariffs creates trade opportunities; it does not by itself produce the firms, electricity, logistics, finance, skills and technical standards required to take advantage of those opportunities.
The emergence of BRICS creates new possibilities within this African project, but it does not guarantee the outcome. Consider the minerals required for the global energy transition. African countries possess significant deposits of manganese, platinum-group metals, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals required for batteries, electric mobility, renewable-energy systems and the wider low-carbon economy. Several BRICS economies already represent substantial sources of demand for these minerals, and their industrial and technological ambitions are likely to further increase that demand. The question is whether it can be structured to support African processing, refining and manufacturing rather than simply accelerating the export of unprocessed ore. For South Africa, this means asking whether its mineral endowments, established industrial base, scientific institutions and engineering capabilities can support new activities in batteries, fuel cells, electric mobility, and renewable-energy equipment. Elsewhere on the continent, mineral extraction can be progressively connected to refining, processing, component manufacturing, engineering services, and technical skills.
Regional integration consequently must become as much an industrial project as a trade project. A viable African battery value chain need not be reproduced inside the borders of a single country. Minerals extracted in one economy can be processed in another, components can be manufactured where industrial capabilities already exist, with assembly occurring close to sufficiently large markets. The strategic objective should be to connect these capabilities across the continent so that regional integration progressively expands the number of African firms, workers, and economies participating in higher-value activities. Regional institutions have recognized this opening. Both SADC and SACU have recently developed strategies to leverage their members’ critical mineral endowments for industrial development rather than raw export, embedding the beneficiation agenda within regional frameworks rather than leaving it to individual countries to negotiate alone. The question for BRICS partners is whether their infrastructure finance can connect regional production rather than reinforcing the extractive economic geography that routes everything to ports.
The experience of Indonesia is instructive in this respect. By restricting the export of unprocessed nickel ore, Indonesia used its resource endowment as an instrument of industrial policy, compelling downstream investment in domestic refining and processing and generating a measurable expansion of manufacturing activity around the minerals sector. The conditions in Indonesia differ from those across African mineral-producing economies, and no single approach transfers without adaptation, but the underlying logic, that a country with significant mineral endowments can use its position in global supply chains to anchor productive capability rather than to service demand, is directly relevant to the African debate. SADC and SACU frameworks enable the collective pursuit of that logic rather than individually, which considerably strengthens the negotiating position of member states.
BRICS cooperation can be brought directly into this developmental space. Its members collectively possess capabilities that African economies require industrial finance, advanced manufacturing, energy technologies, digital systems, agricultural technologies, pharmaceuticals, logistics expertise and large consumer markets. The strategic African objective should therefore be to use these relationships to close specific productive gaps, rather than to approach BRICS principally as another destination for commodities. The test of each partnership is whether it leaves firms stronger, engineers more capable, supplier networks deeper, and regulatory institutions better equipped than before.
This requires developmental statecraft, understood not as a rhetorical commitment to the state’s role in development but as the organized capacity of public institutions to identify productive opportunities, direct finance towards them, negotiate technology partnerships on terms that leave capabilities behind, coordinate the different policy instruments that productive transformation requires, and sustain that effort through the inevitable difficulties of implementation. State capability, in this sense, is the operational form of sovereignty in practice. A government may possess all the formal attributes of sovereign authority whilst systematically lacking the institutional capacity to negotiate effectively with international capital, enforce agreements, direct finance towards developmental ends or build the regulatory knowledge that separates a beneficial technology partnership from another form of dependency.
The infrastructure and technology challenges illustrate the practical implications. Much of Africa’s transport network still reflects an extractive economic geography. The next generation of infrastructure must connect African economies and link transport corridors to processing facilities, industrial parks, energy systems, universities, cities, and regional markets rather than simply moving commodities more efficiently to ports. When an African country acquires sophisticated technology, the relevant question is what remains after the transaction: whether our engineers understand it, whether our universities can teach and improve it, whether domestic firms can enter its supply chains and whether we can progressively adapt it to local circumstances. The developmental value of technology partnerships lies ultimately in the capabilities they leave behind, and state capability is what determines whether those conditions are written into agreements and enforced when partners resist them.
Finance is an equally pressing matter in the African context. Large infrastructure projects can attract BRICS capital, but smaller domestic manufacturers and regional suppliers frequently lack the patient finance required to expand production, meet technical standards, and enter value chains. BRICS financing mechanisms, including the New Development Bank, could make a particularly consequential African contribution by complementing large infrastructure investment with financing for productive enterprises, supplier networks, and industrial projects.
For Africa, these possibilities will not materialize automatically. The continent possesses many of the minerals upon which emerging industries will depend, the youngest population of any continent, enormous renewable-energy potential and a continental market whose importance will grow considerably during this century. But history provides ample evidence that endowments do not, by themselves, produce development, and the responsibilities that follow from this understanding fall primarily on African states rather than on any external partner. BRICS cannot perform these functions on Africa’s behalf, nor should it. What it can do is enlarge the range of instruments available to countries pursuing productive transformation.
Africa, therefore, confronts BRICS with both an opportunity and a test: the opportunity is a wider range of markets, finance, technologies, industrial partners, and development experiences, while the test is whether the continent uses this greater room for maneuver to change its productive structure or merely to diversify the destinations to which its commodities are exported. BRICS can enlarge Africa’s field of possibilities, but it cannot determine what Africa builds within it. The changing international order can give Africa greater room to act, while productive power will determine what we can do with that room.
Busani Ngcaweni is Director of the Centre for Public Policy and African Studies at the Johannesburg Business School, University of Johannesburg.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
After a 43-day nationwide strike, nurses in Kenya returned to work on Thursday, September 10. Their union finally secured an agreement from the government on September 9, a day after thousands of nurses and midwives from all of Kenya’s 47 counties converged at the Greenpark in the national capital, Nairobi.
From there, they marched to Delta House, headquarters of the Council of Governors (CoG), demanding the implementation of an agreement the government signed nearly a decade ago.
The nearly five-month-long strike in 2017 had ended with both the national and county governments signing a return-to-work agreement, committing to finalize the draft of the agreed Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and implement it within a month.
It was to incorporate measures to address the nurses’ grievances, including, among other things, increases in nursing service allowance, uniform allowance, and risk allowance. The increases were to be staggered annually and completed by 2021.
The nurses returned to work after this agreement. However, almost nine years later, the commitments contained in the return-to-work agreement remain unfulfilled, while the CBA it was meant to underpin has never been concluded.
The government refused to increase the risk allowance even when the COVID pandemic was declared in early 2020, by the end of which it had claimed the lives of scores of nurses in Kenya. Those who survived infections in the line of duty had to spend long periods isolated from their families, estranged from their young children and suffering enormous anxiety and stress. But the increased risk allowance promised to them in 2017 remains unfulfilled, even in 2026.
On July 29, nurses downed tools in protest. The strike has since paralyzed health services countrywide. Nonetheless, even as the strike entered its second month, the county governments did not budge. On August 31, the CoG Chairperson Ahmed Abdullahi deemed the 2017 CBA financially unviable.
He dismissed the CBA as one “signed under duress in the run-up to elections in 2017” and “never been implemented,” even as reports raised alarm about rising maternal, neonatal, and perinatal deaths across the country.
“No gun was pointed at the heads of all the signatories of our return to work agreement in 2017,” retorted KNUNM Deputy Secretary General Maurice Opetu, refuting the claim of duress. “It was signed in a very harmonious meeting out of understanding” by both the “levels of government” – the national and counties.
It is the county governors who “have made the nurses work under duress without the CBA. And then working under duress pushed us to call a strike after trying all [these] years to resolve the matter,” he insisted.
The nurses’ struggle for this CBA had begun alongside similar struggles by doctors and clinical officers. The government signed and implemented CBAs for doctors and clinical officers, but refused to do the same for nurses.
“They are saying doctors are few, and clinical officers are few, but we are many, so they do not have that budget,” explained Collin Ajwang, President of the National Nurses Association of Kenya (NNAK).
“This doesn’t make sense because our large number is exactly what has helped hospitals run effectively. We have reduced maternal mortality; we are the ones making sure theatres are running; we cannot be few. We are at dispensaries where there are no doctors. Let them tell us how few they want us to be so that they can pay us this money.”
On the 33rd day of the nurses’ strike, the aviation workers downed tools on August 30. Flights were delayed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, while operations ground to a halt in at least three other airports. Within two days, the government signed an agreement with the aviation workers’ union, the Daily Nation reported, highlighting the contrast in the government’s handling of the two strike actions.
The “airport is a portal and exit of all serious businesses,” not only from Kenya but from East Africa and the continent as a whole, remarked the KNUNM Secretary General, Seth Panyako. “These people who are in charge of making decisions do business through the airport.” So, the government, he said, cannot afford the airports to “stop even for a minute
This business class can afford to “go to private hospitals. There is an alternative for them.” But national and county governments “really don’t care about the common” masses relying on public hospitals for healthcare, and are suffering as a result of the government’s refusal to fulfill the commitments made in the agreement it had signed, he argued.
A week later, on September 7, doctors gave the government a seven-day ultimatum, warning that they would also go on strike if it did not resolve the dispute with nurses. “Doctors cannot work without nurses. Doctors are now overburdened. We cannot continue like this,” said Davji Atellah, Secretary-General of the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists Dentists Union (KMPDU).
“In the ICU (Intensive Care Unit), in the wards, in the HDU (High Dependency Unit), only the nurses can offer that type of care,” he explained, insisting that “nursing care is very essential in healthcare.”
A day after the doctors’ warning, nurses marched on the CoG in Nairobi. Union leaders remained camped at the CoG’s headquarters.
Following a day-long closed-door meeting, the government and the union leaders signed a return-to-work agreement on September 9, with the CoG committing to pay Ksh5,000 in uniform allowance and increase the risk allowance from Ksh3,850 to Ksh8,000. The CoG also agreed to implement the pending CBA within 45 days.
“We have finally called off the 43-day strike following a breakthrough in negotiations with the Council of Governors,” Panyako announced. “We therefore call upon all our members to resume duty within the next 25 hours as we give room for the implementation of the agreements reached.”
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