Press Release: From Italy - Declaration on the Rights of Peasant Seeds, Dichiarazione sui Diritti delle Sementi Contadine
Italy, spiral planting of peasant seeds
May 12, 2026
Contact: Mari Margil, Executive Director, mmargil@centerforenvironmentalrights.org
Today, in Rome, Climavore released the Declaration on the Rights of Peasant Seeds, Dichiarazione sui Diritti delle Sementi Contadine.
The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER) has been partnering for several years with Climavore on protecting the rights of seeds in Italy. This includes developing the Declaration, which calls for the recognition of legal rights of peasant seeds – seeds cultivated, shared, saved, and protected by small farmers.
In 2025, with Climavore’s team, CDER visited with farmers in Italy, to discuss protecting peasant seeds and how existing laws favor the corporatization and privatization of seeds, rather than their protection.
Building on the Rights of Nature protections adopted in different communities and countries around the world, the Declaration calls for peasant seeds to have the right to be free from monopolies, patents, intellectual property regimes, and genetic engineering, as well as rights to evolve, regenerate, and evolve.
The Declaration explains that “peasant seeds” are “cultivated, selected, preserved, exchanged, and transmitted across generations by rural and local communities, outside industrial, manipulated, or proprietary systems.”
CDER assisted Climavore on the development of the Declaration on the Rights of Peasant Seeds / Sementi Contadine as major a step toward advancing legal changes necessary to protect the rights of peasant seeds and the rights of smallholder farmers to protect, cultivate, share, and save seeds.
To read the full Declaration and sign on in support, go to this link.
The founders of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights developed the first rights of nature laws in the world, including Ecuador’s Constitution, the first in the world to recognize the constitutional rights of nature. CDER partners with and assists communities, Indigenous peoples, Tribal Nations, and other governments around the globe to advance the rights of nature and democratic rights.
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