Alike Harlan’s vision, it is important to understand the relational character of agricultural evolution, defined as ‘the activities of man that have shaped the evolution of crops and [...] the influences of crops in shaping the evolution of human societies’ (Harlan, 1975: 3).

Alongside the evolution of agricultural crops, regulatory developments through history around the exchange of seeds bring an important insight in the way stakeholders and institutions have managed these exchanges.

To answer these questions, a descriptive research method is used to ‘system­atically analyze a legal phenomenon in all its components to present it in an accurate, significant and neatly arranged way’ (Kestemont, 2015: 5). This sys­tematic analysis leads to divide this chapter into six sections. Section 1 briefly describes the birth of agriculture. Section 2 focuses on the loss of biological diversity and traces back to early collection missions and ex situ conserva­tion programmes. Section 3 moves on to the modern biotechnology era and explains how these technological advancements and their correlated opening up of IPRs regulations led to the increase of the economic value of genetic resources and to the further commodification of PGRFA. Section 4 explains how the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources has failed to keep PGRFA in the public domain, while section 5 relates to the rise of states’ sovereign rights over genetic resources and its concretization through the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol. Finally, section 6

History of the seed regulatory setting 25 expands on the reinforcement of seed appropriation through the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) 1991 and the 1994 Trade-related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS Agreement) of the World Trade Organization. Each section of this chapter ends with a concise ‘history box’ highlighting the important events that took place over that period of time.