Demba is a small farmer in Mali who grows different varieties of millet, sorghum, cowpea and peanuts (i.e. plant genetic resources for food and agriculture) on his 0.35hafield.

The varieties he grows originate from exchanging seeds with his family, his neighbours and seeds bought on markets nearby. Demba does not manage tofeed his 9 personsfamily with his production.

Chapter 3 analyses the tensions arising from the multifaceted international seed regime complex, as a necessary preliminary analysis to allow for the evaluation of the present international seed regime conducted in Chapters 4 and 5. Since the dawn of settled agriculture, farmers have developed, conserved and exchanged crop and forage varieties to respond to their needs (Reed, 1977; Pistorius, 1997: xxvii; Smith, 1998). Fowler and Hodgkin explain indeed that:

[w]hen it comes to food security, all countries share something important and fundamental.

(Fowler and Hodgkin, 2004: 144)

The generally open patterns of exchange and use, established by early farmers were continued by public researchers and plant breeders until the middle of the twentieth century (Klose, 1950). This trend perpetuated and amplified a situation that originated in the fifteenth century, where countries all over the world are reliant on PGRFA located within each other’s borders (Palacios, 1997; Khoury et al., 2015). Today, there is not a single country that does not need crops originating from other countries or continents to feed its population. From the second half of last century however, access to PGRFA diversity has become far more difficult. This explains why, for the last three decades, besides the promotion of conservation and sustainable use of seeds, facilitating access to plant genetic resources for food and agriculture has been a priority for FAO and other international organizations.

What are the underlying tensions rendering the international seed manage­ment system so complex? Indeed, these tensions need to be resolved to effectively facilitate access to PGRFA and reach the Treaty’s overall goals of food security and sustainable agriculture. In this chapter, four tensions are described, depicting a global picture around the access problem.

The method used to answer this question follows the same explanatory analy­sis as in Chapter 2. To grasp a thorough understanding of the regime complex, a wide literature review on the PGRFA management was undertaken at the international level - from the mid-twentieth century to nowadays - both from scientific legal and non-legal literature. This reading enabled to grasp a broad understanding of the international PGRFA management system. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, law in books and law in practice being two different things, my concomitant experience as negotiator and observer in Treaty meetings pro­vided other useful knowledge, used as a support tool to clarify the context and understand the law accordingly. The description of the tensions arising from the international seed regime complex between 1950 and 2004 constitute the basis for the evaluation of the current International Treaty regulatory setting, covered in Chapters 4 and 5 of this book.

Below, four major challenges encountered by stakeholders in the exchanges of and access to PGRFA are exposed. These are: the existing tension between public seeds and intellectual property rights; the tension between advancements in biotechnology by mega agrochemical companies and small-scale farmers; the tension between farmers’ seed systems for the exchanges of PGRFA and national or international over-regulation on access to seeds; and the North/South divide.