Farmers’ Rights formally appeared in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) as a means of recognising the past, present, and future contributions of farmers in conserving, improving, and making available the plant genetic materials that are important for food and agriculture. Discussions have been underway under the auspices of the ITPGRFA’s Governing Body with the recent Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights (AHTEG-FR) collecting together views, experiences, and best practices to produce an inventory and options for encouraging, guiding, and promoting the realisation of Farmers’ Rights. While this is useful, this article reports on the outcomes of a workshop that applied a different methodology. Our purpose was to identify what could be and should be the substance of Farmers’ Rights so that the policy substance drives the implementation rather than the AHTEG-FR’s retro-fitting Farmers’ Rights to existing views, best practices, and measures. The contribution of this article is to develop and set out a list of possible substantive Farmers’ Rights as a contribution and foundation for further consultations and negotiations.

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The concept of food sovereignty is regularly conceived as one side of a binary. Thus, scholars frequently juxtapose food sovereignty-as embodied in small-scale, customary, or peasant agriculture-against large-scale, industrial, and global modes of food production. The logic of this dichotomy suggests that the realization of food sovereignty is incompatible with the recognition of intellectual property for plants and seeds. In contrast, we argue that food sovereignty and intellectual property are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts. Instead, food sovereignty activists and lawmakers alike are reimagining intellectual property to move beyond a focus on exclusive ownership, thus deploying it in novel ways.Our argument draws on extensive fieldwork, based on which we relate the experiences of two case study countries, namely Ecuador and Nepal. We describe how these countries recently embedded rights related to food sovereignty in reformed constitutional frameworks. We also evaluate how these novel constitutional food sovereignty rights shaped the making of other national laws in Ecuador and Nepal, including frameworks whose purpose is to protect plant varieties as intellectual property. Throughout the article, we demonstrate that countries can both promote food sovereignty and protect plant varieties as intellectual property. One way that governments can achieve this goal is to ensure that all relevant laws and policies-including those which relate to ---

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