Seeds of Surveillance: The Track and Trace Playbook

QR codes are usually associated with convenience. In the Seed Act 2026, they become something else entirely: extending traceability to what is grown before it enters the supply chain, changing who has control over our food.

The Seed Act 2026 is presented by the Union Government of India as a necessary modernisation measure to curb the circulation of fake or substandard seeds.

The stated aim is the rollout of a new nationwide traceability system that mandates QR codes on all seed packets, compulsory registration for all commercial seed entities and significantly heightened penalties—up to ₹30 lakh (€27,000+ euros) and three years’ imprisonment—for seed fraud.

The government has consistently maintained that the Seed Act 2026 is designed to regulate only the commercial seed trade and will not interfere with the long-standing rights of farmers to save, sow, exchange or share seeds within their communities.

Officials emphasise that these traditional, non-branded and community-based practices remain a vital part of India’s agricultural heritage and are explicitly exempt from the registration and digital traceability requirements imposed on commercial entities.

While the government maintains that the Act will rebuild farmer trust, streamline quality control and strictly protect the traditional rights of farmers to save, share and exchange seeds, critics like the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (an umbrella coalition of 400+ farmers’ unions) view these reforms as a well-worn corporate strategy of enclosure that eradicates seed and food sovereignty.

Critics argue that these government assurances are insufficient and potentially misleading. They contend that by failing to explicitly define and protect community seed systems as a distinct sector, the Act leaves them vulnerable to administrative overreach.

Farmer organisations worry that without clear, ironclad legal safeguards, the pressure to comply with registration and branding requirements—especially for small-scale seed producers who may use simple packaging—will effectively force them to adopt the same burdensome and costly standards as large corporations, gradually pushing decentralised, village-level systems towards extinction.

Even with an informal exemption, the pressure to meet the ‘certified’ market standard could make traditional seed sharing increasingly risky. Critics argue that the rigid requirements for ‘certified, stable and uniform’ seeds will effectively criminalise or marginalise indigenous, locally adapted varieties, creating a dependency loop that forces farmers to rely on high-cost, proprietary inputs from large agribusinesses.

This would, in effect, mirror the pattern of corporate capture and loss of food sovereignty observed in other countries across the world.

From Latin America to Africa

As documented in the 2018 film Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?, which looked at the situation in Latin America, this pattern relies on a predictable sequence of events designed to dismantle the autonomy of peasant farmers.

In Latin America, a number of treaties and agreement over breeders’ rights and intellectual property were enacted to prevent peasant farmers from freely improving, sharing or replanting their traditional seeds. Thousands of seed varieties have since been lost and corporate seeds have increasingly dominated agriculture.

To move farmers away from using native seeds and to get them to plant corporate seeds, seed ‘certification’ rules and laws were brought into being by national governments on behalf of commercial seed giants like Monsanto.

In Costa Rica, the battle to overturn restrictions on seeds was lost with the signing of a free trade agreement with the US, although this flouted the country’s seed biodiversity laws. Seed laws in Brazil created a corporate property regime for seeds which effectively marginalised all indigenous seeds that were locally adapted over generations. This regime tried to stop farmers from using or breeding their own seeds.

It was an attempt to privatise seed. The privatisation of something that is a common heritage. For ten millennia, seeds were treated as a shared, inter-generational heritage, but the 20th century saw the rise of a corporate model that hybridised, patented and modified these seeds to demand monoculture farming and constant chemical inputs.

In Seeds: Common or Corporate Property?, an interviewee claims that if corporate seeds end up in a peasants’ field, the corporation can take the entire crop. It is a way of getting rid of the small farmer as agribusiness corporations strive to take control of the entire global food chain.

This pattern of enclosure is not unique to Latin America; similar struggles have unfolded across Africa, where diverse seed systems have also faced intense pressure from corporate-aligned legislation. In many African nations, regional seed harmonisation protocols (often pushed by international trade agreements) have sought to impose strict commercial standards on farmers.

These regulations frequently mirror the Latin American experiences, aiming to replace indigenous, climate-resilient varieties with a narrow range of patented, uniform seeds. Across the continent, movements like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa have consistently challenged these laws, warning that they facilitate the dispossession of smallholder farmers and undermine the localised seed diversity that is essential for food security.

Corporate control over seeds is also an attack on the survival of communities and their traditions. Seeds are integral to identity because in rural communities people are acutely aware that they are ‘all children of the seed’. Their lives have been tied to planting, harvesting, seeds, soil and the seasons for thousands of years.

By highlighting the fight back against the ‘Monsanto law’ (GM corn) in Guatemala, the film shows how movements are resisting regulations and seed certification laws. As part of the resistance, farmers organised seed exchanges, seed fairs, public markets and seed banks. They sought to ensure that seeds for different altitudes, different soils and different nutritional needs remained available.

In Brazil, the film describes how previous governments supported peasant agriculture and agroecology by developing supply chains with public sector schools and hospitals (Food Acquisition Programme). This secured good prices and brought farmers together. It came about by social movements applying pressure on the government to act.

The federal government also brought native seeds and distributed them to farmers across the country, which was important for combatting the advance of the corporations as many farmers had lost access to native seeds.

However, no matter how well organised small farmers become, they might not be able to win the battle on their own. The struggle has to be taken to cities to raise awareness among consumers about how food is being appropriated by transnational corporations without their consent or knowledge. Without involving consumers, they become an ignorant link which merely serves to perpetuate the chain of corporate control.

Struggle for the seed

This well-tested playbook now appears to be taking hold in India. The Seed Act 2026 introduces a mandatory, digital traceability system that serves as a modern tool for the same exclusion.

The strategy is to impose rigid, scientific standards that indigenous, locally-adapted seeds—which are naturally diverse and unstable—cannot meet, thereby making them effectively illegal or commercially impossible to maintain. By framing this as a necessary move for consumer protection or quality control, states frequently obscure the fact that they are creating a corporate property regime, a cynical tactic that has successfully eroded food sovereignty in Latin America for decades.

The historical evidence suggests that this strategy is designed to create a dependency loop that eventually forces the smallholder out of the market entirely. Once corporate seeds dominate a region, the resulting food chain becomes brittle, with the Food and Agriculture Organization already noting that the global diet has shrunk to rely on a dangerously narrow range of cultivated species.

In the Indian context, the transition to certified seeds is viewed by activists as an attack on the very identity and survival of rural communities. Once these corporate regimes take root, they are used to exert control over the entire food chain, often leaving farmers as mere tenants who must pay royalties for the privilege of working their own land.

The resistance in India is a direct reaction to this well-worn trajectory. The fight for the seed is a fight against the total colonisation of food systems. For those who value autonomy, privacy and the right to exist outside the grip of transnational monopolies, the Indian struggle is a critical front in the global resistance against the corporate enclosure of the planet.

The struggle over India’s Seed Act is not an isolated dispute. It forms part of a much longer history of corporate enclosure, seed monopolisation and farmer resistance. These developments are explored in greater detail in the open-access book India’s Farmers Against the Global Agri-Cartel: Chronicling Resistance to Corporate Enclosures.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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