A community seed bank, and the legal question underneath it
The store room in Kiboga holds forty seven varieties. The interesting part is whether keeping them there is lawful.
The Kiboga community seed bank is a room with shelves, labelled tins and a ledger. It holds forty seven varieties, most of them local, several of which exist nowhere in any formal collection.
The question underneath
Plant variety protection regimes are written for commercial breeders. They are rarely written with a village seed bank in mind, and the drafting often catches it accidentally. Whether an exchange counts as a sale, whether a ledger counts as marketing: these are not obvious.
What we did
Mapped every Ugandan provision touching seed saving, exchange and sale, then wrote the bank a plain language note on what it can do confidently and where it should be careful.
What still needs fixing
The law should say explicitly that farmer managed seed systems are lawful, rather than leaving a community to infer it. That is what the EAC Agroecology Bill would do.
