Dear partners and allies,

Warm greetings of solidarity.

We invite you to sign on to this collective call to remove provisions aligned with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) 1991 from the ongoing EU–Philippines Free Trade Agreement (EU–PH FTA) negotiations.

Across the Philippines, farmers sustain agriculture through seed saving, exchange, and farmer-led breeding- practices that uphold livelihoods, biodiversity, and climate resilience. Filipino farmers have conserved tens of thousands of local, indigenous, and traditional crop varieties and continue to develop climate-adaptive seeds rooted in local knowledge systems and community context.

UPOV 1991 threatens these systems by redefining seeds as private property, restricting and even criminalizing farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and replant seeds, and opening the door to corporate control, biopiracy, and genetic erosion. This undermines seed sovereignty, weakens food security, and contradicts internationally recognized farmers’ rights.

The urgency of this call is heightened as the next round of EU–PH FTA negotiations—where the Intellectual Property chapter, including UPOV provisions, will be discussed—is set to commence in the third week of May.

As an immediate response, MASIPAG has already submitted urgent appeals to the Department of Trade and Industry, whos the main negotiating body from the Philippines,  calling for transparency  and to Senators Loren Legarda and Francis “Kiko” Pangilinan for Senate intervention.

We now call on the European Union and the Philippine government to remove UPOV provisions from the EU–PH FTA and uphold the rights of Filipino farmers to their seeds, knowledge, and livelihoods.

Following this, the consolidated sign-on statement will be formally forwarded to all concerned legislative and government bodies in the coming weeks to demand accountability, transparency, and the outright removal of UPOV provisions from the EU–PH FTA.  

We invite you to stand with our farmers. Sign on to the statement by clicking this link:  tinyurl.com/SeedsNatin


For the farmers,

Eliseo Ruzol Jr.

MASIPAG / SGRN