The Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) is about to do something so spectacularly tone-deaf that even by Lebanese government standards, it’s impressive. While the country struggles with inflation, continuous Israeli aggression and its aftermath, and the usual infrastructural crises, someone decided this might be the perfect moment to add food insecurity to the list.
Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture is pushing a new seed law that would essentially make it illegal for farmers to sell produce grown from their own saved seeds. Read that again. Farmers who have been saving, exchanging, and replanting seeds for generations—a practice as old as agriculture itself—could become criminals.
The proposed seed law would force farmers to use only pre-approved “registered” seeds, which conveniently happen to be expensive, imported, genetically-modified (GMO) hybrid varieties sold by multinational corporations. These seeds come with a package deal: they need more water (great for a country facing water scarcity), more chemical pesticides (fantastic for the environment), and they can’t be saved and replanted (perfect for keeping farmers dependent and broke).
Oh, and if farmers dare to save, exchange, or resell seeds from traditional heirloom varieties? That becomes a criminal offense. Subject to fines, confiscation, and jail-time. It’s no joke. Restrictive seed laws have already been enforced against smallholder farmers in Kenya, Sri Lanka, Dominican Republic, and other vulnerable countries where large agribusinesses have coaxed governments to enact seed laws that give them a market monopoly.
The next few weeks will determine if Lebanon’s food sovereignty is usurped by the proposed seed law, or whether the farmer movements and civil society groups that are fighting against foreign corporate influence might actually save Lebanon’s agricultural future.
The UPOV trap: When “modernization” means colonization
The new seed law proposes to align Lebanon with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). The words “protection” and “union” make it sound innocent, right? That’s the point. Buried in this bureaucratic acronym is a system that allows companies to patent and claim ownership over plant varieties that have existed for thousands of years.
Using technical and complex legal processes, our heirloom seeds, which Lebanese farmers have cultivated locally can suddenly be “discovered” by a corporation, modified slightly to ensure that it doesn’t sprout with new seeds, then patented, and then resold to the farmer—making it illegal to sell any other natural variety. That genetically modified seed would be owned by an agricultural conglomerate like Bayer or Corteva, who together hold over 80 percent of all genetically engineered crop patents globally. This is what is called biopiracy. In the language of trade agreements, it is called “modernization”, complete with legal verbiage.
UPOV isn’t protecting historic agricultural practices such as seed breeding, saving, sharing seeds; instead, it labels these fundamental trades as criminal acts. Governments are told that using and enforcing GMO seeds will improve yields, attract investment, and open trade routes to foreign countries. What it really is, ultimately, is a war on food independence.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Eid
The foreign agencies running the show
Who’s behind this manipulative legislative masterpiece, you may ask? Why, a lovely coalition of foreign agencies that have provided recommendations to the Ministry of Agriculture for about a decade.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the Italian-funded International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies of Bari (CIHEAM Bari), and International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) have all had their fingers in Lebanon’s new seed law. They conducted studies, they drafted technical legislation, and they want to oversee Lebanon’s management of plant genetics.
This isn’t new. The initial seed law draft traces back to 2022, first introduced by the previous Minister of Agriculture Ayoub Hmayed’s “Seeds of Lebanon” project, funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) and implemented by CIHEAM Bari. At the time, Hmayed defended the technical draft as the work of an unnamed “expert,” a convenient shield against accountability. Local environmental groups made a fuss, and the ministry shelved the proposal, until it was quietly reintroduced again this past November.
Photo courtesy of The Seed Exchange
The ministry’s excuse: “Chill, it’s just a draft”
After agricultural groups and civil society organizations caught wind of the law being proposed for a ministerial vote, they raised hell about food sovereignty in the media, and complained about being shut out of the process. They shamed the MoA into holding a meeting with them in December, led by representatives of small farmer unions, the Lebanese Human Rights Commission, and Agrimovement Lebanon (the latter being responsible for all the noise launched by the Campaign on the Seed Act).
You might be wondering, how did Agriculture Minister Nizar Hani respond? Well, as you would expect any professional bureaucrat to.
He started by emphasizing the importance of open dialogue. This was probably to counter what Sara Salloum, president of Agrimovement Lebanon, had said in an interview with Al Akhbar, “We requested a meeting. He did not welcome us; we barely spoke to his assistant.”
Secondly, according to the MoA’s press release, “Minister Hani emphasized that the draft law under discussion was not final, stressing the Ministry’s openness to all opinions and its commitment to addressing concerns and clarifying any ambiguities, particularly regarding the protection of traditional seeds, which constitute a national heritage and a fundamental pillar of food security.”
Thirdly, he invited the activists to join the ministry’s “technical committees” where they could share their grievances and studies, and participate in the drafting of the seed law so that it would protect natural seeds and ensure the law’s contribution to “sustainable agricultural development”.
However, the following week, MoA began announcing plans for a first Agriculture Investors’ Conference scheduled for May 2026—which was advertised as bringing together international investors with stronghold local exporters, effectively steamrolling over small farmers again.
Hani said on the sidelines of a kickoff meeting: “We started with around 17 proposed investment ideas and worked on them as an initial investment plan. Today, we are refining that list down to six or seven concrete projects that can be presented to investors interested in agriculture in Lebanon.” This sends a clear message that his priorities are to court foreign investment and marginalize civil society demands instead.
Why would the government do this to Lebanese farmers?
In a long-read published by Megaphone of how the Lebanese government has always romanticized agricultural potential yet failed to deliver real reform policies, Zeead Yaghi recounts that among the (many) reasons for mismanagement are a lack of trust in financing small farmers, and the claims that Lebanon is too small a country to scale-up for export.
Consider though, that the Netherlands, with its roughly 34,000 square kilometers, produces nearly as much food for export as the entire United States. They achieved this through organizing their small farmers, funding their local technology, and enacting policies that protected their sector. As you can imagine, GMO seeds for human consumption are strictly prevented in the Netherlands, mainly thanks to public and environmental pressure.
Lebanon has a better climate, richer soil, and more diverse growing conditions than the Netherlands.
But the status quo of governance failure allows companies to use Lebanon as a profitable production base—land is cheap, labor is exploited, and irrigation water is underpriced or even provided for free. Combine this with the economic benefit of selling at higher prices in “developed” countries, and the threads of corruption and extraction start to show.
Photo courtesy of Michelle Eid
The real costs: sovereignty, nutrition, environment
It’s sad to say, but Lebanon has imported 80 percent of its food and 80 percent of its seeds for years—and many seeds are already in fact genetically-modified. Worse still, approximately 1.2 million people in Lebanon are struggling for food security and rely on foreign assistance to eat, according to a UN World Food Programme published in 2024. In this context, does the government want to make people already in poverty even more dependent on imports?
The implications of the seed law ripple across three critical areas:
Food Sovereignty: This law would systematically dismantle our farmers’ self-sufficiency, making it illegal for them to sell indigenous varieties, and the market completely dependent on foreign GMO seeds for our produce.
Nutrition: There’s substantial evidence for the nutritional value of biodiversity in non-GMO seeds. Hybrid and GMO seeds are bred for uniformity, shelf life, and maximizing harvests—not nutrition. Lebanon’s heirloom seeds of wheat, vegetables, fruits, beans, and the thousands of herbs that we use from everyday za’atar to medicinal heritage, are adapted to Lebanese soil and climate over centuries. Indigenous seeds are more nutrient-dense and possess biological memory of the local environment, unlike the hybrids bred for industrial agriculture.
Environment: GMO seeds require more water, and more pesticides and chemical fertilizers, thereby degrading soil quality and polluting water sources. They also threaten indigenous plant biology through cross-pollination. One example that the ministry hasn’t addressed, and that Agrimovement has highlighted, is the threat of Spanish olive tree imports that could mix with and contaminate the DNA of native Lebanese olive species, which is also happening now.
And to top it off, the draft seed law also mandates that farmers must register their personal information, turning private information into big data for the government to track.
The Gaza Seed Bank and Israeli ecocide
Another connection that should make everyone deeply uncomfortable is that last year, Israel razed and destroyed independent seed banks in Gaza and the West Bank. The targeting of seed systems is one part of a broader strategy of cultural genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide—erasing not just people but modes of growing and existence.
It seems more pronounced in the past two years, but Lebanon has faced decades of ecocide, from encroaching on land, polluting water sources, and using white phosphorus bombs to deliberately poison rich agricultural land. Israel is also using drones to shoot at Lebanese farmers trying to access their lands in the south.
Is it paranoid to suggest Israel’s connections to the UPOV since 1979, and evidence of Israel co-opting traditional Palestinian crops (like za’atar, jujube, lukum, and fava beans), wouldn’t eventually be aimed at manipulating Lebanon’s genetic seeds, too?
Fortunately, Lebanon’s official National Seed Bank located at Tal Amara in the Bekaa valley is too underfunded to be targeted. Operated by the Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI) since 2004, it has been left chronically underfunded by the MoA, and their three staff members aren’t keeping up with bio-testing seeds or providing local varieties to farmers who need them. The vacuum, created by this neglect, is filled by grassroots organizations like Jouzour Loubnan, Buzuruna Juzuruna, Seed in a Box, Nohye Alard, and many others whose work to heirloom seeds, plant nurseries, and train small farmers provides a direct countermeasure to the proliferation of industrial farming.
Photo Courtesy of Michelle Eid
What Agrimovement is fighting for
Agrimovement was formally established in 2018 (registered in 2022) specifically because the Ministry of Agriculture was failing to support the most vulnerable in the sector. They’ve been providing civil society support where the government has dropped the ball.
They’re not asking for anything radical. They’re asking the MoA to follow the model of countries that have protected native seeds through legal framework, such as in India, Mexico, Tanzania, Turkiye, Ethiopia, and Algeria. These countries also have strict restrictions on GMO imports and created protections for traditional seed systems.
Agrimovement has published a point-by-point rebuttal of the FAO/CIHEAM Bari study, arguing that existing seed laws should be strengthened to protect heirloom seeds—not replaced with UPOV’s business-friendly legislation.
Their demands are specific and clear:
– Formal recognition of national seed systems
– Protection of farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and sell seeds
– Explicit safeguards against GMOs and biopiracy
– Removal of UPOV-aligned provisions that grant corporate intellectual property rights over seeds
– Meaningful consultation with civil society and farmers before any legislation is passed
The National Human Rights Commission also issued a legal opinion criticizing the draft law. So, when human rights lawyers are saying that a government policy is problematic, it’s probably an issue that affects everybody.
The technocrat governance strategy
There’s a familiar pattern of technocrat governance strategy here, where “complex laws” are wrapped in technical language, unnamed foreign “experts” are published by consultants, and draft laws that appear suddenly result in ministries promising dialogue that goes nowhere.
The seed law draft was actually first introduced in 2022. Civil society groups have been raising concerns since then. The ministry waited until late November 2025 to revive it, quietly added it to the ministerial agenda, and only held a meeting with activists to quiet the storm in local media about food sovereignty.
The scheduled parliamentary vote is for May 2026. This means that there is only a five-month window for public input on legislation that would fundamentally impact Lebanon’s food security and agricultural future.
Meanwhile, MoA has indicated that it plans to unveil its National Agricultural Strategy 2026–2035 soon, which would set agricultural policies over the next decade. If seed sovereignty and the protection of local varieties is not enshrined in these policies, it sends a clear message that short-term economic gains that benefit the elites override the importance of national food security.
Photo Courtesy of Michelle Eid
What you can do
In a word, you can help fight against the MoA selling out to foreign investors. There’s still time to push back against the draft law, here are some individual actions that are practical and effective:
Sign a petition: Agrimovement has a clear call for solidarity with specific demands. Fill out their form to show your support, or read their point-by-point rebuttal of the proposed seed law.
Show up: There’s a town hall discussion at Saida’s farmer market (Sikka Saida) on January 23rd at 4pm. If you can attend, please do. Physical presence really does matter.
Tell your friends: This threat needs more people informed. Talk about this, post on social media if you’re inclined, try to make others concerned.
Buy from small farmers: Ask your local grocer where the products are sourced from. Try to find farmers cooperatives, and buy directly from small farms where possible.
The bigger picture: who gets to eat?
When we think about seeds, we need to see them as real weapons of sovereignty. The draft seed law is part of a global pattern where multinational corporations use words like “modernization” and “development” to privatize the public commons, criminalize traditional practices, and extract wealth from the Global South. Lebanon is being manoeuvred into the same laws that have pushed countries before us to give up their food sovereignty.
Countries who’ve adopted these trade agreements find themselves trapped in debt cycles, buying expensive seeds and chemicals every season, watching their soil and water degrade, and their farmers and populations exploited, while corporations post record profits.
We all feel the convergence of crises facing Lebanon: economic collapse, political dysfunction, Israeli ecocide, climate change, and food insecurity. In this context, the idea that we should criminalize traditional farming and make ourselves more dependent on foreign corporations who control what we plant and sell is hypercapitalism in action.
We have rich soil, rich microclimates, centuries of agricultural knowledge, and food that people rave about the world over. Our seeds are arguably our national identity. Do we want to sit back and watch as the MoA signs away our agricultural future to a handful of foreign corporations?
What happens next depends on whether enough people care, and whether we’re willing to say it loudly enough so that the ministry can’t ignore us.
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Visit Agrimovement’s Farmers Path Town Hall: January 23, 4pm, Sikka Saida
Hala (Halo) Srouji
Hala (Halo) Srouji is a writer and production manager with a background in editing, journalism, and sustainability. With over two decades of experience in communications and media across the Middle East and the U.S., she curates cross-disciplinary editorial projects that spotlight cultural dialogue, creative collaboration, and environmental awareness. Hala is currently managing and facilitating part of Fann w Fenjen’s interviews with and between artists, bringing a unique and new perspective to artist visibility in media
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