The Seed Oligarchy: How Five Corporations Took Control of the World’s Food Under the TRIPS Agreement
For thousands of years, farmers saved seeds from one harvest to the next. Seed was heritage, culture, and survival—passed down through generations like stories or rituals. But in the last three decades, something unprecedented and quietly devastating has happened: a handful of multinational corporations now control more than half of the planet’s seeds. Beneath the world’s food system lies an intellectual property web so powerful that even the simplest act—saving a seed—can be considered a crime. At the center of this shift is the TRIPS Agreement, a global treaty that transformed seeds from a shared resource into patented corporate property. And behind TRIPS stand five dominant agribusiness giants: Bayer-Monsanto, Corteva, Syngenta (ChemChina), BASF, and Limagrain. Together, they form one o...
