This outline of the SD=HS Global Policy Agenda presents a multiple, evidence-based and bottom-up approach to global policy engagement, which is based on concrete experiences from a number of countries, in combination with multi-stakeholder perspectives and the integration of indigenous and scientific knowledge. The local to global policy engagement is a key component of the SD=HS program enabling it to scale up and mainstream its work in strengthening farmers’ seeds systems. Central to this endeavor is the concept of food and seed sovereignty, which refers to the right of indigenous peoples and smallholder farmers to participate in shaping and managing the policies and institutions that regulate the food and seed systems in which they operate.
The SD=HS Global Policy Agenda focuses on the following six topics: Farmers’ Rights, Seed Laws and Policies, Intellectual Property Rights, Corporate Concentration and Emerging Technologies, Public Research and Access to gene bank materials, and Policy Advocacy on Women, Seeds and Nutrition. This document briefly introduces each topic, with a particular focus on the most pressing and strategically important issues that the program aims to address.
