The Substance and Content of Farmers’ Rights – A Framework?

This report proposes a framework for realising the substance and content of Farmers’ Rights. The framework involves a Hohfeldian analysis of jural relations (analytical jurisprudence) to clarify the right and avoid ambiguity in terminology and slippage and blending between different ideas – helping us in how to think and not what to think. This analytical framework will also clarify the different economic and political implications that follow from the favoured legal relationship and the way that is reflected in domestic laws. A list of rights is also identified from a review of the existing work and effort put into dealing with Farmers’ Rights both within the formal Plant Treaty forums and by institutions and individuals contributing to realising Farmers’ Rights, and existing rights instruments such as the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas and other relevant rights instruments. By identifying the rights and then the kinds of legal (jural) relationship, future work can more reasonably set out in appropriate rights language the substance and content of Farmers’ Rights. This will, of course, require the appropriate consultations and negotiations. This report merely provides a starting point for a substantive rights discussion and an analytical framework that might be useful.