ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 summarizes the legal analysis of the Treaty. The legal analysis of the Treaty covers all Treaty texts, working documents and other relevant information from the beginning of the negotiation up to its implementation phase in 2017. It is constructed around the following eight main themes: sustainable agriculture and food security as the Treaty’s overall goals; the scope of the Treaty; farmers’ rights; facilitated access to seeds; benefit-sharing, the Benefit-sharing Fund and the touchy issue of money; information and knowledge related to seeds; legal rules and procedures supporting compliance with the Treaty, in particular its innovative Third Party Beneficiary instrument; and finally governance and stakeholders’ participation in the Treaty implementation process.
Chapter 4 shows that although the overall goals of the Treaty are clearly expressed in the text, the tools and instruments designed by contracting parties to reach these objectives rather reinforce the current imbalance of rights disadvantaging specific seed users, such as farmers and farmers’ organizations.
