From State Monopoly to Commons: Seed Sovereignty in Iraq and Syria

This contribution explores how farmers and activists in Iraq and Syria have responded to the collapse of formal seed institutions. In this context, seeds emerge as infrastructures of survival, resistance, and alternative political imaginaries.

The Political Nature of Seed Systems

Iraq and Syria are often portrayed as the mythical birthplaces of agriculture. Such narratives romanticize the region’s past while obscuring the material and political struggles of farmers today. Fertility is not inherent—it is cultivated through care, labor, and ecological knowledge.

Seeds are not merely agricultural heritage;they are political artifacts shaped by war, collapse, and social struggle. In fact, seed systems are never neutral and in wartime, their political nature becomes unmistakable.

In Iraqi and Syrian contexts, seeds have been wielded as instruments of governance—by authoritarian regimes, aid agencies, and or market actors alike. They have been commodified, appropriated, or rendered inaccessible through political control. Yet the collapse of these systems did not leave a void: seed-saving networks, informal exchanges, and autonomous agricultural practices re-emerged, often overshadowed by nostalgic tropes of lost seed “treasures.”

Green Revolution and State Control

With the Baathist power takeover in Iraq in 1968, agrarian reform served as an instrument of state control: cooperatives, state farms, and collective farms were placed under the authority of the Supreme Agricultural Council, which reported directly to the Revolutionary Command Council. Political control over the farmers was managed through the local cells of the Baa´th party in the villages, which reported to the political bureau on farmers´ attitudes and behavior. By the 1970s, agriculture had once again been marginalized within the national economy, as oil came to dominate, accounting for 73 percent of the GDP. The first wave of privatization of state and collective farms started in the 1980s and by 1989, 88 percent of farmland was privately held, while only 1 percent  remained under state management.

As the institutional structures of Baʿathist agrarian control eroded, small-scale farmers were left to navigate the agricultural market on their own. They no longer had access to the state’s coercive yet supportive  systems of procurement and input distribution. At the same time, they became increasingly dependent on agro-capitalists and commercial seed suppliers.

In Syria, the Green Revolution was implemented through the partnership with the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), invited by Hafiz al-Assad in 1977. As a regional hub of the USAID and Ford Foundation supported Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), ICARDA brought high-yielding varieties and research infrastructure—but under tight state control. While marketed as development, these interventions strengthened central bureaucracies and marginalized smallholder practices.

The regime prioritized strategic crops like wheat and cotton. Farmers who were politically loyal or better connected enjoyed privileged access, while others — especially Kurds and landless laborers — were excluded. Seed sovereignty and local knowledge systems were therefore undermined not only by market reforms, but also by authoritarian agrarian policies designed to centralize control, legitimize the regime, and secure the loyalty of rural constituencies.

Legal Seed Regulations

In authoritarian states like Iraq and Syria, seed laws are embedded within a wider authoritarian political economy that structures access, control, and dependency — not merely through legal codification, but through coercion, political patronage, bias, and the systematic exclusion of marginalized farmers. A focus solely on formal legal reforms— such as the presence or absence of patent laws — risks overlooking these broader power relations in agrarian governance.

Syria, for example, has no unified seed law or plant variety protection (PVP) system in line with international standards such as UPOV, like those seen in UPOV member states or in post-2003 Iraq.  Instead, Syria’s seed governance operates under a legal framework that governs various aspects of seed production, breeding, importation, and control.

In Iraq, by contrast, pointing out that there was no specific law regulating access to seeds before 2003 misses the larger point: juridical permissiveness did not translate into farmer autonomy. While the Patent Law No. 65 of 1970 explicitly prohibited patents on seeds, plants, and biological resources allowing in theory unrestricted use, exchange, and saving, the political and socio-economic reality told a different story. Access to agricultural resources was shaped by centralized state control, unequal distribution, and political loyalty, long before the imposition of intellectual property regimes under the U.S. occupation.

It is was the 2003 US-led invasion that handed legislative authority to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),an unelected occupation regime, which in 2004 issued the infamous Order 81. This decree introduced a plant variety protection regime modeled on UPOV-style intellectual property rights, despite Iraq being neither a UPOV nor WTO member. This Order 81 banned the exchange and reuse of protected seed varieties, formalizing a system that prioritized commercial interests over farmers’ customary practices.

At the same time, USAID-led reconstruction programs promoted imported, so-called high-yielding hybrid seeds as part of an agricultural recovery package — including chemical inputs and mechanization. This intervention further marginalized local seeds and knowledge systems. Iraqi farmers, many of whom had already lost their own seeds due to the dynamics described above in addition to war, displacement, and the destruction of the national gene bank in Abu Ghreib, became dependent on these externally provided seeds.

The new seed regime, combined with agricultural development interventions relying on external seeds and chemical inputs, eroded farmers’ capacity to reproduce, exchange, and adapt seeds under conditions of prolonged crisis. By design, the USAID reconstruction programme was not intended at improving farmers’ conditions or fostering agrarian recovery. Instead, it created a new dependency on external inputs and directly undermined farmers´ autonomous seed systems. The legal codification introduced by Order 81 thus provided the ideological foundation for the material transformations implemented through reconstruction programs, forming part of a broader hegemonic project of economic reordering in Iraq — one that led to farmers’ entanglement in a spiral of market control, dependency, and dispossession.

Finally, the Order 81 was later incorporated into national legislation through Seed Law No 50 of 2012 and Seed Law No 15 of 2013., These laws failed to recognize farmers’ informal seed systems of saving and exchanging, and instead gave gives priority to protecting the rights of private breeders, . Meanwhile, there are ongoing plans to restore the Iraqi National Gene Bank of Abu Ghreib, while a new seed bank has recently been built in Kurdistan-Iraq´s Sulaymaniya, with official support from the Kurdistan Regional Government, the FAO, and the EU.

Seeds as Dignity[1] and Commons

Seeds are not commodities. They are commons—seeds of dignity. They are the foundation of life: to grow, to choose, and to reproduce. Sharing them freely across class, geography, and sectarian lines defies authoritarianism and fragmentation. It is a revolutionary act—rooted in solidarity, care, and autonomy.

In Iraq, the Gwez w Nakhl Food Sovereignty Network for Kurdistan and Iraq and the Iraqi Seed Collective emerged after 2019 as part of broader struggles for justice. Drawing on the momentum of the Tishreen uprising, they reframed food production as political autonomy. Through regional collaborations, landrace recovery, and seed libraries, they contest the fragmentation of post-2003 Iraq. Their work builds agrarian alternatives to market dependency and sectarian division.

In Syria, since 2011, farmers—particularly in areas outside regime control—have reclaimed heirloom and baladi seeds, not as heritage objects, but as tools of political autonomy. The 15th Garden network, founded amidst siege and displacement, began exchanging seeds, setting up informal seed libraries, and planting gardens in destroyed villages and refugee camps. In these spaces, seed sharing is not just survival,it is resistance. These practices challenge both centralized control and the logic of neoliberal aid systems.

With the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, dozens of local seed libraries were founded by people returning to their areas and by communities freed from authoritarian state control. While elites still debate centralization on paper, farmers have long moved ahead in practice—sharing seeds, making planting decisions collectively, and rebuilding agriculture without permission. These practices are the embodied continuation of the Syrian revolution.

Conclusion: Agrarian Sovereignty as Social Justice

The Iraqi experience of the erosion of peasant autonomy and progressive dispossession under decades of authoritarian rule serves as a powerful warning for Syria. It highlights the need to analyze these developments collectively, learn from one another, and build solidarities that transcend borders. At the same time, a defeatist reading of history offers little guidance.

While the structural conditions in Iraq may not be easily reversed, mutual solidarity also entails that people in Iraq are drawing inspiration from the emerging network of seed libraries and collective agricultural imaginaries taking shape in Syria. The fact that these imaginaries are already beginning to materialize is precisely what gives our movements their strength. In both Iraq and Syria, seeds are more than inputs—they are infrastructures of justice, continuity, and possibility. In a region devastated by war, drought, and authoritarian control, reclaiming seed sovereignty becomes a foundation for social cohesion and reconstruction from below.

[1]Eponymous film, Seeds of Dignity” directed by Ali Alsheikh and produced by BuzurunaJuzuruna with the support of RLS Beirut office.