From field to regulation: LiveSeeding at the European Parliament on the future of seed diversity

The European Union (EU)’s overhaul of seed marketing rules has entered the final, crucial stage. As trilogue negotiations have already begun on the new Plant Reproductive Material (PRM) Regulation, a panel hosted in the European Parliament laid bare the central issue: how to enable the development and access to a wide range of cultivars, including diverse ones.
The Commission’s proposal, tabled in July 2023, aims to replace ten separate seed Directives, some dating to 1966, with a single Regulation.

It retains the two pillars of EU seed law, variety registration and certification, and introduces new categories and derogations for conservation and organic varieties. A year later, the European Parliament adopted their common position on the text, further expanding the needed flexibility for these diverse cultivars. Member States agreed on their positions in December 2025, adopting a more conservative approach on several topics. Trilogues have now started and will shape the final version of the text by balancing the different institutions’ priorities.

Input from practitioners: how the final text shall look like

The panel, moderated by ARC2020’s Hannes Lorenzen, was explicitly staged as a last-minute practitioner input as the trilogue begins. Its political intent was clear: give the Council concrete evidence from people who actually work with seeds of what is at stake in the design choices still open.

Speakers from conservation networks, farmer organisations and organic breeding organisations highlighted what needs to be secured in the final PRM text to protect farmers’ rights, organic seed and breeding companies, and genetic resources:

• Truly enabling farmers’ rights to exchange seeds and other PRM,
• Guaranteeing real market access for conservation and local varieties by removing species and geographical restrictions.
• Ensuring the adjusted registration protocols for organic varieties are workable
• Providing strong support for the dynamic conservation of cultivated plant diversity, following the European Parliament’s approach.
• Designing proportionate rules for small operators to support their needed work and ensuring a diversified seed market.
• Ensuring amateurs can buy seeds and PRM of all species, and not only of fruits and vegetables as desired by the Council.

The rapporteur of the file for the European Parliament, MEP Herbert Dorfmann (IT, EPP), the shadow rapporteur for the Greens, MEP Martin Háusling (DE), and the rapporteur for the ENVI committee, Christophe Clergeau (FR, S&D), all showcased strong support for these demands. On the Council side, the Cypriot presidency endorsed seed diversity as a resilience tool for climate adaptation and expressed confidence in finding a suitable compromise among the three institutions.

The Council’s restrictions on conservation varieties, seed exchanges between farmers, and conservation activities are rooted in a fear of not being able to control these exchanges and that this would lead to lower seed quality standards. As highlighted by Eric Gall, Deputy Director of IFOAM Organics Europe, these concerns ”should not be overstated, nor used to justify an unduly and disproportionate limitation of farmers’ and gardeners’ choice, and of the work of organic breeders and seed companies. We believe that it is possible for all institutions to find common ground to accommodate the needs of different farming systems and to leave space for biodiversity, in the common interest”.

Traditional and newly bred conservation varieties

A recurring ambiguity in the debate concerned conservation and local varieties. While the Commission and Parliament understand conservation varieties as ‘traditionally grown or newly bred varieties of all species’, the Council differentiates between traditional ‘conservation varieties’ and newly bred ‘local varieties’, with the latter category limited to fruit and vegetables only.

This specie limitation is precisely the issue that Riccardo Bocci, Technical Director of Rete Semi Rurali and speaking on behalf of the LiveSeeding project, highlighted. For self-pollinating species, legumes, wheat, and most grain crops, there is structurally less genetic diversity within a variety than in cross-pollinators. Conservation and local varieties are therefore often the only legally coherent space between a standard uniform variety and heterogeneous material that has no market access at all.

Riccardo Bocci’s formulation was precise: local varieties of newly bred agricultural species must remain available, not just for fruit and vegetables. The Parliament’s position supports this; the Council’s December mandate does not. The final definition decided in the trilogue will have an important impact on the availability of grain and legume varieties.

The NGT entanglement

One thread ran through multiple interventions and deserves more attention: the relationship between the PRM reform and the ongoing NGT (New Genomic Techniques) Regulation. The S&D shadow rapporteur, Christophe Clergeau, and Cloé Mathurin, policy officer of the European Coordination La Via Campesina, both flagged the risk: if NGTs enter the market with patent protection, the new diversity categories in the PRM regulation must be explicitly protected from NGT-linked intellectual property.

The concern is practical. A conservation variety or local varieties incorporating patented NGT material would be subject to intellectual property constraints that fundamentally conflict with the logic of conservation and exchange these categories are intended to facilitate. The Parliament’s position includes transparency requirements regarding breeding methods and intellectual property status, whereas the Council’s mandate is less explicit on disclosure. In a trilogue already technically complex, the NGT-PRM coherence must not be overlooked, as it will determine whether the new diversity categories are genuinely open or subject to private enclosure.

Where LiveSeeding fits

The panel explicitly placed LiveSeeding in an interesting science-policy dialogue. Edwin Nuijten, Chair of the European Consortium of Organic Plant Breeding (ECO-PB), highlighted the project work on supporting the development of adjusted registration protocols for organic varieties (OV): “In the project LiveSeeding, new adapted protocols are being developed, which will hopefully enable the rapid adoption of these adapted procedures by the Commission.”

The project’s relevance is structural. LiveSeeding sits at the intersection of two EU policy trajectories that the PRM reform must reconcile.

• The Organic Regulation’s trajectory towards phasing out derogations for non-organic seeds by 2036 under the organic framework, which requires a major scale-up of certified organic seed availability.
• The PRM reform, which rewrites the market access rules that will determine whether organic varieties and diversity-based materials like conservation varieties will benefit from truly adapted access to the market.

LiveSeeding addresses this intersection in three concrete ways that correspond to arguments made throughout the panel:

The trilogue timeline and why it is important

Both the rapporteur Herbert Dorfman (EPP) and the Cypriot Presidency expressed genuine optimism that a political agreement can be reached during the current presidency by June 2026. Technical meetings are already running at high frequency as of the panel date.

Considering that this Regulation is the second attempt to unify the current Directives, the precedent having been rejected by the European Parliament in 2014, the stakes are considerable. A successful conclusion creates a stable framework in which projects like LiveSeeding and the broader investment in organic breeding infrastructure can be built.