Despite feeding the world and providing resilience to natural disasters, peasant seed systems face severe threats due to the appropriation of nature by corporations and the accelerated destruction of agricultural biodiversity. Increasingly, seed and agrochemical businesses seek to privatize, monopolize and control seeds by patenting and commodifying this very source of life. Meanwhile, peasant and indigenous communities, who have been the developers and guardians of seeds for millennia, are finding their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds overshadowed by a corporate agenda that prioritizes profit over human rights and the sustainable maintenance of nature.

It is now high time that the spotlight is turned on to how the corporate capture of seeds and other natural resources (land, water, forests) is impacting the way in which the food we eat is produced. This compels us to look at the rights of peasants and small-scale food producers overall. The central role of women as custodians of seed and biodiversity must also be recognized; women are the unacknowledged and unseen experts on these matters and must be involved in decision-making. But, above all, what needs to be changed is the current value system that prioritizes seed and food for profit over seed and food rights, not commodities, for those who produce it and their heirs. Without this breakthrough, we cannot move forward.

Seeds and agricultural biodiversity have been at the heart of social movements' struggles for decades. Nonetheless, despite the manifold interlinkages, efforts towards the realization of the human right to adequate food and nutrition have thus far paid insufficient attention to them. The Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2016-"Keeping Seeds in Peoples' Hands"-explores ways to close this gap and promote a stronger agenda to advance these interconnected struggles. It discusses how peasant movements, indigenous peoples, and other local communities around the world are resisting the privatization and commoditization of nature and presenting alternatives. Read the Watch, rise up and join the struggle to make the right to food and nutrition a reality for all!