Four firms control more than half of the world’s seed supply. Italian farmers are fighting back and returning to the bartering system

A five-year-old Italian farming network called Rete per l'Agricoltura Naturale (RAN) held a seed-saving workshop on Aug. 7 in the Marche hills, part of an effort to build an alternative to a global seed market now controlled by just four companies, per Fortune. The event sold out within a week of a single Facebook post that drew more than 1,600 sign-ons, according to the same report.

Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF together control 56% of the world's commercial seed market and 61% of its pesticide market, with Bayer alone holding a 23% share of global seeds, Fortune reports. Economists typically flag a combined 40% share among a sector's top four firms as the point where market distortions begin, and 60% as the threshold for heightened antitrust scrutiny — thresholds the seed industry already meets or exceeds. Concentration is even sharper at the crop level: Corteva holds 38.3% of U.S. corn seed, Bayer 33.3%, and four firms together control 93.6% of U.S. cotton seed.

That concentration is the product of a decade of mergers. Dow and DuPont combined their agricultural units into Corteva; China National Chemical Corporation acquired Syngenta and later merged it with Sinochem's farm assets; and Bayer paid $63 billion for Monsanto in 2018, subsequently folding the Monsanto brand into its own. BASF, which lacked a major seed business, purchased seed and pesticide assets — including canola, soybean, and vegetable seed lines — that regulators had required Bayer to divest as a condition of the Monsanto deal, per Fortune.

RAN's response is a project called the Casa Diffusa dei Semi, or Distributed Seed House: a network where growers save, reproduce, and share seeds free of patents and genetic modification. Antonio Lo Fiego, an agronomist and technical director at Arcoiris Sementi Bio, led the first workshop on selecting, gathering, and preserving vegetable seeds, run on a gift-economy model with no participation fee. The legal stakes are real: utility patents — now expanding into gene-edited crops — do not carry the traditional exemption that allows farmers to save seed from their own harvest, meaning a farmer who replants patented seed without a license can face a lawsuit, as Fortune notes.

RAN grounds its work in Article 9 of the FAO's International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which recognizes farmers' rights to save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed. The FAO estimates roughly 75% of crop genetic diversity has been lost over the past century as uniform, commercially bred varieties displaced local ones. Stefano Mori, coordinator of Centro Internazionale Crocevia, an Italian organization with more than three decades of work on food sovereignty, warned that industrial patents on new genomic techniques "could accelerate the already worrying concentration of the seed market and contaminate non-cultivated fields with biotech varieties," according to his organization's statement.

Italy's agriculture is already absorbing climate stress that underlines the biodiversity argument. Extreme heat this year can cut milk production at Italian dairy farms by as much as 10% and pushed grape harvests in Lombardy's Franciacorta region to their earliest recorded start, per a separate Fortune report. RAN says it plans to run the seed workshop again in future seasons as part of a 2026 calendar that, according to Fortune, has been selling out within days of each opening.