A number of Civil Society groups are resisting the passage of the Plant Breeders Bill into law.

The groups, which include, the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana, the General Agricultural Workers Union, Catholic Bishops Conference, Christian Council of Ghana say the Bill is not in the best interest of the country.

The Plant Breeders Bill, among other things is to ensure a genetic diversity of food crops as part of attempts to guarantee food security.

The Bill which has been in Parliament since 2013 has suffered a number of resistance by farmer groups.

The latest to resist the Bill in its current form is the farmers platform protection of farmers' rights together with the Civil Society Organizations.

The CSOs in a statement said the Plant Breeders Bill only promotes the breeders’ rights over and above the farmers’ rights.

The coalition against the Plant Breeders Bill are even more incensed with Ghana's decision to sign the ARIPO Protocol at a time when Ghana's Parliament has not approved the Plant Breeders Bill.

"The ARIPO Protocol is a harmonised regional legal framework for the protection of plant breeders’ rights—the Arusha Protocol for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (the ‘Arusha PVP Protocol’)."

Providing reasons why the Plant Breeders and the ARIPCO Protocol should be rejected, the coalition said the policy "would grant temporary monopoly privileges to plant breeders through the tools of intellectual property, as a means to encourage research and innovation in plant breeding. In this process, however, the poorest farmers may become increasingly dependent on expensive inputs, creating the risk of indebtedness in the face of unstable incomes."

"The argument in the Memo that the Bill will help farmers break out of their cycle of subsistence farming is also flawed," the statement said.

Instead of passing the bill, the farmers who are part of the coalition are asking government to pass a "new seed act that will increase funding to public breeders/researchers; Promote open pollinated varieties; Promote Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB); Enshrine the inherent rights of farmers to save, reuse, select, exchange and sell; Reorient agricultural policies towards food sovereignty – healthy, ecological biodiversity, sustainable and democratically control and protect local seed farmers from monopolies that prevent them from having choices"