The Red de Semillas Libres: Contesting Biohegemony in Colombia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2019
Drawing on ethnographic research, we analyze the motivations, conditions of possibility, and strategies of seed saving among different farmers in Colombia. For indigenous agroecological farmers, seed saving represents a form of resistance mobilized through narratives of tradition, sovereignty, freedom, and environmental protection. In contrast, industrial farmers, who grow genetically-modified cotton, carry out seed saving surreptitiously to minimize production costs and to resist the enclosure of seeds by corporations. Despite these two groups of farmers' different political motivations and strategies, both types of seed saving practices challenge corporate seed control. Can these seed-saving practices be considered forms of seed sovereignty activism?
Gutierrez et al The Struggle for Peoples Free Seeds in Latin America
This collaborative article presents an overview of the mechanisms and consequences of the expansion of transgenic seeds and intellectual property rights in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala. The article also discusses the strategies of resistance of communities and grassroots organizations in those countries. Reference: Right to Food and Nutrition Watch Consortium. 2016. Keeping Seeds in Peoples' Hands: 70-79. http://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/watch-2016
Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 2019
By evaluating two grassroots organizations that belong to the Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia (RSLC; Free Seed Network of Colombia), we show how the recovery, conservation, and defense of native and creole seeds have two types of effects on agroecological scaling. The first is a horizontal or scaling out effect, given that these activities involve the adoption of agroecological practices which allow for spreading knowledge, principles, and practices among seed custodians, their local communities and organizations, and the networks of these organizations. The second is a deepening effect, given that: 1) seed custodianship reaffirms and/or generates new peasant and indigenous identities and ways of life; 2) seed recovery, conservation, and defense conform a multi-dimensional process that is material, political, and symbolic, which provides cultural and territorial rootedness, and 3) strengthening of the social-organizational fabric through collective actions and strategies by seed custodians in their territories in defense of native and creole seeds. These processes propitiate fertile conditions for scaling peasant agroecology and contribute to the construction of seed sovereignty, which is an essential aspect of struggles to preserve and reproduce and native and creole seeds.
Biopolitics, social movements and genetic resources: the case of PAA seeds
Genetic resources are strategic elements for the control and organization of the capitalist agriculture’s production chain. In Brazil, this process is not devoid of conflicts, as rural social movements resist the manipulation of genetic resources through contestatory and propositional actions. Seeking to analyze a recent Brazilian public policy, the Food Acquisition Program (PAA), which has a new modality – “PAA Seeds”, this study departs from the operationalization of the concept of fungibility of power, which considers that power has expanded to all dimensions of life. Thus biopolitics, in a context of pluripotent life, becomes exercised at the intracellular level through biotechnology. In this perspective, power is no longer exclusively of a territorial nature becoming possible to exercise through the manipulation of life’s temporality in order to control territory. Through this system of concepts, we seek to verify if “PAA Seeds” can be considered a form of reappraising forces in a biopolitical contentious for the control of the manipulation of genetic resources, specifically seeds. Based on the instances of dispute between agribusiness and peasant agriculture, we identify along the established analytical movement that “PAA Seeds” is presented as a rebalancing mechanism between these two distinct biopolitical projects.
PhD Dissertation, 2010
For the past decade, seeds have been at the centre of a relentless global war. This is a war of rhetoric—fought in courts, in corporate publicity campaigns, and in international environment and trade negotiations; but it is also a “down-to-earth” struggle, fought in farmers’ fields around the world. Indeed, with the advent of plant genetic engineering, seeds have undergone a formidable transformation. Formerly a common good, produced by peasants/farmers and exchanged freely among them, seeds are becoming a tradable commodity on the global marketplace covered by extensive patent rights. As the first link in the food chain and the basis of our food supply, seeds carry tremendous material and symbolic importance. Not surprisingly, these developments have proven highly controversial, and Brazil is one of the terrains where the global struggle over seeds is being played out. This dissertation combines an ethnographic analysis of how genetic engineering is transforming small farmers’ seed practices in Southern Brazil with a broader analysis of the Brazilian transgenic seed landscape. It includes a discussion of the recent evolution of Brazilian seed industry, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) and seed legislation; a detailed account of the transgenics controversy in Brazil; and an examination of the role played by civil society in the transgenics debate. I argue that the right of farmers to save, use and exchange their seeds—and not genetic engineering per se—is at the heart of farmers’ resistance to genetically engineered organisms in Southern Brazil. Small farmers’ response to transgenic seeds does not reflect so much a distrust of a new technology as an acute awareness of the power relations intrinsic to the current biotechnological revolution. Indeed, small farmers are aware that recent technological developments open the way to the heightened commodification of seeds, and that, in this process, they are being dispossessed of the right to seeds, the most fundamental input in farming. I conclude by briefly discussing how these developments have prompted the emergence of “farmers’ rights” in an attempt to reassert the age-old practice of seed saving.
‘Free our seeds !’ Strategies of farmers’ movements to reappropriate seeds (Demeulenaere, 2018)
The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research. Challenges for Food Security and Agrobiodiversity, 2018
Girard, F. and C. Frison (eds). Seed movements around the world share a common enemy: global seed corporations, which are seen as organizing an unfair monopoly over seed markets, using technical devices, industrial property rights, and economic concentration, at the expenses of farmers’ livelihoods. Yet these movements differ in their aims and strategies. Some defend a principle of the free circulation of seeds, rejecting any public regulation of the seed trade. They argue that seeds embody a vital principle that, by its essence, cannot be constrained, either by regulation or intellectual property rights (IPRs). Some others want to counter-balance asymmetries of power between corporations and farmers, arguing that for centuries farmers have collectively managed and enriched crop genetic resources and have now earned rights in return. This chapter focuses on an organisation belonging to the second group – the French Réseau Semences Paysannes. From the beginning, it has clearly placed emphasis on farmers, framed as commoners who replenish a common pool resource, genetic resources, which is essential to plant breeders’ activity. Yet the positioning of the movement towards the banner of ‘the commons’ is internally debated: presenting oneself as stewards of agrobiodiversity is certainly productive but appears to some members as reductive of their experience. Farmers’ seed ‘reappropriations’ do not necessarily translate into property claims, but rather into the defense of farmers’ collective rights on seeds. [Free download : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01793041/document\]
Food matters have become increasingly important in academic, policy and political agendas in recent years, acknowledging the coproduction of food and society: the key role food plays in sustaining society alongside its potential to be shaped by society. From concerns about where food comes from, how it is produced, what it contains and how it is marketed to concerns with how it is consumed, who can afford it, why it is wasted and where possible sites of intervention might lie, researchers have increasingly been exploring the role of food in relation to (in)security, justice, production and consumption. The political and economic tensions surrounding different modes of engagement with food, and contestations about the sites and forms of interventions (whether government policy, third sector, charitable) are tied up with more radical geo-political concerns about human society and planetary governance. The aim of this session is to encourage critical debate about the relationship between food and society and to reconfigure and advance understandings of food in the context of the political process.
'Keeping seeds in our hands': the rise of seed activism
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020
Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmers’ rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems – from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies – are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments. We take stock of what has been achieved so far and of the challenges ahead, and suggest some avenues for future research.
Seed sovereignty and agroecological scaling
Seed sovereignty and agroecological scaling: two cases of seed recovery, conservation, and defense in Colombia, 2019
By evaluating two grassroots organizations that belong to the Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia (RSLC; Free Seed Network of Colombia), we show how the recovery, conservation, and defense of native and creole seeds have two types of effects on agroecological scaling. The first is a horizontal or scaling out effect, given that these activities involve the adoption of agroecological practices which allow for spreading knowledge, principles, and practices among seed custodians, their local communities and organizations, and the networks of these organizations. The second is a deepening effect, given that: 1) seed custodianship reaffirms and/or generates new peasant and indigenous identities and ways of life; 2) seed recovery, conservation, and defense conform a multi-dimensional process that is material, political, and symbolic, which provides cultural and territorial rootedness, and 3) strengthening of the social-organizational fabric through collective actions and strategies by seed custodians in their territories in defense of native and creole seeds. These processes propitiate fertile conditions for scaling peasant agroecology and contribute to the construction of seed sovereignty, which is an essential aspect of struggles to preserve and reproduce and native and creole seeds.
2014
Seeds are simultaneously a meaningful part of the daily life of many people involved in agriculture and instruments for national and international policy making. This thematic section explores the sensorial connections between people and plants, the relationships of power that impact and frame them, and the reflections and contestations that they are a part of. In the midst of Western societies and among scientists and farmers, different ontologies and different perceptions of being and coevolving with others in the world coexist, as we will show by looking at human-seed relationships. Local and global legacies create powerful differences between seeds, while various forms of international governance simultaneously push seeds toward homogenization and agriculture toward industrialization while claiming to preserve diversity. Intellectual property rights over seeds and seed regulations have become powerful tools of multinational seed corporations for appropriating large parts of farmers’ incomes and controlling the food chain, while it is the sensorial and emotional connections between humans and plants that provide the drive to resist them.