Revolturas: resisting multinational seed corporations and legal seed regimes through seed- saving practices and activism in Colombia (original) (raw)
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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.
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
Risaralda, Quindío (The Coffee Axis) and Cundinamarca department. This thesis is the outcome of an exploration into a country that, because of its geographical and cultural closeness to my own, I approached it with confidence and ease, to rapidly realize that I could not pretend to grasp its complexity based on my own background. I never felt so welcomed, respected and supported as a foreigner, as a researcher and as a friend, as in Colombia. I also never felt so doubtful and insecure about what to do and where to go, being constantly warned about the risks of my academic ambitions. University professors, eminent peasant leaders, governments officials, environmental activists, random people in a bar, in the street, inside coffee plots; whenever I went I felt welcome, even if I was usually told to be careful, not to be alone, not to trust anyone. Even while meeting and interviewing peasant leaders, used to persecution, executions and disappearances of their comrades and probably used to mistrust unknown people asking questions, I did not felt the distance I was expecting. Probably, they wanted me to know their country, to show me that things were all right despite all the suffering. They did not hide their own stories of persecutions and exile, nor restraint from giving their opinion about the situation. However, my topic had to change from studies of power relations in a rural Cauca, to a more neutral topic politically speaking as alternative agriculture and seed exchange networks in the Coffee Axis. It is however, a strongly political issue today, particularly after the recent agrarian strike, but it can be easily depoliticized and being understood as a matter of pure environmental conservation. I will show that this is not the case at all, but it worked for me in the context of my research and helped me to approach people easely.
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.
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.
'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.
‘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\]
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.
Neoliberal economic frameworks threaten the ability of marginalized people worldwide to grow, harvest, and access sufficient healthy food because they deny traditional collective seed ownership and preclude subsistence as a viable livelihood. Many internationally-oriented counter-responses work to reframe intellectual property law in favor of traditional farmers. In the United States, various grassroots agricultural biodiversity conservation projects designed to re-establish the control of open-pollinated seeds within communities have emerged with similar intent. This article situates and explores the role of open-pollinated seeds and agricultural biodiversity conservation strategies in local food sovereignty. The authors direct applied research projects that collaboratively document and disseminate open-pollinated seed varieties throughout the Southeastern United States with a specific focus on the Ozark Highlands and Appalachian Mountains. The research methods represent an activist anthropology—participant observation and ethnographic interviewing while collaboratively growing and sharing seed varieties with local farmers, gardeners, seed-savers, and activists—with the explicit purpose of forging more sustainable, integrated, and sovereign local food systems. Les cadres économiques néolibérales menacent la capacité des personnes marginalisées dans la culture, la récolte, et l'accès à des aliments sains de l'autosuffisance, parce qu'ils nient la propriété collective des semences et empêchent de subsistance comme moyen de subsistance viables. Beaucoup d'efforts internationaux ont tenté de résister à cette tendance en recadrant le droit de la propriété intellectuelle en faveur des agriculteurs traditionnels. Aux États-Unis, il y a nombreux projets communautaires de conservation de la biodiversité agricole. Ils sont conçus pour rétablir le contrôle des semences à pollinisation libre au sein des communautés. Cet article situe et explore le rôle des semences à pollinisation libre, et les stratégies de conservation de la biodiversité agricole, dans la souveraineté alimentaire locale. Les auteurs mènent des projets de recherche qui documentent les variétés de semences à pollinisation libre dans tout le sud-est des États-Unis, avec un accent particulier sur les Monts Ozark et les Appalaches. Les méthodes de recherche représentent une anthropologie activiste, impliquant l'observation participante et entretiens ethnographiques. Au même temps, nous cultivons et partageons des variétés de semences avec les agriculteurs locaux, les jardiniers, es gens qui épargnent les graines, et des militants. Un but explicite est de créer des systèmes alimentaires locaux qui sont plus durable, intégrée et souverain. Mientras que los marcos económicos neoliberales amenazan la capacidad de las personas marginadas de todo el mundo para cultivar, cosechar y acceder a suficiente comida sana porque niegan la propiedad tradicional de semillas colectiva y se oponen a la subsistencia como medio de vida viable. Muchas contra-respuestas de orientación internacional replantean la ley de propiedad intelectual a favor de los agricultores tradicionales. Con una intención parecida, en los Estados Unidos han surgido varios proyectos de conservación de la biodiversidad agrícola diseñados para restablecer el control de las semillas de polinización abierta dentro de ciertas comunidades. Este trabajo explora el papel de las semillas de polinización abierta y estrategias de conservación de la biodiversidad agrícola en la soberanía alimentaria local. Ambos autores han dirigido proyectos de investigación aplicada que documentan y difunden las variedades de semillas de polinización abierta en todo el sureste de Estados Unidos con un enfoque específico en las Tierras Altas de Ozark y los Montes Apalaches. Los métodos de investigación representan una antropología activista - la observación participante, las entrevistas etnográficas y, a la vez, el compartir de semillas con los agricultores locales, jardineros, y activistas - con el propósito explícito de forjar sistemas alimentarios locales más sostenibles e integrados.
The Dispute Over the Commons: Seed and Food Sovereignty as Decommodification in Chiapas, Mexico
2000
Seeds have become one of the most contested resources in our society. Control over seeds has intensified under neoliberalism, and today four large multinational corporations control approximately 70 percent of the global seed market. In response to this concentration of corporate power, an international social movement has emerged around the concept of seed sovereignty, which reclaims seeds and biodiversity as commons and public goods. This study examines the relationship between the global dynamics of commodification and enclosure of seeds, and the seed sovereignty countermovement for decommodification. I approach this analysis through an ethnographic case study of one local seed sovereignty movement, in the indigenous central region of Chiapas, in southern Mexico. I spent eight months between 2015 and 2016 conducting field research and documenting the development of the Guardians of Mother Earth and Seeds project, a local initiative focused on seed and food sovereignty that was initiated in 2015 by DESMI, the most established NGO working in this region. It encompasses 25 peasant communities-22 indigenous and 3 mestizo-from the Los Altos, Norte-Tulijá, and Los Llanos regions of Chiapas. I also collected data from 31 other communities in the region involved to varying degrees with this agenda of seed and food sovereignty. This study incorporates both communities affiliated with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and non-Zapatista communities. Three research questions guide this dissertation: (1) How do the increasing industrialization and commodification of seed systems and agriculture affect peasant communities in Chiapas?; (2) How is the local seed and food sovereignty countermovement responding to those processes of commodification?; and (3) How does iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS