'Keeping seeds in our hands': the rise of seed activism (original) (raw)
Related papers
JPS special forum on seed activism: an overview of the issues
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2019
Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of the rise of what may be termed as seed activism. Indeed, over the past two decades, there has been rising mobilisation across the world against the new enclosures created through the private appropriation and commodification of seeds. Peasant organisations, social movements and NGOs have used the courts, pressurised national legislatures and taken to the streets to variously challenge these developments, which deprive peasant communities of their rights to conserve, plant, reproduce and develop seeds. But they have also envisioned/crafted alternative frameworks to protect these rights and ensure the preservation of agricultural biodiversity.
‘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\]
Farmers' Rights: Intellectual Property Regimes and the Struggle over Seeds
Politics & Society, 2004
This article analyzes "farmers' rights" as a strategy of resistance against the perceived inequities of intellectual property rights regimes for plant varieties. As commercial models of intellectual property have made their way into agriculture, farmers' traditional seed-saving practices have been increasingly delegitimized. In response, farmers have adopted the language of farmers' rights to demand greater material recognition of their contributions and better measures to protect their autonomy. This campaign has mixed implications. On one hand, farmers'rights are a unique form of right that may help transform conventions of intellectual property in ways that are better suited for registering and materially encouraging alternative forms of innovation, such as those offered by farming communities. On the other hand, farmers' rights have proved enormously difficult to enact. And by situating farmers'rights alongside easily enacted commercial breeders'rights, the campaign risks further legitimizing the inequities it is responding to.
Farmers’ rights to seed: Conflicts in international legal regimes
Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, 2016
The human right to adequate food and nutrition has not paid enough attention to seeds and agricultural biodiversity, but the time has now come to turn this trend around. Peasant seed systems feed the world and are resilient in times of natural disasters. Yet they face severe threats due to the increasing corporate capture of seeds and nature on the one hand and the accelerated destruction of agricultural biodiversity on the other. Right to food and nutrition activists can strengthen the work of small-scale food producers to protect their agrarian, fishing, pastoral and agro-ecological systems by granting seeds and agricultural biodiversity their well-deserved place. WHAT ARE THE MAIN THREATS TO SEEDS AND AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY TODAY? Peasants are steadily losing their seeds: Their collective seeds systems are being made illegal and are destroyed and contaminated by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The Green Revolution's agricultural policies, trade agreements, and more recently, the national and international legal frameworks protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) are behind this encroachment on peasants' seeds. 2 IPR protection regimes such as the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) have been devised so as to protect the interests of the seed and breeder industry. 3 They severely impair access to seeds outside of UPOV by restricting peasant practices and seed management systems. In Tanzania and Colombia, among other countries, peasant practices have been declared illegal, and criminalized. Furthermore, IPR protection regimes tend to create monopolies, which then place them in the position to reap profits and to enlarge their market power. It is estimated that Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta control 53% of the global commercial market for seeds. 4 The big six agro-chemical corporations (BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta) have recently announced that mergers are in the pipeline, leading to even more market concentration. 5 The economic, ecological, and socio-political risks of a monopolized seeds and breeds supply system are innumerable. Other major threats relate to the destruction of agricultural biodiversity. This sad state of affairs is the result of land clearing, population pressure, overgrazing, environmental degradation, and industrialized farming, fishing and livestock keeping practices. 6 The industrial seed and breeding systems favor standardization and homogeneity. These have a negative impact on the very variables that underpin biodiversity. 7 The destruction of agrobiodiversity is particularly problematic given the challenges that climate change is posing on the realization of the right to food and nutrition.
Reclaiming Diverse Seed Commons Through Food Sovereignty, Agroecology and Economies of Care
Seeds for Diversity and Inclusion
Seed commons—the collective management of seeds and associated knowledge—is a major aim of food sovereignty, that crucial alternative to the dead end of industrialized agriculture. To reclaim the commons, explains Michel Pimbert in this wide-ranging policy analysis, we need to enable community control over growing, trading and consuming food. That will demand mutually supportive transformations in agriculture, economies, rights and political systems towards agroecology, an economics of solidarity, collective notions of property and direct democracy. Drawing on sources such as the Nyéléni Declaration on food sovereignty and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, Pimbert outlines a radical approach to seed governance outside the capitalist and patriarchal paradigm. The proposals, while scarcely featuring in global and national fora on seed governance, offer a fresh framework for needed change at a time of social exclusion, poverty and dee...
Anthropology of food, 2017
The industrialisation of agriculture has drawn farmers around the world into the vortex of a commercialised global food system. This has caused a massive decline in traditional farming, which tends to be small scale, organic, biologically diverse and sustainable. It has instead favoured mechanised farming on large land holdings, using monocultures, aggressive cultivation methods and external inputs in unsustainable ways. There is much controversy about which of the two paradigms should be used in future. This paper focuses specifically on tension around corporate appropriation of the world’s seed supply and farmer’s counter movements for seed sovereignty, as a key aspect of this broader controversy. It argues that the unrolling of a reformed, second-generation Green Revolution based on GMO seed technologies will expose farmers to further risks and deepen their disempowerment, while careful use of open source hybrid seeds may increase traditional farmers’ food sovereignty.
Free Seeds: Connecting Freedom and Autonomy of Nature
This paper presents the results of a research on a campaign called Seed Freedom, developed on Navdanya's farm-Bija Vidyapeeth-in 2012. Our essay focuses on the question of seed appropriation and domination practiced by large agribusiness corporations, since the 1960s to the present day's transgenic crops as well as the social movements' fight to keep their way of life and production. We plan to discuss and to put into a context the socioeconomic problems that led to the Seed Freedom movement and the relationship between the protection of seeds and food production with the use of sustainable agriculture, environmental campaigns for the protection of biological diversity, and food sovereignty and safety in stark contrast to the agriculture mechanisms used by the broad market and the political and economic agreements which only benefit agribusiness corporations. Our goal is to prove that alternative forms of traditional farming used along with sustainable technologies can ensure not only environmental protection but also food sovereignty.
Seed wars and farmers’ rights: comparative perspectives from Brazil and India
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017
Drawing on interviews with Indian and Brazilian farmers’ rights activists, lawyers, agronomists and plant breeders, this article aims at better understanding how farmers’ rights are protected on paper and implemented on the ground in these two countries. Brazil and India offer important case studies because they are biologically megadiverse countries, and because small farmers represent an important segment of the rural economy. In this article, I show that India has adopted an ownership approach to farmers’ rights, while Brazil leans towards a stewardship approach. Based on an examination of the progress made in enforcing these rights, I further argue that the stewardship model adopted by Brazil is more conducive to the realization of farmers’ rights, and I explore why this is the case. Finally, I show how farmers’ rights provisions in the Brazilian and Indian legislations represent fragile gains that could be curtailed by several bills currently under discussion in the field of seed and plant variety protection.