What does the future hold for farmers' seeds? Between informal sharing, changing laws and the use of digital technology

Today, less than 3% of the seeds traditionally cultivated by man are used for food production worldwide. And for good reason: in many countries, these seeds are kept off the market. While so-called "farm seeds" continue to play an important role in subsistence farming in developing countries, industrial seeds are responsible for massive volumes of production on a global scale.

George Aboueldahab, EDC Paris Business SchoolMyriam Kessari, University of Montpellier and PALPACUER Florence, University of Montpellier

In this respect, France is one of the pioneers of the industrial paradigm, which since the 1930s has been based on standardization criteria to make seeds predictable, productive and marketable. Since then, a vast market has developed around standardized seeds, from which the diversity inherent in living organisms is excluded, as are a multitude of seeds from a variety of ecosystems.

In the face of this commercial stranglehold, however, some players are putting up resistance by continuing to grow and exchange so-called peasant seeds. They are looking into the most appropriate ways of pooling these seeds and the knowledge associated with them, to promote a different relationship with living organisms in our relationship with agriculture and food.

The legal construction of a commodified seed

To understand how we got here, we first need to look at the legal framework governing seed exchange and trade today.

Before the industrialization of agriculture, the seeds used by farmers were the fruit of the work of a whole community mobilized around a single variety. It was this community that ensured seed multiplication, its transmission from one generation to the next, and the sharing of peasant knowledge and associated know-how. Since the primary purpose of growing these varieties was to feed the community, any surplus was sold at local markets. Traditional agriculture has also always worked to maintain seed diversity, to enable crops to adapt to different geographical and climatic contexts.

Today, however, the marketing of industrial seed is part of a complex legal framework, from which farmers' seed is excluded. Indeed, by their very nature, farmers' varieties do not meet the characteristics of Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability (DUS) that are required for industrial seed to be marketed.

In fact, to meet the criterion of distinctness, a variety must be clearly differentiated from all other known varieties. A variety is also considered uniform if its plants have similar characteristics, and stable if the conformity of these characteristics is guaranteed over the defined reproduction cycle.

Because it is in constant co-evolution with its environment, a farmer's seed cannot be perfectly homogeneous or perfectly stable. On the contrary, it is thanks to its heterogeneity and evolutionary character that such a seed can adapt to the contexts in which it is cultivated, and this capacity for adaptation is considered an asset in the philosophy of peasant cultivation.

A wealth that will gradually be excluded from marketing in France. As early as 1932, an official catalog listed and defined the "varieties" that could be marketed. The decree of June 11 1949 prohibited the marketing of any seed not included in the catalog.

In 1961, the creation of the Union for the Protection of "Plant Varieties"(UPOV) at France's initiative extended this legal architecture to the international level, with the aim of protecting the technical investments required for the control and productive selection of seed varieties, which are increasingly being made by large private firms.

However, UPOV leaves farmers the "privilege" of continuing to use their own seeds freely from one year to the next, a right that was reduced to seed saving and non-commercial seed exchange in 1978, before becoming optional, left to the goodwill of individual states, in the early 1990s.

A contested market confiscation

Since the 1980s, this legal apparatus has been increasingly challenged by figures such as the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, and by movements such as Let's Liberate Diversity in Europe and Red de Semillas Libres in Colombia. In France, the Réseau Semences Paysannes, founded in 2003, and Kokopelli, set up in 1999, are among those claiming a relationship with seeds as commons, and who consider farmers' seed autonomy to be a central element of an agriculture that respects living organisms.

More generally, movements in favor of a peasant agro-ecology are denouncing a system of seed ownership and use based on complex, opaque regulations that are difficult for farmers to access and understand. They refuse to see farmers become dependent on industrial suppliers for a resource so essential to their activity.

Peasant agroecology movements are fighting to "liberate" seeds from their commercial confiscation. They reject an industrialist approach that favors private biotechnology innovations to the detriment of the seed pool. Their struggles can take different forms: some organizations choose to wage a legislative battle at both French and European level, and sometimes see their battles crowned with success. For example, the law of June 10, 2020 puts an end to the ban on the sale of peasant seeds to amateur gardeners, making it a legal practice once again. https://www.youtube.com/embed/6NsayXcuLVY?wmode=transparent&start=0 France 24 report featuring the Triticum association. Farmer seeds are presented as being more resistant to disease and more adaptable to drought.

Others choose to go on the offensive and do not hesitate to engage in partly illegal activities, in this case the marketing of seeds not included in the official catalog. This can sometimes lead to convictions and fines, as is regularly the case for Kokopelli.

Nevertheless, these movements continue to take a proactive, local approach, based on initiatives to disseminate and preserve peasant varieties through seed banks and informal exchange networks. Sharing and disseminating these farmers' varieties is a direct expression of a different kind of agriculture, one that protects these seeds from industrial appropriation. The aim here is to organize alternative supply chains that limit farmers' dependence on models based on intellectual property rights.

Community-managed farmers' seeds

The farmers' seed movement is thus banking on "commoning", a concept that designates the organizational processes by which social actors manage a resource while preventing its privatization.

Commoning is embodied by the formation of communities, networks, collectives and associations that conserve, use and exchange, outside the market, peasant seed varieties that are still "free" because they are neither patented nor catalogued.

Unlike DUS seeds, which can only be re-used to a limited extent, farmers' varieties aim for, and enable, agricultural autonomy in terms of seed reproduction. The seed coevolves with its environment, and with the human community that preserves and disseminates it. The operating methods of these communities can therefore find themselves in tension with the legal framework that regulates the seed sector at national and international levels.

On a national level, farmers' seeds continue to be exchanged and shared at farmers' festivals and seed fairs, which provide opportunities to disseminate farmers' varieties. These events are mainly local in scope, but some farmers and sympathizers do not hesitate to travel across France to attend. Although today's legislation seems to be moving towards greater flexibility (Law of June 10, 2020), it is this type of event that has facilitated the transmission of farmers' varieties in more restrictive legislative contexts.

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Co-constructed knowledge under threat

The preservation and use of farmers' seeds is therefore based on traditional, locally-rooted knowledge linked to the specific characteristics of local varieties. This knowledge has been preserved and passed down from one generation to the next, in a way that preserves its subjective character and enables it to be adapted to new contexts. This knowledge can range from the simple weight of seeds, growing conditions or sowing period, to more complex knowledge about possible resistances or desirable traits inherent in varieties (productivity, ease of harvesting, etc.).

They are also central to the agro-ecological transition, since this transition will involve the use of old varieties, selected by farmers, adapted to the local environment, often requiring less water and relying little or not at all on chemical inputs.

But this peasant knowledge, like old varieties, is now threatened both by the difficulties of transmission and by the risks of privatization and industrialization of the elements it contains. The FAO underlines the role played by the use of industrial varieties in the loss of over 75% of plant genetic diversity. Indeed, when farmers abandon a local peasant seed, the associated knowledge is often also lost. In France, however, farming communities are showing that it is possible to keep old varieties alive, as in the case of theMenton pink onion. https://www.youtube.com/embed/j2KRcVOFUCQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 The Menton pink onion, a species saved from oblivion by farmers' seeds, is the subject of this France 3 Provence report.

But if physical links and encounters have so far ensured the survival of this knowledge, will they suffice to enable wider transmission? At a time when gasoline is expensive, travel is costly, and almost everything can be found on the Internet, the question of digitizing this knowledge arises, and there is no unanimous or easy answer.

The sharing/protection paradox: pooling against the risk of confiscation

Some initiatives (associations, artisan-seed growers, conservatories, etc.) are trying to develop digital tools to keep track of varieties and the people who own them.

Based on participatory action research, we worked with farmers and artisan seed growers on how digital tools could be used to share this knowledge between farmers' seed stakeholders.

It emerges that digital technology could facilitate the sharing of knowledge associated with farmers' varieties within the communities that sustain them, and help spread the seed commons. It would also be particularly useful for tracking the genealogy of seeds and helping to safeguard them (or prevent their disappearance).

Yet this same traceability can also jeopardize seeds by breaking with the informal nature of knowledge-holding and sharing (precise growing conditions, desirable genetic traits, etc.) to which farming communities remain attached.

Formalizing tacit or interpersonal knowledge also implies a form of standardization that removes the anchoring and subjectivity of knowledge.

These fears of appropriation and standardization shape the organizational strategies of farmers' seed movements in the face of the adoption of digital tools. Thus, in a context of struggle where the threat is strong, militant movements favor defensive strategies that may in part curb their proactive alternative potential.

Our action-research thus attests to a reluctant stance towards the use of digital technology to manage farmers' seeds and share related knowledge. These conclusions point to a major condition for the sharing of seeds and associated knowledge using new tools such as digital technology: a relaxation of the legal constraints that today confiscate the relationship with living organisms in a commercial model that is too far removed from nature.

George Aboueldahab, Teacher-researcher, EDC Paris Business SchoolMyriam Kessari, Lecturer and researcher, Institut Agronomique Méditerranéen de Montpellier, University of Montpellier and PALPACUER Florence, University Professor of Management Sciences, University of Montpellier

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