What future for farmers' seeds? Between informal sharing, changing laws, and the use of digital technology
Less than 3% of the seeds traditionally cultivated by humans are now used for global food production. This is because, in many countries, these seeds are kept out of commercial channels. While so-called "farm" seeds continue to play an important role in food production in southern countries, it is industrial seeds that ensure massive production volumes on a global scale.
George Aboueldahab, EDC Paris Business School; Myriam Kessari, University of Montpellier and Florence Palpacu, University of Montpellier
In this regard, France is one of the pioneers of the industrial paradigm which, since the 1930s, has been based on standardization criteria that make seeds predictable, productive, and marketable. A vast market has since developed around standardized seeds, which exclude the diversity inherent in living organisms, as do a multitude of seeds from various ecosystems.
Faced with this commercial stranglehold, however, some actors are resisting by continuing to practice the cultivation and exchange of so-called peasant seeds. They are exploring the most appropriate ways to pool these seeds and the knowledge associated with them, in order to promote a different relationship with living things in our approach to agriculture and food.
The legal construction of a commercialized seed
To understand how we got to this point, we must first examine the legal framework that governs seed exchange and trade today.
Before the industrialization of agriculture, the seeds used by farmers were the result of the work of an entire community mobilized around a single variety. It was this community that ensured the multiplication of seeds, their transmission from one generation to the next, and the sharing of farming knowledge and associated know-how. As the primary purpose of growing these varieties was to feed the community, marketing focused mainly on any surplus, which was sold in local markets. Traditional agriculture has also always worked to maintain seed diversity so that crops could adapt to different geographical and climatic conditions.
Nowadays, however, the marketing of industrial seeds is subject to complex legal and regulatory requirements, from which farmers' seeds are excluded. By their very nature, these farmers' varieties do not meet the criteria of distinctness, uniformity, and stability (DUS) that apply to industrial seeds and are mandatory for any commercialization.
In fact, to meet the criterion of distinctiveness, a variety must be clearly differentiated from all other known varieties. A variety is also considered uniform if its plants display similar characteristics, and stable if the conformity of these characteristics is guaranteed over the defined reproduction cycle.
However, because it is constantly co-evolving with its environment, a peasant seed cannot be perfectly homogeneous or perfectly stable. On the contrary, it is thanks to its heterogeneity and evolutionary nature that such a seed can adapt to the contexts in which it is grown, and this ability to adapt is considered a valuable asset in the philosophy of peasant cultures.
This wealth of variety would gradually be phased out of commercial cultivation in France. In 1932, an official catalog listed and defined the "varieties" that could be sold commercially. The decree of June 11, 1949, then prohibited the sale of any seeds not listed in the catalog.
In 1961, the creation of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) on France's initiative extended this legal framework 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 carried out by large private companies.
A grand lady, UPOV nevertheless leaves farmers the "privilege" of continuing to freely use their own seeds from one year to the next, a right that was reduced in 1978 to the conservation and non-commercial exchange of seeds, before becoming optional, left to the discretion of States, in the early 1990s.
A contested commercial seizure
This legal framework has been increasingly challenged since the 1980s by figures such as Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva and movements such as Let's Liberate Diversity in Europe and Red de Semillas Libres in Colombia. In France, the Réseau Semences Paysannes(Farmers' Seed Network), founded in 2003, and Kokopelli, created in 1999, are among those who advocate for seeds as a common good and consider farmers' seed autonomy to be a central element of agriculture that respects living organisms.
More broadly, movements in favor of smallholder agroecology denounce a system of seed ownership and use that is 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 that is so essential to their activity.
Peasant agroecology movements are therefore fighting to "liberate" seeds from commercial confiscation. They reject an industrialist approach that favors private biotechnological innovations at the expense of common seeds. Their struggles can take different forms: some organizations choose to fight a legislative battle at the French level, but also at the European level, and sometimes see their struggles crowned with success. For example, the law of June 10, 2020, ends 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. Farm seeds are presented as more resistant to disease and better adapted to drought.
Others choose to go on the offensive and do not hesitate to engage in activities that are partly illegal, in this case, the sale of seeds that are not listed 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 approach at the local level, based on initiatives to disseminate and preserve farm varieties through seed banks or informal exchange networks. The sharing and dissemination of these farm varieties directly implements a different form of agriculture, which protects these seeds from industrial appropriation. This involves organizing alternative supply chains that limit farmers' dependence on models based on intellectual property rights.
Community-managed farm seeds
Peasant seed movements thus rely on "commoning," a concept that refers to the organizational processes through which social actors manage a resource while preventing its privatization.
Commoning is embodied in the formation of communities, networks, collectives, and associations that preserve, use, and exchange, outside the market, varieties of farm seeds that are still "free" because they are not patented or cataloged.
Unlike DHS seeds, which have limited reuse potential, farm-saved varieties aim for and enable agricultural autonomy in seed reproduction. Seeds co-evolve in their environment and with the human community that ensures their conservation and dissemination. The operating methods of these communities may therefore conflict with the legal framework that regulates the seed sector at the national and international levels.
At the national level, farmers' seeds continue to be exchanged and shared at farmers' festivals and seed exchanges, which provide opportunities to disseminate farmers' varieties. These events are mainly local in scope, but some farmers and supporters do not hesitate to travel across France to attend them. While legislation now 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.
[More than 85,000 readers trust The Conversation's newsletters to help them better understand the world's major issues. Subscribe today]
Cocreated knowledge under threat
The preservation and use of farm-saved seeds is therefore based on traditional knowledge, rooted in local communities and 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 nature and allows it to be adapted to new contexts. This knowledge can range from simple information such as seed weight, growing conditions, or sowing period, to more complex knowledge about possible resistance or desirable characteristics inherent to the varieties (productivity, ease of harvesting, etc.).
They are also central to the agroecological transition, since this transition will rely on heirloom varieties, selected by farmers, adapted to the local environment, often less water-intensive, and with little or no dependence on chemical inputs.
But this traditional farming knowledge, like heirloom varieties, is now threatened both by difficulties in passing it on and by the risks of privatization and industrialization of the elements it contains. The FAO highlights the role of industrial varieties in the loss of more than 75% of plant genetic diversity. When farmers abandon local seeds, the associated knowledge is often lost as well. In France, however, farming communities are showing that it is possible to keep heirloom varieties alive, as in the case ofthe Menton pink onion. https://www.youtube.com/embed/j2KRcVOFUCQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 The pink onion of Menton, a species saved from oblivion by farmers' seeds, is the subject of this report by France 3 Provence.
But while physical connections and encounters have enabled this knowledge to survive until now, will they be enough to enable its 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 resources in the face of the risk of confiscation
Certain initiatives (associations, artisan seed producers, conservatories, etc.) are attempting to develop digital tools to keep track of varieties and the people who hold them.
Based on participatory action research, we worked with farmers and seed artisans on how digital tools could be used to share this knowledge among those involved in farm-saved seeds.
It appears that digital technology could facilitate the sharing of knowledge associated with farm varieties within the communities that keep them alive and help to spread seed commons. In addition, it would be particularly useful for tracking the genealogy of seeds and contributing to their preservation (or preventing their disappearance).
However, this same traceability can also jeopardize seeds by breaking with the informal nature of knowledge retention and sharing (specific growing conditions, desirable genetic traits, etc.) to which farming communities remain attached.
The formalization of tacit or interpersonal knowledge also involves a form of standardization that removes the anchoring and subjectivity of knowledge.
These fears of appropriation and standardization shape the organizational strategies of peasant seed movements when it comes to adopting digital tools. Thus, in a context of struggle where the threat is strong, activist movements favor defensive strategies that may, in part, curb their proactive alternative potential.
Our action research thus attests to a reluctant stance toward the use of digital technology for managing farm seeds and sharing related knowledge. These conclusions highlight a major condition for the pooling of seeds and associated knowledge through new tools such as digital technology: the relaxation of legal constraints that currently confine our relationship with living organisms to a commercial model that is too far removed from nature.
George Aboueldahab, Professor, EDC Paris Business School; Myriam Kessari, Lecturer-Researcher at the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute of Montpellier, University of Montpellier and Florence Palpacu, University Professor in Management Sciences, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.