Re-purposing the master's tools: the open source seed initiative and the struggle for seed sovereignty

Abstract

‘Food sovereignty’ must necessarily encompass ‘seed sovereignty’. Corporate appropriation of plant genetic resources, development of transgenic crops and the global imposition of intellectual property rights are now widely recognized as serious constraints on the free exchange of seeds and the development of new cultivars by farmers, public breeders and small seed companies. In response, an Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) has been launched in the United States to apply legal mechanisms drawn from the open source software movement to plant breeding. An open source license is a tool constituted by the provisions of contract law. It is a tool of the master inasmuch as the structure of the legal system has been designed to facilitate the activities of the dominant stakeholders in the overarching social formation. This paper assesses the problematics of re-purposing such a tool by examining the issues that have been raised in OSSI's efforts to develop its licenses and to transmit its sense of their potential to prospective allies. Through an examination of the expressed positions of La Vía Campesina and Navdanya on the nature of ‘seed sovereignty’, the compatibilities and disjunctures of OSSI's stance with those of potential allies in the food sovereignty movement are assessed.

Keywords:

• food sovereignty
• seed sovereignty
• genetic resources
• plant breeding
• seeds
• intellectual property rights
• open source

Additional information

Jack Kloppenburg works in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has studied the social impacts of biotechnology, the controversy over control of genetic resources and the prospects for framing ‘foodsheds’ as an analytical basis for developing sustainable food systems. He is currently jazzed by the potential of ‘food sovereignty’ and by the possible application of ‘open source’ principles to plant breeding. He is a founder of the Open Source Seed Initiative.