![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the organisational dynamics of movements claiming for a peasant reappropriation of seeds, in a context where genetic resources issued from Participatory Plant Breeding programmes involving farmers are getting official recognition from the European Union. The two organisations in France and Italy under scrutiny illustrate different pathways. Drawing on Kriesi's framework, we interpret them as trajectories of institutionalisation, commercialisation, and conviviality. Whether or not seed activists should attempt to change the world from within institutions or from outside is highly disputed and remains open. It leads up to the connected issue of social base participation and internal democracy.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the members of the two organisations studied here, for the time and interest they have dedicated to this research, either through interviews or through critical reviewing of our first drafts. Karine Peschard, Edouard Morena, Stefano Mori, and three anonymous reviewers have also provided us valuable comments which have greatly helped us maturing the analysis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Such transformation has been more recent and rapid, and may still be incomplete, in former Soviet countries, which have more recently integrated the European Union.
2 We cannot go into the detail of each national legal framework but we must at least mention that newly bred plant varieties are ruled in Europe by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, known as UPOV and set up in 1961. The 1991 version of the UPOV Convention restricted the farmers’ privilege to resow seed harvested from protected varieties for their own use (Dutfield Citation2018, 28–29). Such provision has been incorporated in European law through the European Regulation CE 2001/1994.
3 Participatory Plant Breeding is a decentralized, transdisciplinary and multi-actor process of plants selection, commonly based on collaborations between farmers and breeders (geneticists and agronomists). It usually leads to genetically heterogeneous materials – that is plant varieties that are not distinct, uniform and stable (the so-called DUS criteria required for the registration and commercialitation of seeds) – more adapted to the characteristics of the territory, to agro-ecological cultivation practices and to the needs of the farmers who have selected them (Ceccarelli and Grando Citation2007; Dawson et al. Citation2011).
4 ‘The political tactics of La Vía Campesina are more ‘outside’ than ‘inside’, and protest than lobby, though La Vía Campesina does sometimes engage in coordinated inside-outside strategies with its allies and does lobby’ (Martínez-Torres and Rosset Citation2010, 163).
5 E. Demeulenaere has followed the French Peasant Seeds Network since 2005, both as an ethnographer and a regular member. Y. Piersante has worked in 2008–2009 for Crocevia, one of the founding associations of the Italian Rural Seeds Network, and is a member of the Board since 2012. In the frame of her PhD, which proposed a comparative study of the French and the Italian seed movements, she has conducted about thirty-five interviews. Our analysis draws on these interviews, as well as on participant observations in annual general meetings, working groups, field trial visits, roundtables and public events, on written documents produced by both movements, and finally on the critical feedback we received from our interviewees.
6 See note 2.
7 The importance of multiple affiliations in the emergence of networks supporting new causes has been commented on by della Porta and Diani (Citation1999).
8 Biodynamic is an holistic approach to farming inspired by the 1924 lectures to farmers given by anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner calling for a new way to integrate scientific understanding with a recognition of spirit in nature.
9 Biodiversité Echanges et Diffusion d'Expériences, literally ‘Biodiversity, Exchanges and Experience Diffusion.’
10 What peasant seeds are is regularly rediscussed collectively within the RSP General Assembly. The latest definition adopted to date (2019) emphasizes that peasant seeds are a ‘commons’ inscribed in a co-evolution between crops, communities and territories (see https://www.semencespaysannes.org/les-semences-paysannes/qui-sommes-nous.html, Accessed on April 21, 2020). This reframing of peasant seeds as a commons bears witness that RSP claims are no longer focused on a general recognition of farmers’ rights over seed exchange and on-farm management, but specifically affirm the rights and practices of the commoners who sustain them. As we shall see below, this evolution is inseparable from the redefinition of action strategies, which aim to move away from commitments with political institutions to give priority to capacity building in the fields.
11 On the critical potential of the concept ‘peasant seeds’, see Demeulenaere (Citation2014).
12 The majority of these programmes were funded by the subsequent European research and innovation agenda (6th and 7th Framework Programme, and lastly H2020). Farm Seed Opportunities, (FP6, 2007–2010), for ‘Opportunities for farm seed conservation, breeding and production’ - 6 countries, 12 partners; SOLIBAM (FP7, 2010–2014), for ‘Strategies for Organic and Low Input Integrated Breeding and Management’ - 12 countries, 23 partners; DIVERSIFOOD (H2020, 2015–2019), ‘Embedding crop diversity and networking for local high-quality food systems’ - 12 countries, 21 partners. A number of research projects have also been funded by the French research agency (ANR): Wheatamix (on mixes of wheat varieties) (2014–2018); BAKERY (Diversity and interactions in a low-input ‘Wheat/Human/Sourdough’ agro-food ecosystem: towards a better understanding of bakery sustainability) (2014–2018).
13 The Peasant Confederation is a founding member of La Vía Campesina, via the European Peasant Coordination renamed in 2008 as the European Coordination Via Campesina (ECVC).
14 RSP members were present in the following committees, under different hats: the steering committee of the Foundation for research on biodiversity (FRB), where there is now a commission on the French actions with the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); CTPS – Permanent Technical Committee for plant breeding, a public body that organised consultation between the French state and professional groups with professional stakes in seeds and plants; the working group ‘Seeds and sustainable agriculture’ (Semences & Agriculture durable) at the Ministry of Agriculture; the Economic, Ethical and Social Council within the Higher Council for Biotechnology (Haut Conseil des Biotechnologies, HCB), a consultative body to help French lawmakers regulate GMOs and other kinds of biotechnologies; and at the international level, through La Vía Campesina, the FAO International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA).
15 Law n° 2011–1843 of 8 December 2011 on plant variety protection.
16 The last presidential elections in 2017, where traditional political parties have collapsed, and the Gilets jaunes movement of Fall 2018 are two manifestations of the rising distrust of political parties and unions among the French population.
17 Without going into the details, one should mention as well the commercial agreement established between a member organisation of the RSP and the supermarket group Carrefour which became another bone of contention between the members close to the Confederation paysanne and other members.
18 Renamed Bioversity International in December 2006.
19 Renamed Ministry of Agricultural, Food, Forestry and Tourism Policies (MiPAAFT) in 2006.
20 Coldiretti is an agricultural union founded in 1944, with 1.6 million members in 2018.
21 Italian Farmers Confederation (Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori) is a professional agricultural organisation founded in 1977, which currently has around 900,000 members.
22 The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) is a comprehensive international agreement pertaining to the conservation, exchange and sustainable use of the plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA). Signed in 2001, it established farmers’ rights to the protection of traditional knowledge, equitable benefit sharing and the right to participate in decisions regarding the management of PGRFA.
23 The National Rural Network is a MiPAAFT programme that accompanies and integrates the activities related to the development of rural areas for the period 2014–2020.
24 Inspired by the Open Source Seed Initiative – an experiment born in the US few years ago, which has devised a seed marketing system based on Open Source principles (Kloppenburg Citation2014) - the RSR is experimenting a new form of plant variety rights. At this stage it is not (yet) a registered brand, but a tool for the recognition of the collective innovation work that provides benefit sharing principles. Even though it is not legally binding, the message on the label on the seedlots on sale contains a pledge that every farmer buying these seeds is free to continue and make available the results of the population selection processes, and commits himself not to limit the use of the seeds purchased and its derivatives through patents or forms of intellectual property.
25 della Porta and Diani (Citation1999, 145) offer a quite similar analysis, with the notion of ‘professional social movement organisation’. According to them, these types of organisation are characterised by a low rate of participation by the associative base in decision-making processes and organisational policies; professional staff who largely determine the positions adopted by the organisation towards various issues; and leaders who rely more on their reputation as technical experts on specific matters than on mass mobilisation (see also McCarthy and Zald Citation1987 [1973]).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Elise Demeulenaere
Elise Demeulenaere is an environmental anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), currently working within the Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris. Since 2005 she has been following French mobilisations for a peasant reappropriation of seeds.
Yvonne Piersante
Yvonne Piersante defended in 2019 a PhD in rural sociology at the University of Calabria (UNICAL, Italy), prepared under the co-supervision of Alessandra Corrado, and Elise Demeulenaere during her research periods in France. She proposed a comparative analysis of seed movements in Italy and France. She has been for seven years a seed activist in the Rete Semi Rurali. Since 2012 she is in the Board of Directors of Crocevia NGO.