Introduction: Commoning the seeds: the futures of agrobiodiversity and food security

This chapter re-examines the recent history of the commons in plant breeding. It shows the critical change in breeders’ experimental culture at the turn of the 20th century, highlights the impact it had on farmer seed networks and small-scale farmer and its detrimental effect on agrobiodiversity. Awareness of the destruction of the ‘commons’ led professional breeders and the international community to take a series of steps towards the preservation of agrobiodiversity, including the adoption, in 1983, of the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture declaring plant genetic resources ‘a heritage of mankind’. More recently, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (or the Plant Treaty) (ITPGRF) has achieved to establish a first global commons relying on the virtual pooling of 64 specifically identified crops and forages. These attempts, the article goes on to say, are doomed to failure because they are premised on a reductionist vision of seed as a ‘resource’ for plant breeding and biotechnology. This vision is itself inherited from a sort of Kantian cosmopolitanism that permeates all our allegedly ‘modern’ categories, and it renders us unable to meet the challenges posed by the advent of the Anthropocene, namely, to include hybrids and non-humans and to include and respect others, i.e. other cultures, cosmographies and ontologies. The only way out of the impasse, the chapter contends, is to support the local bio-commons i.e. seed managed by local and indigenous communities and farmers throughout the world in that they offer a real opportunity to guarantee the sustainable use and conservation of agrobiodiversity. In order to do so, and without breaking with the legal framework as it currently stands, the chapter proposes a new non-instrumental and non-anthropocentric ethic, while suggesting to design new procedures, inspired by the diplomatic practice and knowledge, aimed at arbitrating conflicting values and principles on a case-by-case basis. With the new ethic at hands, the chapter offers to reinterpret the great bulk of international treaties and domestic legislations in a way that would give more weight to the right to save seeds and to farmer-to-farmer seed exchanges; that would also give more say to local and indigenous communities, and would genuinely account for their practices, customs, rituals and cosmographies that regulate seed sourcing and seed exchanges that must not be conflated with ‘institutions for collective action’ within the meaning of Ostrom’s theory.