The ownership of seeds
An introduction to this newsletter and my research on the privatization of seeds
A historic, monumental and little-noticed shift
Humans began planting food and crop seeds about 10,000 years ago and they’ve been experimenting with them ever since: Let’s see what happens when we grow this plant in the shade rather than full sun; we’re intrigued that this plant produced many seeds even though others like it shriveled back to their roots; surprisingly, this batch of seeds germinated well despite poor storage conditions. Since agriculture began, selecting, sowing, nurturing, and harvesting seeds has been an intricate, creative, and constantly evolving relationship among plants, soils, local ecosystems, humans, and other foragers.
Seeds from my garden and gifts from seed savers I have interviewed
For 99% of those millennia, food and crop seeds constitute a community resource. They may be sowed and stored by individuals or families, but seeds are one of two essential assets any community must conserve in common: unless we produce and cherish a rising generation of children and unless we produce and cherish a pool of food and crop seeds for future growing, devastation sits on the horizon. However, in the past century or so, this relationship between growers and seeds has shifted dramatically from seeds as a form of community resource to plant genetics as an item of privatized property (and the change in terminology is significant, as I will discuss in a future post). The implications of this historic transition — which is the focus of my research over the past decade and will be one of the main topics of my newsletter — are monumental, not widely understood and rarely noticed in public debate.
Over the past decade, I primarily have focused on three levels: 1) international: the framework of intellectual property law and international governmental organizations and the importance of international and multinational seed banks; 2) communities: the role of grassroots seed sovereignty movements, especially the ones arising from peasant, traditional, and indigenous communities, and 3) individuals: seed savers and distributors who have helped disappearing varieties of food and crop seeds find new homes and lives. As this newsletter develops, you’ll see that I’m troubled by some of the changes I see occurring on these three levels, heartened by others, and worried by the lack of attention to the foundational shift taking place, but that won’t mean I’m telling simple stories of evil-doers and heroes. Seven decades of personal experience and others’ testimony have taught me that life is more complicated and contradictory, and in the case of my work on seeds, I have seen plentiful evidence of both ill will and narrow-mindedness and good intentions that lead to unintended, and sometimes undesirable, consequences.
Core questions
This newsletter’s About page gives you a bit of my background and describes the range of stories I will share, which go well beyond this research topic. Here, in this first post, I want to introduce you to a few central questions that spur my research and writing on the ownership of seeds.
What is driving this historic change in understandings of seeds? To put it bluntly, political beliefs are a key component. Human attitudes toward food and crop seeds are not now and never have been uniform; even when seeds are protected as a form of community wealth, they have been played as jigsaw pieces in the puzzles of power. That said, the direction and force of the transition toward privatized property rights is unmistakably evident in patent law, court rulings, and the everyday language that accompanies purchases of seed. The causes are multiple, to be sure, but political structures reflect our political beliefs, including the ways that groups in varying positions of power define the right of property, its origin, and maintenance. Likewise, our diverging understandings of seeds (that is, what constitutes “seedness”) lead to dramatically different beliefs about what parts of a seed, if anything, can be “owned.” Numerous people, including some I have interviewed, provide stories that can help us understand the different concepts and beliefs that are at play.
What does this shift toward intellectual property of seeds tell us about different understandings of justice? This aspect grabbed my attention most stridently when I was attending a session of the World Intellectual Property Organization Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore in Rome in 2016. National delegations debated the wording and wisdom of a forthcoming international treaty (finally approved in May 2024) and the discussion was vigorous, often antagonistic, sometimes hostile — and all debaters relied on arguments about justice. Those who argued for protection of traditional knowledge regarding seeds and plants called for just treatment of indigenous and traditional communities; other delegations emphasized the justice embedded in intellectual property rights (IPR) that patent law accords to plant breeders. Clearly, the question was not whether justice should be upheld but which theory of justice will prevail. In some of my recent work, I have responded by laying out the debate’s two main theories of justice, and this in turn leads us to the third question: What exactly is the problem?
Is this shift toward privatized property rights over plant genetics a problem or merely a historical development? How threatened should we feel, and how does our study of the previous two questions guide us in this third area? On the one hand, if our political beliefs place a high value on private property rights and if our understanding of justice is based on legal protection of those rights, we are likely to see the institutionalization of IPR over plant genetics (with attentiveness to traditional knowledge) as progress, not a problem. If a problem exists, it is the unwillingness of those who do not sufficiently respect the value of investment in research and development. On the other hand, if our political ideas leave us reluctant or unable to endorse the privatized ownership of seeds, which we regard as a violation of justice based on community wealth, we are likely to regard the growing international system of IPR over plant genetics as a significant threat. Again, political ideas and beliefs are at the center of whether and how we identify the core problem.
What options do we have? While much of the resistance to IPR law focuses on its threat to indigenous and traditional communities, can these communities take a contrary approach by using legal protection such as Plant Variety Protection certification in the U.S. to keep others from stealing their own plant breeding successes? Also, is the new WIPO agreement that was finalized last month an essential cautionary step or a further cementing of the IPO regime, and should we encourage our countries to become signers? Closer to home, do we as farmers, gardeners, cooks, and eaters have ways of influencing what happens next? Can we take actions on the international, community, and/or individual level that could affect the future of seed diversity, seed ownership, and seed access?
Seeds stored for the next year; Tamil Nadu, India (personal photo)
What do I hope to build with this newsletter? What can readers expect?
As noted in my About section, I plan to write a lot about the ownership of seeds but also share essays on experiences and observations on rural life, gardening and food production, and our relationships with the land and its inhabitants in our current political and ecological world. I hope to post about once every week to 10 days but make no firm commitment, as it will depend on other driving forces in life.
I am slowly working on a book manuscript at the same time as I post this newsletter, and I hope readers’ responses will help guide me as I work on these projects. In some cases, this newsletter will include drafts that I will revise and edit for the book and other publications. I do not plan to create a subscription paywall at this point, so all posts are visible to subscribers and non-subscribers (but subscriptions are greatly appreciated). My head and my notebooks are full of information and ideas that I want to offer for conversation, which is my definition of a good time. We can’t share a glass of wine while we do it, but we can still talk things through and see where the ideas lead.
To give you a sense of what’s coming up, here are topics I plan to write about in coming months:
My sense of place: west-central Minnesota as home
Review of the new World Intellectual Property Organization agreement on intellectual property, plant genetics, and traditional knowledge
How an indigenous nation can use intellectual property law to guard its own seed development project
Preliminary notes on seed sovereignty projects in Scotland
Current stories from my garden, root cellar, and freezer (I am a farmer at heart)
Seed ownership, seed sovereignty, and two contrasting theories of justice
Raising geese and my efforts to honor “gooseness”
The modern linguistic shift from “seeds” to “plant genetics”
Political, agricultural, and culinary menus of millet: the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective
Famine, self-sufficiency, and Cuba’s “green” revolution
The meaning of “farmers’ rights” and “benefit-sharing” in international law
Learning to cane chairs from my Grandpa Butch and Grandma Margaret, who struggled to survive as farmers during the Dust Bowl in South Dakota
A deep-time home for seeds in the High Arctic: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (photo below)
Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 2014 (personal photo)
Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again soon!