Saving, sharing and shaping landrace seeds in commons: unravelling seed commoning norms for furthering agrobiodiversity

作者：Emil Sandström, Tove Anna Ortman, Christine A. Watson, Jan Bengtsson, Clara Gustafsson, Göran Bergkvist · 发表于：Agriculture and Human Values · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1007/s10460-024-10581-4 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development、Genetically Modified Organisms Research、Reproductive Health and Technologies

Abstract One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for l...