Seeds of kin, kin of seeds: The commodification of organic seeds and social relations in Costa Rica...

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relations in Costa Rica and LatviaSeeds of kin, kin of seeds: The commodification of organic seeds and social

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Article

Seeds of kin, kin of seeds:The commodification oforganic seeds and socialrelations in Costa Ricaand Latvia

Guntra A. AistaraCentral European University, Budapest, Hungary

Abstract

This article employs multi-sited ethnography as a tool to explore the relationships

among farmer seed exchange practices, intellectual property rights legislation, and bio-

diversity. Specifically, it investigates these issues in the historically, ecologically and cul-

turally diverse contexts of the Costa Rican and Latvian organic agriculture movements,

as these small countries negotiate their places in the economic trading blocs of the

Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the European Union (EU),

respectively. The juxtaposition of two such different cases reveals the micro-processes

whereby the imposition of intellectual property rights on seeds replaces the centrality

of social kin networks through which seeds are exchanged with bureaucratic transac-

tions. This shift from exchanging seeds among kin to tracing the genetic lineage of seeds

is part of a global process of commodification and control of seeds. Increasing efforts to

‘‘harmonize’’ intellectual property rights on seeds and plant varieties throughout the

world will have profound impacts on food production, small farmer livelihoods and

social networks, and agricultural biodiversity.

Keywords

biodiversity, free trade agreements, globalization, intellectual property rights, multi-sited

ethnography, organic agriculture, plant variety protection, post-socialism, seed exchange

Whoever has the seeds will be the owner of everything. If you don’t have seeds, you

won’t have anything. Without seeds, what will we eat? People don’t know how impor-

tant it will be when they tell you, ‘You can’t plant this’. We who are older can

understand this. (Costa Rican farmer)

Corresponding author:

Guntra A. Aistara, Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy, Central European University, Nador u.

9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary

Email: [email protected]



A recent study challenges the long-standing claim that agricultural genetic diversitydecreased dramatically in the 20th century due to the imposition of intellectualproperty rights on seeds (Heald and Chapman, 2009). The authors examinethe availability of vegetable seed varieties in commercial seed catalogues in 1903,1983 and 2004, and reveal that there was greater diversity among commercialvegetable seeds available to growers in 2004 than in 1983. They conclude withheartening news for those who feared that agricultural diversity has been steadilydecreasing due to the spread of patents and plant variety protection for breeders:‘If the meaning of diversity is linked to the survival of ancient varieties,then the lessons of the twentieth century are grim. If it refers instead to the mul-tiplicity of present choices available to breeders, then the story is more hopeful’(Heald and Chapman, 2009: 4).1 Here I wish to take up their challenge to ‘initiatea debate on what scientists, economists, anthropologists, and the media shouldmean when they invoke a value-laden word like ‘‘diversity’’’ (Heald andChapman, 2009: 1).

In this article, I question the limited notion of diversity implied above. I seek toreexamine the relationship between intellectual property rights and biodiversitythrough an ethnographic exploration of the cultural meanings attached to organicfarmer seed use, reproduction, and exchange in two radically different and rapidlychanging settings, thus placing the concept of biodiversity into a broader web ofecological, cultural, and political connections. Furthermore, I explore how idiomsof kinship and genealogy are used by both organic farmers who exchange seeds andby plant variety protection institutions to explain their practices, and the implica-tions they hold for the meanings of diversity.

Specifically, I investigate the social and environmental consequences of theimplementation of intellectual property rights on seeds and plant varieties in thehistorically, culturally, and ecologically diverse contexts of Costa Rica and Latvia,as small farmers in these small countries negotiate their entry into the regionaltrade blocs of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and theEuropean Union (EU), respectively.2 Through a multi-sited approach, I askwhat these two distinct stories show us about similar global processes takingshape in particular places.3 I show how multi-sited ethnography can be used as atool for exploring ‘unexpected ways that sites are connected’ (Marcus, 1998) andwhat these connections may reveal about the microprocesses that make up glob-alization (Burawoy, 2000), as well as the diversity of responses to them. Thisapproach is particularly relevant in the face of increasing efforts to harmonizeintellectual property rights legislation across diverse contexts, with profoundimpacts on food production, small farmer livelihoods, social relations, and agri-cultural biodiversity.

My argument is structured according to six social processes I observed in mytwo field sites. I begin with a depiction of seed exchange practices and resultingsocial relations among organic farmers in Costa Rica, and then reflect on theimplications, ecologically and culturally, of the use of the term ‘creole’ to describefarmer-saved seeds. I contrast this to the linear model of genealogical purity

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required by EU legislation and by the Convention on Plant Variety Protection(UPOV)4 which is already in place in Latvia but was strongly resisted in CostaRica as part of the struggle against CAFTA. I further relate the imposition ofintellectual property rights to specific stages in the commodification of seeds andtrace how this impacts farmer subject formation and social relations in each con-text. I argue that the imposition of intellectual property rights replaces networks ofrelatedness as social spaces for seed exchange with bureaucratic and hierarchicalspaces for exchange of permits and paperwork. This is accompanied by a shiftfrom exchanging seeds among kin to tracing the lineage of seeds, which I contendis a necessary step for their commodification and control. In the conclusion Icontrast the implications for agricultural biodiversity of the two models andshow how a redefinition of diversity based on processes and relationships, ratherthan mere numbers of plant varieties, may take these broader cultural concernsinto account.

Exchange

Throughout time, people come and go, but seeds are the link that must continue.

(Costa Rican farmer)

At 7 am on a Saturday morning in November 2006, the University of Costa Ricacampus in Turrialba was already bustling in preparation for the Third AnnualFestival of Semillas Criollas (creole or heirloom seeds) organized by the CostaRican Organic Agriculture Movement (Movimiento para la Agricultura OrganicaCostarricense, henceforth MAOCO). In a large pavilion, about 20 small tables hadbeen set up for farmers, some having traveled two days on various buses in order toarrive there. Their tables were strewn with an array of roots, split-open fruit, seed-lings, cuttings, and seeds. Some had carefully packaged and labeled the seeds, butmany had simple plastic bags with names scrawled on them in a way legible only tothemselves, or no labels at all. As one farmer proudly showed me his assortment, hedescribed the properties and uses of each of the seven varieties of beans, threevarieties of corn, and various herbs and tubers. He mentioned which help preventerosion, improve the soil, or make good animal feed. He had selected some plantsthat were resistant to fire, and others that proved strongest after acid rain.

Besides the technical properties and uses of each seed, each seed also had apersonal story. ‘This one came from my father, who had it for over 50 years.This one comes from my grandfather. And this one I got from an indigenousfarmer several years back.’ This scenario repeated itself as I spoke to variousfarmers. I was impressed by the detailed memories that farmers had of whereeach seed or plant came from. Throughout the day, farmers moved back andforth among the tables, filling up bags with new seeds. There was tangible excite-ment as farmers told me what seeds they had received from other farmers, andwhat their optimal growing conditions and properties were.

492 Ethnography 12(4)



The detailed memory of the origin of each seed demonstrates that seeds are morethan a mere ‘input’ in Costa Rican organic farming systems, but rather play acentral social role as well. Many of the farmers said they never purchased anyseeds, and used only those inherited from their parents or received in exchangefrom other farmers. When I visited farms, farmers showed me the bins upon bins ofseeds that they collect. For the farmers involved, seed saving is also a deeplyemotional practice:

People ask me why I like saving seeds, and I explain . . . I prepare the soil, make a hole,

place the seed in it . . . Then I wait patiently for the seed to germinate, asking my God

to give me a hand. Finally the first little plants emerge from the soil . . . and begin to

flower. It is very moving to see the various pollinators arrive – bees, carpenter bees,

ladybugs, butterflies, hummingbirds, and orchid bees . . . There is no greater emotion

than to see a pod full of eight or ten beans of an intense red color when you are about

to harvest them, and you select the best pods for saving seeds. (Mora, 2008, n.p.)

Organic farmers in Costa Rica also speak of seeds as living creatures, withwhom they collaborate and who they protect, who are their accomplices in achosen way of life (Carazo and Valverde, 2009). This resonates with VanDooren’s (2007) observations that some farmers in the Andes perceive a sense of‘inter-species co-evolutionary kinship’ with certain crops.

In-depth interviews with organic farmers involved in seed exchange revealed thatthey are managing three distinct groups of seeds. Many have a core group of theirseeds that they received from their grandparents or parents, and trace these backfor 50–100 years. While large family sizes in Costa Rica often meant that not allchildren inherited land from their parents, they did inherit seeds and the knowledgehow to cultivate them. Many are now working small parcels they received throughland reform, but using their ancestors’ seeds. A second, much smaller group,includes seeds received casually from friends and neighbors in the last 15–20years. Finally, there is a sizable new group of seeds received in the last two tofive years from other organic farmers in these seed exchange networks.

This last group of seeds marks a distinct and conscious transformation in theway seed knowledge is shared and transmitted – from previous, more informalexchanges with family members to organized seed exchanges with peers. Forinstance, Juan has a backyard farm that is less than half a hectare, but had brought19 varieties of beans, several types of peppers and fruit. He told me his father usedto exchange seeds with his brothers, but now Juan’s own brothers are no longerinterested in seed exchange. Another farmer, Carlos, also noted that since he con-verted to organic agriculture his ties with his brothers, who are conventional farm-ers and not interested in seed exchange, had been weakened. These changes infamilies made the connections to other like-minded organic farmers, fosteredthrough the seed exchanges, all the more important.

The stories of Juan and Carlos suggest that the social networks created throughseed exchanges are an extension of earlier kin networks, which complement and

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may even begin to mimic family relations. One farmer, Andrea, explained:

The exchange of seeds with people changes the relationship to them, makes them more

familiar, and later these relationships are maintained. I see them as part of my family.

I have the possibility that they can come to my house, stay with us – we have a closer

relationship.

Farmers also mentioned the important commitments that come with seedexchange. Juan emphasized that it is important to reproduce seeds so as not tolose them, because if he loses the seeds, he will lose his commitment to his fatherand grandfather, as well as to his daughters. One older woman said she alwaysremembered to whom she had given seeds, and asked the recipients if they hadplanted them. If they had not, she would stop giving them seeds: ‘Once, twice,maybe, but after that. . .’, her voice trailed off with a sigh and a dismissive wave ofher hand. Often as I walked through farmers’ fields, they showed me their smallexperiments along the edges and noted from whom they had received each seed.Their fields became embodiments, quite literally, of the seed exchanges in whichthey had participated, and thus symbolized their common vision for a different typeof farming and community.

Thus, seeds have become the mediator of a new type of social relations, rootedin farmers’ social and ecological values and practices. These new relationships areakin to what Janet Carsten (1995, 2000) has termed ‘cultures of relatedness’, toindicate that people sometimes become ‘related’ not only through blood ties butthrough social practices.5 The changing exchange relations among organic farmersin Costa Rica also parallel Yan’s (2001) observations in rural China, where giftexchanges no longer take place just within kin groups, but among a broader circleof friends and relatives. As networks expand to include a heavy reliance on friend-ship ties as opposed to official kinship relations, they are formed through individualagency rather than inherited connections, in ways that fundamentally alter themeaning and functions of kinship.

Unlike networks for the exchange of inanimate objects, however, seed exchangerelationships in Costa Rica become embodied in living organisms which are repro-duced as objects for further exchange. This gives new significance to the idea ofbiology in kinship relations (Carsten, 2000), because farmers base these new cul-tures of relatedness not on their own biologies, but forge them through thecommon management of other biological species – the plants and their seeds.The new Costa Rican networks of relatedness through seeds are not negating orreplacing existing kin relationships, but as one element of the reciprocal obligationsof kin – that of exchanging seeds – has dropped out of the equation, organicfarmers are responding by creating what are in effect new kin with whom toenact this particular form of exchange.

The significance of seeds for social networks was also demonstrated by their useas a powerful cultural symbol to spread information about both the importance oforganic and traditional agriculture and the threats farmers perceived to their way of




life (Carazo et al., 2007). Several seed exchanges were held in conjunction withcultural festivals, precisely for this reason. One, for example, coincided with thecelebration of the patron saint of the town of San Ramon. Here, the seed festivalincluded mass on Sunday, and the cathedral filled up to where not even standingroom was left. About halfway through the ceremony, an older man and a youngwoman representingMAOCO each took one side of a basket of seeds and brought itup to the altar to be blessed. After blessing the seeds, the priest addressed seeds inthe sermon, comparing them to families, emphasizing that love and nurturing arethe most important elements in maintaining a family, just as they are in cultivatingplants and seeds. At the end of mass, as people embraced to spread peace, repre-sentatives of MAOCO handed the blessed bean seeds around. As the beans slowlyprogressed, hand-to-hand, through the cathedral, people reached for them, whis-pering excitedly. One of the organizers told me how moved she was as she handedseeds to people in the church, because people had really wanted them, and some hadeven asked for more. She explained that she could tell that many of them werefarmers by their calloused, worked hands, and that for them these seeds were areal treasure.

Seeds were also invoked as a symbol of resistance. A seed-spreading ritual sim-ilar to the one performed in the church was performed by MAOCO later that yearat a large anti-CAFTA protest outside the parliament building, because passage ofthe free-trade agreement would require intellectual property rights on seeds, thuspotentially threatening practices of seed exchange. The end of the protest includeda ‘shower of seeds’ thrown at the houses of parliamentarians. This changes dra-matically the symbolism of the seed, reinforcing connections even as a way ofexpressing opposition to those in power.

Thus, seed exchanges are part of a conscious strategy for facing changes inCosta Rica’s socio-economic circumstances that affect the lives of small organicfarmers. These networks combine idioms of family and kinship with new socialforms, bound together by the ritual of seed exchange and the cultural symbolism ofseeds. This process integrates farmers, seeds, pollinators, and environmental fac-tors into a new network, which both creates social and biological continuity andsymbolizes resistance to changes that are seen to threaten it.6

Creolization

For rural persons, the cultivation, care and exchange of semillas criollas [creole seeds]

is a fundamental right. . . . Semillas criollas are the future of our Latin American

countries . . . They are part of our ancestral culture, part of our history, and a piece

of our lives. (Manifesto of the Semilla Criolla, MAOCO, 2007)

Seed exchange festivals are based on an understanding of the farmer as theexpert on seed production, and the need to promote the development and sharingof seed knowledge along with the seeds themselves. The exchange and reproduction

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of seeds is a tradition that many in the Costa Rican organic movement see indanger of disappearing along with the increasing industrialization of agriculture,and its rejuvenation has become a conscious means through which the movement istrying to protect genetic diversity.

Seed exchange has direct connections with and implications for biodiversity,because it promotes the use of a large number of species and varieties, the con-tinuous cross-pollination of landraces, and the establishment of locally-adaptedvarieties. These landraces and local varieties, due to their mixed genetic structure,are more likely to be resistant to pests, diseases, or adverse growing conditions thanare introduced ‘improved’ seeds that have been bred for use with chemical inputsand synthetic fertilizers (Brush, 1999; Cleveland et al., 1994; Salazar et al., 2007;vom Brocke et al., 2003).

Farmers distinguish the seeds they manage from commercial seeds with the termsemillas criollas, or ‘creole’ seeds. Organic farmers in MAOCO were very concernedabout the ecological and political implications of losing control over their seedsupply. Therefore the protection of seeds was also instituted into the landmarknew Costa Rican Law on Organic Agriculture, the approval of which by theLegislative Assembly in 20068 was the culmination of a four-year struggle by themovement. The law carries strong language about the significance and right toexchange semillas criollas, which are defined as ‘seeds that correspond to varietiescultivated and developed by agricultural persons and local communities.Independent of their origin, they are adapted to local agricultural practices andecosystems’ (Asamblea Legislativa de la Republica de Costa Rica, 2007). The lawdeclares that it is the role of the state to ‘promote, stimulate and protect the right ofagricultural persons and organizations to access, use, exchange, multiply and savesemillas criollas, with the aim of preserving the creole genetic heritage for thebenefit of current and future agricultural producers’ (Asamblea Legislativa de laRepublica de Costa Rica, 2007). The combination of these two clauses reveals thatthe genetic heritage that is worth preserving is not limited to certain scientificallydelineated varieties of seeds, but rather to all seeds and propagating material thatlocal farmers have selected, preserved, and exchanged for generations.Furthermore, local adaptation and genetic mixing are crucial.

This definition, particularly the phrase ‘independent of their origin’, is signifi-cant due to the diverse origins of some farmer-saved seed. While many of thefarmers’ seeds are passed down from their families, this does not necessarilyimply that they are landraces. Scientists have a slightly different definition forthe term creolized, meaning that they are a cross between a commercial varietyand a landrace, that after several generations, become treated like landraces andconsidered native by local farmers (Bellon and Risopoulos, 2001; Salazar et al.,2007). For instance, Juan in Costa Rica pointed out to me a few creolized varietiesof corn that his parents ‘made’ by crossing landraces with a commercial varietyobtained as a sample from an extension agent in the 1980s. This practice oftenincreases yields and can allow farmers to select for certain favorable traits (Bellonand Risopoulos, 2001; Salazar et al., 2007), but would be deemed illegal with the




imposition of intellectual property rights on commercial varieties. The wording ofthe law allows both landraces and creolized seeds to be protected, and the termsemillas criollas encompasses both of these groups.

Farmers’ practices of expanding seed exchange to broader social networks havethe potential to increase and greatly change genetic diversity. As seeds travelthroughout the country, they incorporate new traits as they cross-pollinate, andadapt to new climactic and growing conditions.9 As part of the MAOCO project,farmers keep track of how a variety changes as it travels from lowland to uplandclimates, and back again. They believe that while some plants may not be able togrow under more extreme conditions, those that can will be stronger and moreresilient to crises and pests. Brush (1999) summarizes the complex routes of genemigration due to seed exchange:

The needs of farmers to shuffle their seed stock, the biological forces of reproduction,

and the economic forces of crop breeding and technological diffusion produce crop

populations that look very much like cultures – composites of traits and elements from

many sources, some local in origin but many exotic. Just as cultures cannot be

described as bounded or essentially derived entities, neither can crops. Like cultures,

crops survive by transformation in natural and cultural contexts with permeable

boundaries, without definite continuity or authorship, and as heterogeneous rather

than homogeneous entities. (p. 543)

The parallels between changing seeds and changing cultures suggest that it isuseful to consider the origins of the term criollo, originally used to describe peopleof Spanish descent born in the Americas, and the new cultural practices theydeveloped:

. . . the essential and determining condition of having been born in the New World is

not a mere phrase or an accident. The land, vegetation and climate that the colonials

found on the recently discovered continent were so different from those which they left

on the other side of the sea, that in the process of adapting to these new physical

conditions, they improvise cultural solutions, as well, that are distinct from those in

their communities of origin. (Arrom, 1951: 172)

Thus, even in this original usage referring to people and cultural practices, the ideaof adaptation was an incredibly important aspect of what defined criollo, just as itis one of the key factors in the creolization of seeds.

Other meanings of creolization and the contexts in which it happened are alsoinstructive for understanding Costa Rican seeds. Mintz (1971) has urged scholarsto examine the particular historical circumstances that led to the production ofCreole languages, paying particular attention to the relative proportion of differentgroups, and the codes of social interaction that governed relationships betweenthem. We can similarly analyze why the semilla criolla has taken on particularsalience at this particular historical moment in Costa Rica, and become the basis

Aistara 497



of a cultural identity of a group of organic farmers in the current fight againstCAFTA and UPOV. One of the most important factors is the neoliberal turn inagricultural policies in Costa Rica in the 1980s that radically diminished statesupport for agriculture (Edelman, 1999). Many people saw the political divisionin society surrounding CAFTA as the continuation of that battle. One of theconsequences of these policy shifts was that large-scale commercial plantationshave marginalized small-scale producers socially, economically, and geographi-cally. In addition, stereotypes against organic farming as backwards in the faceof agricultural modernization persist. All of these conditions have led organicfarmers to defend their rights to semillas criollas.

The term creolization also has other critical implications for power relations.Stewart (2007) stresses that historically the term was much richer in meaning thanits use in fields such as literature now suggest, where it often refers primarily toprocesses of mixing and continuous change (Balutansky and Sourieau, 1998).When used to describe processes of language change, creolization has also implieda subtle subversive element, a seizure and re-signification of dominant codes(Stewart, 2007). Because of this, Stewart urges us to think about creolization asa form of critical restructuring rather than just ‘mixing’.

Applying these cultural interpretations of creolization to the Costa Rican farm-ers, we see that those organic farmers who began to take part in seed-saving andseed-exchange have consciously differentiated themselves from the norm, creatingand occupying a space of resistance (Carazo and Valverde, 2009). They also do infact take ‘dominant’ commercial seeds and change them physically, in the processassigning them new social meanings as well. The act of producing and reproducingcreole seeds is thus a direct challenge to existing power relations. And as organicfarmers do this, they also restructure their kin networks to form broader cultures ofrelatedness with their peers. This represents a creolization of their kin-basedexchange networks, by adapting to changing conditions and their own culturalpreferences. Thus, creolization of organic seeds and of farmer kin networks actas mutually reinforcing forms of cultural and agricultural resistance.

Paperwork

Seed is grain is seed is grain; the option to produce or to consume is there in each seed.

(Kloppenburg, 1988: 37)

I now turn to the case of the organic farmers in Latvia, to demonstrate a differ-ent constellation of power dynamics and social relations related to seed production.At the 2006 Latvian Organic Agriculture Association (Latvijas bioloisk �as lauksaim-niec�|bas asoci �acija, henceforth LBLA) General Assembly, I was able to observethe moment when legislative changes in seed management were being implemented.Two years after Latvia joined the EU, the Regulation on Mandatory Organic




Seed was about to take effect, and an official from one of the organic certificationinspection agencies was explaining the new rules to the gathered farmers. As part ofthe ‘field to fork’ organic approach, EU regulations had been made stricter, requir-ing that organic farmers use organic seeds for all certified organic crops forwhich they were commercially available. For new EU member states like Latvia,with few or no commercial organic seed producers and only a few state breedingstations that produce organic seed, this regulation would cause a headache, to saythe least. According to the regulation, if organic seed was not readily avail-able, farmers could request a derogation, or temporary exception, to use conven-tional seed.

At the General Assembly, farmers’ jaws dropped as they listened to the upcom-ing changes. Under the new rules, farmers would have to apply in advance forindividual permits to buy the specific variety and amount of conventional seedsthey needed if organic seeds were unavailable. More shockingly, however, farmer-saved seed was no longer to be considered ‘seed’ at all, but would now be referredto as d �|gstosie graudi, or ‘germinating grain’, as if this were an entirely unexpectedproperty of the plant material.10 Although farmers would be allowed to continueusing their own saved d �|gstosie graudi, all seeds they were planning on obtainingfrom outside their own farm (by any means) had to be certified seed, meaning thatthey had to be registered with and tested by the State Plant Protection Departmentto meet varietal purity and quality standards. This would in effect criminalizefarmer seed exchange for certified organic farmers.

This would mean that organic seeds must henceforth be double certified, first asseed, and then as organic. This was the result of the simultaneous implementationof the Organic Seed regulation together with the EU Seed Marketing laws thatrequire seed certification and registration in the European Common Catalog,11 andwas further reinforced by international requirements for plant variety protectionset out in the UPOV treaty.

The consequences of the new requirements could be seen in farmers’ daily lives.The new requirement for double-certified seed caused a variety of problems forfarmers who had begun saving and trading seed with neighbors since they regainedtheir farms after independence in the 1990s. Initially at least, in many post-socialistcontexts this was done mostly to save money (Verdery, 2003). But during the 15years of independence, some organic farmers in Latvia had invested time andenergy in adapting seeds to local and organic growing conditions. The new problemfor most farmers would not be ensuring that their seed was certified organic: all oftheir farms were already certified organic. The real problem would be ensuring the‘quality’ of seed through official certification.

The perverse effect that emerged from the implementation of these two sets oflaws together was that the use of imported, conventional ‘seeds’ was favored overnative or locally adapted, organic ‘germinating grains’. While many organic farm-ers agreed that organic seeds were important for the production of organic food,I heard many grumblings afterwards about the new regulation. Some claimed theyhad called all the breeding stations and that there were none of the seeds they

Aistara 499



needed. Others were dismayed that they could no longer buy seeds from theirneighbors and colleagues, whose ‘germinating grains’ they knew and trusted.

I also heard exasperation from state officials about the fact that so few farmershad registered as ‘seed’ growers, despite the fact that new subsidies were beingoffered to encourage this specialization. In the first year, in fact, most of the sub-sidies went unused. From the perspective of the farmers, however, the process wasnot so simple. An older farmer, Nat�alija, told me that she recalled all the stages ofhow her mother used to produce carrot seeds. She was considering taking out theseed growers’ subsidy, because she knew that most of the younger people in hervegetable cooperative had never actually participated in the seed production pro-cess. Only their grandparents would remember, because seed production had beencentralized on kolhozes (collective farms) during Soviet times. At the next meetingof the vegetable co-op, she proposed applying for the subsidy, but the cooperativewas scared by the strict requirements and initial investments, and finally decidednot to apply.

The requirements for seed certification are undeniably complex. According toa diagram on the State Plant Protection Agency’s website (State Plant ProtectionService, n.d.), in order to certify seeds, the grower must register in the seedgrowers’ registry, and the plant variety must be registered in the LatvianPlant Variety Catalog. Then the grower must obtain permission from theowner of the variety to reproduce the seed. The seeds are tested in laboratoriesfor germination rates, moisture percentage and disease, as well as for the uni-formity of the sample and exhibiting the true characteristics of the variety. Eachstep requires copious documentation and administrative paperwork. This wouldindeed add a whole new dimension, and require a new set of skills, in additionto the process of seed production which Nat�alija recalled from her parents’practices.

It is telling that by the end of 2006, only four farms and several plant breedingstations in the country had registered to produce double-certified seed. One of thesefarmers, Marta, conceded that she had had several problems getting her seed cer-tified. For instance, she grows red clover and timothy grass together in one field,because the clover helps fertilize the timothy in the organic system. This was con-sidered contamination by the seed inspectors, however, and they told her theycould not certify a field with mixed crops. Marta was certain that more peoplehad not registered as organic seed growers because the regulations were too strictand did not meet the particular needs of organic farmers.

As a registered seed grower, Marta must buy fresh ‘foundation’ seed stock fromthe breeding station every few years to ensure that the genetic purity of the materialis not contaminated. I asked Marta what would happen if she didn’t purchase newseeds every few years, but selected her own seeds. At first she was puzzled by theidea, and said, ‘But then my documents would be out of order. . .’ Thinking about itmore, she added that the seed quality would be lost. She explained that the varietywould lose its characteristics, but prefaced her answers with an ambiguous ‘Theysay. . .’ and seemed to become less and less certain of her answers as she spoke.




Finally she concluded that, after all, ‘selection is selection’ and should be done bythe breeding stations, not her, because they have all the appropriate skills andtechnology.

A representative of the State Plant Protection office confirmed that there are noreliable data about how many people are following the rules, and how many arestill purchasing ‘germinating grains’ from their neighbors. If farmers do so, how-ever, they may have problems with organic certifiers, because their papers won’t bein order. In Latvia, then, it was papers and permits rather than seeds that weremediating social relations. Furthermore, relationships were transformed from hor-izontal networks among farmers, to hierarchical relations between experts andfarmers.

Purification

Experience shows that the Plant Protection Agency would prefer that we buy foreign

seeds, not [grow] our own . . . we can’t even talk about this issue. (Latvian farmer)

The emphasis on varietal purity in seed certification and variety protection is con-structed by tracing the genealogy of the seed. Indeed, genealogical idioms aboundin the world of plant breeding and seed certification. Seeds are reproduced in var-ious ‘generations’ and ‘lines’ of descent, and produce ‘progeny’ (United StatesDepartment of Agriculture, 2009). The first generation is the ‘foundation’ or‘basic’ seed, or in kinship terms, the ancestor ‘created’ by the breeder. AsHaraway (cited in Franklin, 2001: 316) has noted, copyrights and intellectual prop-erty rights imply a paternity of a kind, in this case, of a human progenitor and theseed as offspring. In fact, the technical term ‘F1 hybrid’ stands for ‘Filial One’(United States Department of Agriculture, 2009).12 These idioms of paternity ofthe seed create new centers of authority and power that bind breeders together andsubordinate non-breeders, in this case the farmers.

All of these requirements for ‘purity’ in effect exclude farmer breeding tech-niques and enforce a separation between farmers and breeders. In order to registerand protect a new variety under the UPOV treaty, breeders must demonstrate thatit meets four criteria: novelty, distinctness, uniformity, and stability. These criteriaare almost impossible for farmer-breeders to meet, because farmer selection occursat the population level, rather than at the variety level. Farmers working with theirown seeds may allow various crosses to occur. They then select the healthiest plantsthat are best adapted to local conditions, but continue planting various types, as ameans of insurance against changing conditions. The variability among the popu-lation and across generations of farmer-selected varieties makes them more diseaseresistant and better able to adapt to changing growing conditions.13 In short, thediversity-based planting and selection practices of small farmers make the criteriaof uniformity and stability not only nearly impossible to meet, but also undesirable.This incompatibility is summarized by a group of international organic plant

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breeding specialists thus:

Modern plant breeding has aimed at pure lines and . . . use of hybrids, resulting in a

decrease of genetic diversity in conventional varieties. Also genetic diversity at the

regional level is decreasing with few varieties grown over large areas. In search for

implementing more genetic diversity on different levels as a tool for improved yield

stability under organic conditions, the possibilities of landraces and variety mixtures

are explored. But such variety concepts do not fit easily into current official testing and

certification systems. (Welsh and Wolfe, 2002, cited in Lammerts van Bueren et al.,

2007: 102)

The emphasis on purity has the opposite effect on biodiversity than semillascriollas do, because it restricts the number of plant varieties and seeds that canbe marketed. Genetic erosion, or the loss of old varieties, has been attributeddirectly to EU Seed marketing laws and the exclusion of countless varieties ofplants from the European Common Catalogue (Maggioni, 2004; Vellve, 1992).Furthermore, modern breeding techniques depend less and less on landraces orold varieties, but rather ‘predominantly use elite materials composed of breeders’lines and advanced cultivars from breeders’ collections . . . which means they arerecycling uniformity’ (Vellve, 1992: 44).

The emphasis on the genetic purity of the seed for seed certification, in com-bination with the environmental purity required for organic certification, createsa hierarchy of purities. The regulation for organic agriculture prohibits the use ofchemical inputs, but is also aimed at maintaining ecosystem biodiversity by usinga holistic approach, in which the promotion of landraces and genetic mixing arealso very important. While derogations can be obtained for the use of conven-tional seed where organic seed is not available, the same is not true for obtainingderogations to use old varieties or landraces that are not in the EuropeanCommon Catalogue, even if they are organic.14 Thus, the organic integrity ofthe seed, and entire agricultural system, is subordinated to the genetic purity ofthe variety.

Along with this attention to purity of the genetic heritage of seeds comes a needfor documentation and new types of accountability, as evidenced by the paperworkrequired for seed certification. Strathern (2000) has called this type of increasedattention to monitoring ‘audit culture’. While such new institutional arrangementsseem to indicate a lack of trust, they also affirm an increased trust in the system ofmonitoring itself (Power, 1996, cited in Strathern, 2000). The increase in paperworkin Latvia is not restricted to seeds, but also includes monitoring of organic farmers’practices in general (Aistara, 2009). In fact, organic farmers in Latvia often lamen-ted that they spent so much time on documentation that they had little time leftto farm.

Processes of purification also translate into important social processes. De Laet(2000) has traced how processes of purification are used in laboratories andcourtrooms to identify patentable substances, and has simultaneously become




the active style of reasoning in legal classrooms. Latour (1993) has identifiedpurification, or the attempts to separate the realm of ‘nature’ from that of ‘culture’ –despite their constant tendencies to mix – as one of the key processes ofmodernization.

Post-socialist de-collectivization has had an overall effect of re-inscribing line-ages and hierarchies in social relations. As farmers regained access to their familyfarms through de-collectivization, they refocused on family ancestries and geneal-ogies. Verdery (2003: 347) has described how this changed social relations inRomania: ‘Quarrels over land had frayed horizontal ties between kin and neigh-bors, while claiming land had consolidated vertical ties linking ancestors and heirs.’Yet she also notes that hierarchies between experts and farmers were not new,but were also institutionalized in the socialist era on collective farms (Verdery,2003). Latvian farmers who regained their land in the 1990s are also refocusingon ancestral lineages to recreate farmscapes of the past, even as they lament theloss of social relations with peers that were more developed on collective farms.Tracing the purity of seeds rather than encouraging their exchange further sepa-rates farmers from one another and creates new hierarchies among breedersand farmers.

Thus, discourses of purity and lineage are linked directly to practices of power.Tracing the genealogies of seeds inscribes hierarchies, both on seeds and on thepeople managing them. As Cassidy (2009: 24) has noted, genealogical models make‘knowledge of a particular kind’ which present contingency as necessary, andenshrine modernist notions of progress. She reminds us that ‘pedigree thinking’should make us suspicious to explore what particular type of knowledge is created.In the case of seed certification, narratives of purity and expertise necessarilyreplace those of exchange and creolization. The careful attention to, and docu-menting of, the lineage of each seed by the breeder detracts attention from the factthat the exchange of seeds among kin and friends has been replaced with monetaryand paperwork transactions, transforming the nature and possibility of social net-works. Rather than exchanging seeds with kin, as in Costa Rica, European legis-lation and UPOV require tracing the kin of seeds.

Alienation

To provide and promote an effective system for plant variety protection, with the aim

of encouraging the development of new varieties of plants, for the benefit of society.

(Mission of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants,

UPOV)

Both of the models for seed production described above rely on metaphors ofkinship or relatedness, but locate it in critically different places in the productionand reproduction process. Rather than merely a distinction between two field sites,the juxtaposition of these cases reveals crucial micro-processes that allow for the

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commodification of seeds. Kloppenburg, in his account of the history of commod-ification of seeds, notes that: ‘A novel and useful way of thinking about agriculturalresearch is to view it as the incorporation of science into the historical process ofprimitive accumulation and commodification’ (Kloppenburg, 1988: 10). Here Icomplement his analysis by exploring the significance of the practice of seedexchange, or its absence, for commodification.

I would like to suggest that the displacement of the kinship metaphor fromthe social exchange networks to the seed itself is a necessary step in order forthe seed to be controlled. This is equivalent to Marx’s concept of alienation(Marx, 1988 [1932]), whereby people are separated from the fruits of their labor,as well as from the social relations of exchange. Only here, the exchange of the seed isin fact what produces the seed in its current form, taking the place of labor per se.The people exchanging seeds are thus separated from the fruits of their collectivelabor, and one another, if the seeds are removed from their exchange circles.15

By taking seeds out of the context in which they have been selected, saved, andexchanged for generations and turning them into a commodity in a global market,the meaning of kinship in these seeds is transformed. For Costa Rican organicfarmers exchanging seeds, the seeds embody a very real network of past, present,and future kin. The genetic make-up and diversity of these seeds is directly linkedto, and dependent upon, the social kin networks through which they areexchanged. The seeds themselves, as well as the farmers’ fields, are actually madeup of all of their previous kin and exchanges. This can be seen as a variant ofMelanesian personhood where persons come to be composed of other persons withwhom they have engaged in ceremonial exchanges, and are thus dividuals ratherthan individuals (Strathern, 1988, 1991). In Costa Rica, seed exchanges are con-stitutive of the organic farmers’ identity, farming practices, and social relations, aswell as of the genetic make-up of seeds. If the exchange stops, then so will thepreservation and potential of the seeds’ diversity, because the genetic mixing will bearrested.

Heirloom seed companies in the US also use kinship metaphors to market land-races and old varieties as ‘heirloom seeds’ that preserve both natural and culturalbiodiversity:

In such claims molecular genetic kinship is evoked as a fabric of interconnectedness,

manifesting the biological imperative of diversity, and thus the basis of life itself.

Genealogy is the master trope in this web of connections uniting ancient farmer-

cultivators with their modern-day descendants, who are similarly engaged in the pres-

ervation of lineages of seed-value. (Franklin et al., 2000: 81)

Connections facilitated through seed exchanges are rendered impossible in ascenario where a seed from some distant culture in an heirloom seed catalogue ispurchased by a gardener in a North American suburb and rarely saved orexchanged again. Thus, the kinship metaphor is placed onto the seed itself – itbecomes the seeds’ genetic history (rather than the shared farmer-seed-pollinator




social and ecological network that produced it) that makes it ‘heirloom’ (Franklinet al., 2000). And while the seeds may in fact reproduce the genetic history ofexchange up to a certain point in time, they do so in the absence of the socialstructures that made those seeds into a cultural value to begin with.

The displacement of the kinship metaphor results in fetishism of the seed. First, itisolates distinct characteristics of the seed or plant, as distinguished by its variety,from other factors in the agricultural system. This renders them elements that can beimproved upon, rather than parts of a holistic production system, similar to the turntowards ‘total quality management’ that has swept through industries (Dunn, 2004).The isolation of the seed, and its genetic characteristics that must be proven to bedesignated a uniform and stable variety, divorces the seed from the rest of theagricultural production process, and renders the seed replaceable.16

This has important effects on how seed quality is defined and how seeds inter-act with other elements of agricultural systems. The normative language ofEU regulations establishes a clear difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seeds.In Latvia, bad quality seeds were often mentioned to explain problems in theorganic sector. Yet the purchase of higher quality seeds would not help resolvethe broader range of socio-economic issues surrounding infrastructure, markets,and networks that contribute to problems in Latvian organic agriculture. Despitethis, the connection between quality and purity was taken for granted by manyfarmers and officials in Latvia,17 as shown by Marta’s statements relating her seedpapers and quality, quoted above.

In contrast, in Costa Rica no one ever mentioned bad quality seeds. Whenfarmers spoke of traded or saved seeds that had not grown successfully, theyattributed it to the seeds not taking to the soil, climate, or even the farmer – not‘bad seeds’. This is not to say that they did not recognize potential seed defects, but‘quality’ was not used as an umbrella category for problems at the farm level. Whenasked to define ‘good quality’ seeds, they looked just as puzzled as Marta hadlooked at my suggestion that she could select her own seeds: ‘Well, it starts withthe whole growing process. . . . you look at the healthiest plants, the vines with themost pods, the pods with the most beans, the intensity of color. . .’ This attention tothe entire growing process reveals that in Costa Rica seeds are embedded not onlyin a social network of people who exchange them, but in an ecological web as well.Since seeds are not considered good or bad, it is a combination of factors thatdetermine a seed’s success. This approach encourages more experimentation andobservation by farmers.

The alienation of the seed from exchange networks also results in social alien-ation of producers. Strathern (1996) notes that property rights or patents truncatesocial networks, what she calls ‘cutting the network’. This is evident in theEuropean seed system, where seed exchange has all but disappeared in some coun-tries since the imposition of the Seed Marketing laws.18 Farmers become isolatedand deskilled along with the isolation of particular characteristics of varieties, ashas occurred in other industries. In a Gerber plant in post-socialist Poland, forexample, Dunn (2004) observed that workers are ‘privatized’ along with the food

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they produce – reduced to an aggregate of qualities that can be measured separatelyand ultimately replaced. In Alaskan salmon fisheries, ensuring ‘quality’ comesdown to a process of erasing the marks of labor, so that it appears that thefish ‘spring effortlessly from pristine waters’ directly to the plate (Hebert, 2008).For seeds, then, it is both nature and the farmers’ labor that must be erased.There should be no cross-pollination or adaptation, and the seed reproducedin the field should be identical to that which the breeder ‘created’ and certifiedin a state laboratory. Both ‘nature’ and the grower are controlled by the state, inconjunction with the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. The paper trail becomesthe ‘paper panopticum’ (Dunn, 2004) which controls the farmers. This mediateshierarchical relationships between farmers, scientists, and officials, rather than theexchange of seeds mediating horizontal connections among farmers.

The production of ‘legible’ (Scott, 1998) seeds and subjects by EU’s SeedMarketing laws mandates a particular type of knowledge.19 If in Costa Rica thefarmer was the expert, in Latvia, the farmers and their knowledge were ‘down-graded’ along with farmer-saved ‘germinating grains’. In EU-funded organic agri-culture courses farmers learned the steps involved in seed certification and thecalculation of germination rates rather than seed-saving or selection practices. Iobserved frustrated expressions on farmers’ faces at a variety of such seminars.The new names, units, and formulas brought into the Latvian countryside alongwith EU accession replaced Soviet terms, which in turn had replaced Latvian termsfrom the first independence period. They therefore represent a succession of politicalshifts of domination and control embodied in farming practices mandated by newpolicies. EU skepticism in Latvia has been growing steadily since accession, and itwas not uncommon at seminars to hear exasperated farmers conclude that they hadbeen simply thrown ‘from one Union to another’, and that Moscow had actuallybeen easier to understand than Brussels. While there is a clear qualitative differencebetween Soviet occupation and voluntary EU accession, in practical everyday termsit makes little difference to the farmers who is telling them how to farm.

The various steps outlined here, of removing seeds from exchange circles, trac-ing their genealogies, isolating their characteristics, and removing all traces ofnature and labor, are all crucial for transforming seeds into anonymous, market-able goods. The difference in the location of the kinship metaphor – in the socialnetwork or within the seed itself – parallels the distinction that Roberts (2007)draws between the way that US discourses surrounding embryos for in-vitro fer-tilization emphasize the ‘life’ of the embryo, while those in Ecuador stress theembryo’s kin. In Ecuador this leads to reservations about freezing and preserving‘extra embryos’, because they would in effect be abandoned by their parents.In contrast, in the US each embryo is considered a ‘life’ that has been providedby an anonymous donor, and could be adopted by any, anonymous kin.This alienation of the embryos from their kin facilitates not only their preservation,but also their ‘free trade’. Similarly, the shift from planting seeds of kin to tracingthe kin of seeds enables seeds to become anonymous commodities ripe for‘free trade’.




Harmonization

Seeds are ours, yours, everyone’s . . .There is a threat now of patents and that you can

go to jail. But if I have to put them in a little box and hide them until I can take them

out again, I will do it. (Costa Rican farmer)

The free trade of seeds is accomplished through the seemingly benign concept of‘harmonization’. Harmonization of intellectual property rights legislation ismeant to simplify trade among states by making laws and standards equivalent,yet produces a range of other effects as well. The 1994 World Trade Organization(WTO) Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement requiredall WTO members to adopt some form of plant variety protection, spurringrapid growth in the membership of the UPOV Convention (Jordens,2005). De Laet (2000: 152) has traced how patents ‘travel’, noting thatthere seems to be an assumption on the part of patent offices that patents ‘canbe transported with little effort and to universal effect’. Similarly in the world ofplant variety protection, there seems to be an assumption that similar laws canbe effortlessly implemented in very different contexts under the rubric ofharmonization.

In fact, harmonization of legislation, required by Latvia to join the EU, and byCosta Rica to implement CAFTA, has been one of the more contentious aspects offree trade agreements, because it is unidirectional and necessarily involves keyconcessions in terms of national sovereignty in decision-making. All relevantlaws must be re-made to fit mandates of regional or international treaties, disre-garding previous debates and accords at the national level. Like purification, har-monization of national legislation is a process that also creates a line of descent, inthis case from the international UPOV treaty to national and local laws, whichmust remain pure and true to their ancestor, despite variations in local histories,cultures, and processes of adaptation. Harmonization, then, is a term that masksthe creation of new hierarchies and covers up discord below the surface.Harmonization is the purification of the genealogy of law.

Situating debates about UPOV in Latvia and Costa Rica in their respectivelegislative and political histories can help us understand some of these previousdebates and lineages. The move in Latvia towards double certification and theassociated hierarchization of social relations was not unprecedented. The historyof seed testing is presented on the Latvian State Plant Protection Service website asnearly seamless from 1875 to the present (Valsts augu aizsardz�|bas dienests, 2005).The first testing office was opened under the Russian czars, and commercial seedtesting began in 1923 during Latvia’s brief independence period. These systemscontinued through the Soviet years, where breeding and seed growing institutionswere also hierarchized. In fact, for a society built upon the image of egalitarianismsuch as the Soviet Union, the vocabulary used in seed production was anything but.Specialized state breeding stations and state farms (sovhozes) grew ‘elite’ and‘superelite’ seeds, the progeny of which they provided to specialized seed kolhozes,

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which grew seed and distributed seed to other collective farms (Great SovietEncyclopedia, 1979).20

After independence in 1991, harmonization to international treaties and EUlegislation was almost the raison d’etre of the new Latvian parliament. Latvia’sfirst plant variety protection law was adopted together with three other intellectualproperty rights laws in 1993. The justification provided in parliamentary debateswas that Latvia should follow the example of ‘all civilized nations’ that havealready accepted such laws. The proof of the quality of the laws was that theywere based entirely on model laws prepared by international agencies. (LatvijasRepublikas Augst�ak�a Padome 1992). Re-creation of Latvia’s first intellectual prop-erty laws, passed during the first independence period in the 1930s was part of whatEglitis (2002) has called ‘political normalization’.

The plant variety protection law, however, would be the first in the history ofLatvia. Interestingly, the promoter of the law used very similar arguments for pro-tecting State breeders’ varieties as those often used to justify protecting farmervarieties or semillas criollas in Costa Rica: they are better adapted to local condi-tions, could thus increase yields and reduce the use of agrochemicals. In fact, thedebate in parliament that day was entirely about breeders and their problemsbecause they were not receiving monetary compensation for their varieties, onlyever-dwindling state support (Latvijas Republikas Augst�ak�a Padome, 1992).

Farmers, and their rights to reproduce seeds, were never mentioned in the debateon plant variety protection. This is in part because the concept of ‘farmers’ itselfwas in fact being re-constituted through legislative action at the very same time.Latvia’s de-collectivization and land reform had begun only in 1990, and privati-zation of land was not yet complete. Thus, ‘farmers’ did not exist as a social classwith a long history and set of skills and rights to be considered. Breeders, who hadexisted throughout the Soviet period, rather than farmers, played the central role inthe genealogy of this law.

Harmonization, like purification, brings with it implied contingency and neces-sity. For the promoters of the law and for the State Plant Protection Service, thefact that seed certification and breeding started as early in Latvia as it did in otherparts of Europe symbolically affirms Latvia as a part of Europe. The first indepen-dence period when seed certification was institutionalized is the reference point formany Latvians as a prosperous time (Eglitis, 2002). Drawing on these ‘seeds of thepast’ is in its own way a reenactment of genealogical idioms, by tracing Latviannational ancestry in the ‘family of Europe’. All of this helps to explain why the lawon plant variety protection went largely unnoticed and a ‘farmers’ rights’ debatehas never really emerged.

The proposed changes in Costa Rica’s legislation came at an entirely differenthistorical juncture than those in Latvia. The history of the National Seeds Office,responsible for plant variety protection in Costa Rica, is very telling. The Officewas created only in 1981, as an outcome of the 1978 Seed Law, coinciding withmany of the neoliberal reforms that farmers protested vehemently in the 1980s as abreach of the social welfare state (Edelman, 1999). CAFTA and UPOV were seen




by many as the final stage in that ‘take-over’ of the agricultural sector by corporateand US interests. Thus, rather than symbolizing the ‘seeds of the past’, CAFTA,UPOV, and seed certification were the seeds of unwelcome change, and activistsmounted strong resistance.

Farmers and activists in Costa Rica feared the subordination of national legis-lation. In fact, the Legislative Assembly had already rejected joining UPOV twicein 1999 and 2002 (Rodriguez, 2008). Joining UPOV was originally proposed tomeet the WTO requirement for plant variety protection. The BiodiversityCoordination Network lobbied successfully that UPOV was not the only way tomeet the requirement, and proposed an alternate bill on plant variety protection,but it had never been approved.21 CAFTA, however, explicitly required that CostaRica join UPOV, which was contentious because it would have higher standingthan the new national Organic Law, and would require the altering, or ‘harmoniz-ing’, of 13 other laws, each of which represented a previous set of negotiations andcompromises.

The changes required to harmonize Costa Rican seed legislation would potentiallythreaten farmer seed practices in a number of ways. First, they would eliminate theability of farmers to cross their own seeds with commercial varieties to produce newcreolized varieties, because it would require farmers to obtain permission from and/or provide payment to the breeder in order to reproduce any seeds subject to varietyprotection (Rodriguez, 2008). Participating countries may make exceptions for farm-ers to reuse seed under certain circumstances under a clause called ‘the Farmers’Exception’, but the Convention has been amended various times, making it progres-sively more restrictive of farmer seed-saving options and who can be considered abreeder.22 Second, the emphasis on pure, stable, uniform varieties would discountfarmers as breeders and devalue the mixed genetic nature of farmer-saved semillascriollas. Third, despite assurances made while negotiating CAFTA that farmer seedswould remain largely unaffected, proposed changes would also require the registra-tion of all farmer-saved seed varieties (Red de Coordinacion en Biodiversidad, 2008).As in Latvia, this would add bureaucracy and legal monitoring to farmer practices,subordinating local practices to national and international control. Finally, manyfarmers feared that joining UPOV would allow breeders to ‘steal’ farmer varieties, asin the case of the Enola bean (RAFI, 2000).

Thus, the issue of ‘privatizing seeds’ represented by the UPOV conventionbecame one of the more contentious and visible issues in the fight against imple-menting CAFTA. The debate resulted in an attempt to hold a national referendumon UPOV. Supporters collected over 100,000 signatures in a period of a fewmonths, but the Legislative Assembly passed the bill on plant variety protectionin 2008 before signature collection for the referendum had ended, resulting in thecacophonous harmonization of Costa Rica’s laws.

This final example shows the far-ranging effects of the ‘harmonization’ of leg-islation. On one hand, it inscribes genealogies of lawful, legible subjects, such as thebreeders whose rights are protected in Latvia. Simultaneously, harmonizationexcludes other genealogies, such as those of the organic farmers in Costa Rica,

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whose rights had been protected under the national Organic Law but could now beoverruled.

Reconnecting diversity

Seeds are a gift of nature, of past generations and diverse cultures . . . Seeds

are the first link in the food chain, the embodiment of biological and cultural

diversity, and the repository of life’s future evolution. (Manifesto on the

Future of Seeds, International Commission on the Future of Food and

Agriculture, 2006)

Let us now return to the definition of diversity with which I began. Through thejuxtaposition of the current situations in Costa Rica and Latvia, I have shown howthe preservation of agricultural biodiversity is inextricably linked with social andcultural practices and histories. For farmers involved in seed exchange, biodiversityis far more than just the availability of a greater number of seeds in a seed cata-logue. Rather, it is related to their networks of family and friends, and crucial fortheir food sovereignty for the future. The commodification of seeds forces a sep-aration not only between production and reproduction (Kloppenburg, 1988), butbetween cultural and biological diversity as well. The parallel processes of purifi-cation of seeds and harmonization of laws lead not only to genetic erosion, but to adistinct socio-cultural erosion as well.

This analysis suggests a need to shift from a merely quantitative definition ofbiodiversity, such as the one mentioned in the introduction to this article, to a morequalitative one. Escobar (1998: 55) has noted that biodiversity can not be under-stood without paying attention to the broader context that produced the practicesand relationships of which it is formed:

From a discursive perspective, then, biodiversity does not exist in an absolute sense.

Rather, it anchors a discourse that articulates a new relation between nature and

society in global contexts of science, cultures, and economies. As a scientific discourse,

biodiversity can be seen as a prime instance of . . . coproduction . . . of networks.

Indeed, biodiversity conceived as a network or a web of connections, both socialand ecological (Aistara, forthcoming; Holmgren, 2002), yields much more potentialfor understanding farmer actions and emotions regarding seeds. Taking farmers’exchange and breeding practices as sites of the ‘emergence’ of biodiversity (VanDooren, 2008) may lead to better options of protecting such systems and valuingfarmer knowledge and social networks.

Despite this, harmonization of intellectual property rights legislation at theglobal level continues to progress, as evidenced by the fact that more and morecountries are being required to adopt almost identical plant variety protection laws– great differences in existing farmer practices, cultural traditions, and ecological




conditions notwithstanding. Harmonization of legislation, intended in the neolib-eral tradition to enable free and equal trade relations for all parties, instead createsnew relations of power and inequality. UPOV and plant variety protection regu-lations have been positioned politically by hegemonic corporate and scientific dis-courses as the only solution to the recent global food crisis (FAO, 2009). At thesame time, seed company concentration is increasing at historic levels, resulting inmonopoly power by a few multi-national corporations over the global seed stock(Srinivasan, 2003). With such exclusive access to germplasm, corporate breedersmay well be able to provide a greater diversity of seeds for select crops, availablefor purchase in commercial seed catalogues, even while restricting access to seedsby other actors. I contend that such a politically and economically determined‘menu’ of agricultural genetic diversity, offered for sale by corporate seed conglom-erates, is not sufficient or beneficial, but is in fact destructive in its broader politicalimplications for small farmers and their social and cultural practices, as well as forbiodiversity.

Nevertheless, there is diversity in responses as well. For Latvian organic farmers,the battle to define their place in the EU has been located on other fronts (Aistara,2009). They inherited their land and status as farmers together with intellectualproperty rights on seeds, and activism on this issue remains limited. Meanwhilein Costa Rica, just as farmers have a rich history of preserving agricultural geneticresources, they also draw upon cultural practices of resistance to domination, andtap into transnational networks as well (Aistara, 2008). At the global level, arecent attempt by two farmers’ coalitions to be granted observer status in UPOVwas rejected (European Coordination Via Campesina, 2009), heightening fearsthat there is a conscious will to exclude farmers not only from the right to be con-sidered breeders, but also from decisions about the future of agriculturalgenetic diversity. Attempts in recent years by farmers’ organizations to have avoice in such institutions as the WTO, UPOV, and patent courts are unprecedented,however, and groups like Via Campesina are seeking to redefine participatorydemocracy at the global level (Menser, 2008). These efforts signal an attempt byfarmers not only to retake their place at the negotiating table as agricultural experts,but also to affirm a much broader understanding of the relationships between bio-logical and cultural diversity, as expressed in the epigraph to this section.

Thus, if we reduce the concept of diversity to ‘the multiplicity of present choicesavailable to breeders’ (Heald and Chapman, 2009: 4), then the prospects for the21st century are grim. If, however, we take diversity to mean a complex anddynamic web of historical, cultural, and biological connections including notonly breeders but also farmers and their kin, and seeds and their pollinators, theprospects are more hopeful.

Acknowledgements

The research and writing for this project were made possible with funding from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, several institutes at the University

of Michigan, and post-doctoral support from the Central European University and the

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University for Peace in Costa Rica. I am thankful for thoughtful comments and insights

from Rebecca Hardin, Karen Hebert, Michael Kennedy, Stuart Kirsch, HadleyRenkin, Joshua Reno, and two anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this articlebenefited from helpful feedback from the judges of the Rappaport Paper Prize in

Anthropology and Environment at the November 2008 American AnthropologicalAssociation meeting, and audience questions at the World Organic Congress in Modena,Italy in June 2008.

Notes

1. One of the authors noted that ‘the intention was not to define crop diversity as just that,but to present one trend we found in commercially available open-pollinated varieties inthe US over the course of the 20th century’ (S. Chapman, personal communication, 17

September 2010). Nevertheless, their formulation provides a useful entry into discussingthe perception that commercially available varieties are an equivalent substitute forfarmer varieties.

2. Latvia joined the EU on 1 May 2004, and Costa Rica joined CAFTA after a narrowreferendum in October 2007. See Pearson (2009). By juxtaposing the EU and CAFTA Iby no means intend to suggest that they are equivalent in form or content, but debates

surrounding these agreements have served as the generalized context for all politicaldecisions for years, and these regional integration processes fundamentally alter the legaland economic systems of Latvia and Costa Rica.

3. See Hannerz (2003) for a review of the complications and potential offered by multi-

sited fieldwork. The current article is based on two years of fieldwork in Costa Rica andLatvia between the years 2003-9, involving participant observation, in-depth interviews,farm visits, volunteer work on farms, and national and international events. All trans-

lations are my own and all informants are referred to by pseudonym.4. UPOV is comprised of all the signatories of the Convention on Plant Variety Protection,

originally signed in 1961.

5. This is part of a move in anthropology to explore non-biological ways of understandingkinship since Schneider’s (1984) critique of the Western assumptions implicit in biolog-ical theories of kinship.

6. Here I am following actor-network theory that integrates human and non-human

actants into networks (Latour, 2005).7. Landraces are ‘geographically or ecologically distinctive populations [selected by farm-

ers] which are conspicuously diverse in their genetic composition both between popu-

lations and within them’ (Brown, 1978: 145 cited in Cleveland and Murray, 1997:480).8. Due to a procedural error, the law had to be re-approved by the Legislative Assembly in

June 2007, but passed unanimously both times.

9. A recent study challenges the notion that creolization improves genetic diversity,but this is due in part to the relatively recent introduction of these traits and that ‘localevolution has not yet generated much diversity’ (Van Heerwaarden et al., 2009: 886).

10. This term does not appear in the official seed law, but was introduced in the meeting tomake clear the differences between certified and uncertified seeds.

11. While the Seed Marketing laws came into effect in 2004, organic certifiers had not beenchecking the origin of seeds. This law also applies to conventional farmers, but they are

not subject to inspections.




12. Until the introduction of hybrid corn in 1935, hybridization meant simply cross-

breeding of two plant varieties. In common usage now ‘hybrid’ has a much narrowermeaning of crossing of two inbred pure lines, which results in an F1 hybrid(Kloppenburg 1988: 68).

13. See Salazar et al. (2007) for a discussion of the difficulty in registering farmer varietiesunder intellectual property regimes.

14. The situation is changing slowly with the introduction of the EU Conservation Varietydirective in 2008.

15. This resonates with Lewontin’s explanation (1998) of the ‘proletarization’ of farmers bymaking them reliant on external farm ‘inputs’.

16. See Van Dooren for an insightful analysis of the fetishism of the seed that results from

foregrounding the ‘invention’ of the seed rather than the intricate webs of human andnon-human interactions that have come before it, and the division of humans who areoutside of nature (the cultured breeders) versus trapped as a part of nature (farmer-

breeders) (Van Dooren, 2008).17. Assuming that improving quality is the main intention of seed certification is mistaken.

Kloppenburg (1988) has shown how seed certification was initially useful to US farmersto help fight deceitful seed companies, but that in the 1960s when negotiating the US

Plant Variety Protection Act, seed companies fought hard against including ‘quality’ asa criterion for seed certification. This allows US seed companies to register and marketalmost identical seeds, thus making certification more of a marketing tool than insur-

ance of quality.18. There are active seed exchange networks in France, Italy, Spain, and a few other coun-

tries involved in a European network that have become active in fighting against intel-

lectual property rights regulations, but this is a relatively recent effort.19. The first laws passed in the 1960s, as part of the ‘high modernist’ goals (Scott, 1998) of

the Green Revolution. The seed marketing laws simplify and standardize breeding pro-

cedures and requirements in an ‘administrative ordering of nature and society’ (1998: 4)that will make the plants and seeds easier to ‘‘count, manipulate, measure and assess’’,(1998:15).

20. This also distinguished them from seeds saved by farmers on their home plots, a practice

which survived until the end of the Soviet Union when the first colorful seed packagescame in and many local heirloom seeds were lost.

21. See Pearson (2009) for an excellent discussion of the Biodiversity Coordination

Network’s and other activist groups’ campaigns against GMOs and the neoliberalturn in Costa Rica.

22. For example, the 1978 version of the Farmers’ Exception allowed farmers to save seeds

from protected varieties for their own use, including reproduction. The 1991 ver-sion exempts farmers only for one’s own consumption of the products, not reproductionof the seeds (Red de Coordinacion en Biodiversidad, 2007, Salazar et al., 2007).

All countries joining now must adopt the 1991 amendments, thus endangeringfarmer seed-saving practices. Originally the UPOV system was distinct from pat-ents, so that discoveries of natural genetic mutation or cross-pollination couldalso be registered. The original wording referring to discoveries of natural mutations

allowed for a broader interpretation of who is a breeder. Subsequently wordingwas changed to include ‘discovery and development’ rather than just discovery(UPOV, 2002).

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Guntra A. Aistara received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008 andspecializes in environmental anthropology. She is currently a post-doctoral fellowat the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, on leave from herposition as Assistant Professor of Natural Resources and SustainableDevelopment at the UN-mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. This articleis part of a book manuscript in progress, entitled Placing Diversity, about smallorganic farmers’ struggles to create and maintain rural spaces as particular placesand sources of diversity in the midst of globalization.

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