Aim and structure of this book

The present research explores the consideration of seeds and the MLS as a global commons system to facilitate the conservation and provision of seeds worldwide for food security and sustainable agriculture.

First, the aim is to set the contextual field in which the Treaty has its origins (Chapter 2) and identify the general challenges related to PGRFA management (Chapter 3). The historical evolution of PGRFA management has shifted the consideration that seeds were considered public goods available to all to the con­sideration that seeds are overly privatized goods, accessible to few following strict (legal, economic and technical) access conditions. This evolution has crystallized an imbalance of rights pertaining to seeds and contributed to further limit access to and exchanges of seeds between all stakeholders, thereby endangering seed conservation and sustainable use. This descriptive first part highlights major ten­sions resulting from the above-mentioned developments: i.e. the international regime complex (Jungcurt, 2007; Gerstetter et al., 2007) for PGRFA and the hyperownership of seeds (Safrin, 2004). These tensions express an imbalance of recognition in the rights pertaining to seeds: private individual hyperowner­ship of seeds (through legal and technological tools) overpower collective rights over seeds (e.g. through (in-)effective Farmer’s Rights). This historical narrative explains that the international community needed to design a new international convention to overcome these tensions: the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

The second step elucidates why seed exchanges remain problematic notwith­standing the negotiation and implementation of the Plant Treaty. By creating the MLS, Contracting Parties have attempted to strike an equitable balance between public and private interests in access to seeds, but countries face difficulties in implementing the Treaty. The de facto imbalance of rights pertaining to seeds needs to be re-balanced to implement efficiently the MLS and allow stakehold­ers to reach the Treaty’s objectives. The objective of this second research step is to draw a precise portrait of the Plant Treaty’s functioning, of the constraints

in its text and of the difficulties in its implementation, in order to understand why the Treaty does not reach its objectives. First, a classical legal analysis of the Treaty is carried out (Chapter 4), to explain if and how the Treaty attempts to overcome the public/private paradigm.²¹ However, this legal study provides insufficient appreciation to understand fully the slow implementation of the Treaty and the difficulties in fulfilling its objectives. Therefore, as a comple­mentary investigation, a stakeholder analysis is carried out (Chapter 5), where actors have identified limitations and constraints they face in their experience with the Treaty negotiation and implementation (Frison et al., 2011a).²² This second step therefore focuses on a technical level, by identifying constraints in the implementation of the Treaty, to which recommendations will be formulated for Treaty stakeholders.

Third, Chapter 6 proposes a way to overcome the deficit of Contracting Par­ties’ obligations in reaching their food security and sustainable agriculture overall goals. Following the technical analysis of the Treaty’ dysfunction, eight thematic group of conceptual constraints are highlighted as problematic in the current design of the common management of seeds. These conceptual constraints all seem to point to a lack of holistic vision to the problems we are faced with, including the interconnected character of many of these problems.