Further developments

This book provides recommendations for the political construct of a global seed commons, which are hoped to be useful in the current review process of the Treaty. It does not provide all the answers, but rather opens many more ques­tions.

At the theoretical level, several directions could be followed. First, as a con­tinuation to the present use of the theory/ies of the commons, further work could be carried out in line with what has been called ‘the new vogue of the commons’ (Mattei, Dardot and Laval, etc.). Dardot and Laval (2010, 2014) question the notion of appropriation and promote the collective and political decision to design specific resources or services as not appropriable. Inappropri­ability is envisaged as a necessary new category, next to the public and the private ownership and management of resources or services, if the objective is to serve the collective interest and sustainability requirement. Could inappropriability be envisaged for governing PGRFA? Capra and Mattei (2015) call for a new vision of the role of Law, as an all-embracing science, an integral part of a whole, i.e. taking an ecological perspective of the Law This is an attractive perspective for those observing the functioning of nature and humanity within nature as a ‘holistic system’. Applying this concept to PGRFA management would require us to position ourselves differently; to rethink our approach to the farmer-seed (human-nature) relationship.

This questioning could be developed using feminist theories and methodolo­gies, inter alia by exploring Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledges’(1988). Haraway calls for a new understanding of (scientific) objectivity, which would allow us to connect different points of view and recognize that all views are partial (i.e.

A complementary research path could be grounded on the recent Latin American Decolonial movement, which Alvarez Villareal and Coolsaet have applied to environmental justice (Alvarez Villarreal and Coolsaet, forthcoming). This movement does not refer to colonialization, i.e. the political and histori­cal moments that ended with the political independence of the last colonies in the 1960s, but to ‘coloniality’ i.e. the diversity of practices that derive from the matrix of power created by colonialism but that are still at work within con­temporary or post-colonial societies (Quijano, 2007). Coloniality is sustained by three different but correlated dimensions: power, knowledge and being.

Furthermore, the Treaty, and the present research findings, could be examined through the lens of the Global Public Goods¹ (GPG) theory developed in the early 2000s by Inge Kaul et al. (1999, 2003) and Kaul and Conceifao (2006). The GPG theory attempts to provide answers to problems related to globalization. Kaul and Conceifao (2006) argue that many contemporary international crises - such as food crises - have their roots in serious Global Public Goods undersupply They iden­tify three policy gaps to be filled for their theory to reach normative and effective impacts on international legal regimes: a jurisdictional gap’, a ‘participation gap’, and an ‘incentive gap’. The jurisdictional gap focuses on the discrepancy between a globalized world and national, separate units of policy-making (Kaul et al., 1999).

Further studying the links, roles and responsibilities of the state, of citizens’ movement and of other stakeholders could be useful to deepen the connection between regulatory systems of seed exchanges based on (intellectual) property rights and informal seed exchange systems based on sharing social and cul­tural norms. In the continuation of a preliminary study carried out with other researchers on the role of trust and social capital in the design and evolution of institutions for collective action (Six et al., 2015), one could explore the link between legal norms designed around strong (intellectual) property rights and soft social norms designed around trust and reciprocity. Nodal governance (Bur­ris et al., 2005; Drahos, 2004) could be a pertinent theoretical framework used to analyse the social sharing aspect of seed exchange networks. Nodal governance is an elaboration of network theory (Newman, 2010) that explains how a variety of actors operating within social systems (Wasserman and Faust, 1994) interact along networks to govern their systems.

Studying the Treaty through the lens of Human Rights could also comple­ment the present work, in particular regarding the formal recognition of Farmers’ Rights at the international level. Developments currently taking place within different fora in promoting and recognizing specific rights to seeds, land, water, food and all embracing peasants’ rights could greatly enhance the Treaty’s implementation. Using the concept of ‘essential resource’ (Pistor and De Schut- ter, 2015) as a complementary concept promoting the common management of PGRFA could be one way to enter this human rights approach. In addition, the negotiations on the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas seem promising, in particular if correlated with the development of access and benefit-sharing policies centred around commu­nities (i.e. such as in the Nagoya Protocol and the development of ‘biocultural Protocols’ promoting biocultural rights of groups such as local and indigenous people, see Girard, 2018). Developing and promoting such collective rights of communities could be a way to strengthen the recognition and enforcement of Human Rights, by bridging each recognition level of these rights together: the individual, the group, and the universal levels.

Several other theoretical frameworks could be useful to work on the Treaty. Behavioural studies could be an interesting field to research in order to unravel the delicate question of trust during Treaty negotiations and in collective man­agement systems, especially within communities constituted by heterogeneous seed stakeholders. In international relations, studies could further build on the results of this book by exploring the difficult question of designing horizon­tally coherent international policies.

Further research at a more technical level could also supplement this work. While it is not the direct purpose of this book to propose ready-to-implement solutions to the Treaty implementation constraints identified throughout the analysis, the overall objective is to serve the discussions taking place in the ongoing Treaty review process which aims at mitigating the said constraints. Along that line, several suggestions are made to propose additional technical investigations.

First, in the IP field, further exploration on how to (re-)design a farmer’s exemption in the MLS in relation to the existing legislation on plant variety protection and patents is greatly needed, in furtherance of Correas’ (2015) or Van der Kooij’s (2010) proposals. Could the MLS, coupled with sui generis plant variety protection laws, recreate an effective farmer’s exemption? Additionally, a clearer understanding and vision of how to protect PGRFA-related traditional knowledge is required. Besides, further work is needed to mitigate the impedi­ments of access to PGRFA due to national seed laws on certification and com­mercialization. Digging into the technicalities of intellectual property protection legislation and seed laws is therefore crucial.

In addition, in international relations studies and public international law, further exploration is needed to review the governance systems of the Treaty. Would an adaptation of the Governing Body rules allow for a type of multi­stakeholder governance similar to that of the FAO Committee on World Food Security? How could participatory democracy (Blondiaux, 2008; Girard and Le Goff, 2010) be mobilized to promote an effective multi-stakeholders governance in the Treaty?

Furthermore, highly technical issues have been raised regarding the adminis­trative burden of PGRFA management and exchanges between stakeholders. A deeper examination of the SMTA technical rules regarding tracking and iden­tification would be useful in order to facilitate the access to Annex I PGRFA. Financial issues are also key to the dysfunction of the Treaty. Different means of funding the Treaty ought to be envisaged and tested, etc. Not to mention biodiversity-related studies, where innovative strategies and technologies for conservation and sustainable use of PGRFA would benefit the implementation of the Treaty, and in particular focus on in situ and on-farm conservation and sustainable development strategies (Maxted et al., 2013 ; Dulloo, 2015). The list of other possible technical developments could be quite long.

My own next steps will be to verify the validity of the six invariable principles in smallholder farmer communities in China, Yunnan, through a case study analysis. By conducting surveys with farmers in nine villages of the Yuan Yang Terraces, I hope to demonstrate the utility of these principles. The aim is to pres­ent the results of this case study at the next session of the Governing Body, so that Treaty stakeholders may envisage these invariable principles as useful input for the ongoing review of the Treaty’s multilateral system. Thanks to the award of two Belgian fellowships (F.WO and FN.R.S.), I am very excited to begin this new research project in collaboration with Mourad Hannachi, INRA-Grignon (France), and to work at the University of Antwerp, besides my long-lasting affiliation to the Universite catholique de Louvain. I hope that this more socio­logically oriented postdoc fieldwork will enable me to touch upon and see in a more concrete manner the holistic vison of the human-seed relationship I sensed out of the theoretical research exposed in this book.

Besides, thanks to funding acceptance of a French ANR research project, I will collaborate with Prof. Fabien Girard and other academics on the ‘Biocul- turalis’ project, which aims to explore the Biocultural Community Protocols (BCPs). BCPs are developed as empowerment tools by communities with a view to promoting substantive (equitable benefit-sharing, taking into account ILCs’ perspectives) and procedural (avoiding misunderstanding, allowing enough time and money) rights in access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge in between communities and between communities and bioprospec­tors. By fostering communities’ collective action and transforming their partici­pation role at the local, national and international level (i.e. all levels of society), BCPs could also scale-up the active involvement of communities in biodiversity conservation. The state, by supporting the development of these initiatives and promoting self-government, plays a role of enabling social innovation processes. By conducting case studies on BPCs in Peru, Colombia and Madagascar, this project intends to analyse the empowerment processes these farming communi­ties have designed. We hope to show that these grassroots innovations develop and promote mechanisms allowing the communities’ active participation in governing their resources, traditional knowledge and their related innovation as a solution to social and economic development needs and to food security threats.

Epilogue

As I review the final lines of this book mid-2018, more and more initiatives arise and literature is published promoting sharing, inclusivity, community, respect of the living seed and resilience. In the Global North, the Transition Network gathers an ever-growing number of citizens willing to question and reappropri­ate their modes of production and consumption, many initiatives dealing with food and agriculture. In addition, academics increasingly question the dominant narrative about IPRs in food and agriculture R&D and the breeding sector, decrying that

the dominant global IPR appears to have contributed to consolidation in the seed industry while failing to genuinely engage with the potential of alternatives to support social goods such as food security, adaptability and resilience. The dominant IPR also constrains collaborative and cumulative plant breeding processes that are built upon the work of countless farmers past and present.

(Vanloqueren and Baret, 2009; Kloppenburg, 2010; Stiglitz, 2014; Frison, 2016; Howard, 2016, IPES-Food, 2016, 2017b), with Halpert and Chappell (2017: 1)

In the Global South, voices rise louder and louder, calling for the respect of smallholder farmers’ traditional practices and ways of living, respect for the liv­ing and collective responses to food and nutrition needs (African Centre for Biodiversity, 2018; Shiva, 2018) as the only resilient path towards human survival in the Anthropocene.

Are these wake-up calls the sign of a profound change in society? Or are they simply the return of the pendulum going back and forth on the public/private property scale of international resource governance? I hope for the former and plead for a collective and equitable change towards resilience: a change in our Eurocentric-dominant mentality over the property of things towards a global community of stewards of Earth, our mother home.

Note

1 This analysis has already been carried out but has not been published yet. Part of it has been presented with Charlotte de Callatay at the 3rd Thematic IASC Conference on Knowledge Commons, October 2016, Paris, with a paper entitled ‘ Exploring the normativity and effective­ness of Global Public Goods with two case studies: the Global Seed Commons and the Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses’