The birth of agriculture and its developments

Ten thousand years ago, domestication of crops began, and human movements initiated the wide geographical spread of crops. Humans started their transition from nomad hunters-gatherers to sedentary farmers (Cochran and Harpend­ing, 2009: 65-84), which has allowed for the development of agriculture and of agricultural biodiversity over the last millennia.

For millennia, common heritage has been implicitly used as the principle governing the diffusion of crop and animal genetic resources from centres of domestication, their exchange among farmers, and their introduction into new continents, in particular between the Old and the New Worlds after 1492.

(ibid: 1295)

The birth and expansion of agriculture¹ was made possible thanks to easy exchanges of seeds between farmers, resulting in domestication and diversifica­tion of cultivated crops (Harlan, 1995), although this does not mean that seed exchanges and systems happened under no rules (Santilli, 2012: 266; Coomes et al., 2015). This trend still constitutes the core pattern of the present PGRFA management system. However, the historical descriptions below will not focus so much on these early periods of time but rather on the nineteenth century onwards. One should recall, however, that throughout agricultural history, many conflicts have occurred and revolved around the access to and use of genetic resources (Kloppenburg, 2004; Aoki, 2008). As Fowler and Mooney remark:

[f]rom the earliest times, ownership and control of plants and their diversity have been much more than a merely scientific or technical concern. They have been and will continue to be profoundly political. The strength of nations has risen and fallen; great fortunes have been made and lost; and people have enjoyed plenty or suffered hunger at least in part because of who owned, controlled, used and benefited from genetic diversity, and who did not.

(Fowler and Mooney, 1990: 200)

Box 2.1 The birth of agriculture

• 10,000 years ago: Domestication and geographic spread of crops

• c. 8000 bc: Humans turn from nomad hunters-gatherers to sedentary farmers

• c. 3000 bc : Sumerians and Egyptians actively collect PGRFA

• Last millennia: Development of agriculture and agricultural biodiversity

• 1492: The discovery of America boosts intercontinental exchange