The first person that after having built a fence around a piece of land, declared: This is mine, and found people simple-minded enough to believe him, was the real founder of society.

How many crimes, wars, murders, misery and horrors would have been spared to humankind if someone would have pulled out the fence posts or filled up the ditch, and warned his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to everyone and the earth to no one.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755: 68)

For those lucky enough to live in rich countries, most of us are able to eat qual­ity food three times a day. With almost 8 billion people to be fed on earth, food production is undeniably an important and highly profitable market. It is also a complex matter, involving many different aspects, such as agricultural knowl­edge and practices of various farming systems, land and water management policies (whether national or international), technological innovation (chemical inputs, seeds and breeds innovation, mechanization, etc.), geopolitical relation­ship between major producer countries and main import countries, climate changes hazards, global market regulation and policies, etc. War, climate change, poverty, land grabbing, water scarcity, etc., are so many factors to be taken into account and tackled when addressing food insecurity crises worldwide. Similarly, health issues (whether related to malnutrition or to junk food overconsumption - IPES-Food, 2017a) or the cultural role of food and cooking in our societies are key to tackling endemic world food insecurity. While it is undeniable that all these aspects are important and merit research interest, this book will focus on the international management and regulation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA),¹ i.e. what I will call for short the ‘inter­national governance of seeds’. By doing so, I do not claim that addressing the problems relating to crop variety conservation and sustainable use is the best or only way to respond to food insecurity, which is rising again (SOFI, 2017) after several decades of diminishing (SOFI, 2014).

The diversity of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (in short: seeds)² is an essential condition for our survival (Altieri, 1999; FAO, 2015). Given the current context of climate change, access to the diversity of seed varieties is even more vital to produce the food we need (IPES-Food, 2016; Beddington et al., 2012). However, at least two main reasons threaten access to seeds. First, the ongoing massive erosion of genetic diversity constitutes an urgent and seri­ous risk to our food production, in particular in the context of climate change (Saab, 2015; Wheeler and von Braun, 2013). Biodiversity erosion is caused by a multitude of drivers, such as climate change, land use changes and the intro­duction of invasive species (FAO, 1998, 2010; Esquinas-Alcazar, 2005; Butchart et al., 2010), but also micro-level farming decisions and macro-level policies (Pascual and Perrings, 2007, 2012) including agricultural intensification, shift­ing cultivation and indiscriminate crossbreeding. Second, hyperownership over genetic resources (Safrin, 2004; Chiarolla, 2006; Aoki, 2008, 2010), understood as ‘exclusive ownership and restrictions on the sharing of genetic material’ (Safrin, 2004: 641), impedes an easy access to seeds whether being ‘traditional varieties’ or ‘biotechnologically improved’.

Both elements limit the use and sharing of seeds among food and agriculture stakeholders and constrain international seed management within an appropria­tion paradigm. This appropriation paradigm stands at odds with what is seen by an important part of the literature as the dynamic flow of germplasm inherent to agricultural practices since the first forms of plant domestication (Pistorius, 1997). This narrative of the unfettered access to seeds is contested by recent academics, who show that ‘[a]lthough such networks are open systems, this does not mean that seeds are free or that seed flow goes unimpeded among com­munities, farmers, families, ethnic groups or polities.

Involving all seeds stakeholders in the ‘PGRFA regime complex’ (Aoki and Luvai, 2007; Jungcurt, 2007), in particular farmers who are producing our food, is an unescapable choice, if we are to face world food insecurity in an equitable manner. Moreover, protecting the diversity of local and traditional seeds goes hand in hand with the protection of traditional and innovative farming systems, particularly well adapted to local needs, practices, culture and social behaviours. Engaging in a virtuous circle - englobing seed conservation and use in a holistic system where social, cultural and spiritual needs are taken into account besides the food, nutrition and economic aspects - promises to enable local populations to produce sufficient and nutritious food for all in a resilient manner (Altieri and Merrick, 1987; IPES-Food, 2016).

I hypothesize that this challenge can be met through collective governance of crop diversity addressed in a holistic manner inspired from Capra and Mattei’s views (2015). By holistic, I mean that regulation of seed management (variety improvement, conservation and use) should be addressed in a systemic way as opposed to an analytic approach where the improvement of crop varieties would be tackled independently from its economic or political context, its environ­ment, its users’ culture or needs and its ecosystems.

Capra and Mattei take a more spiritual and historical approach to ecology to show that individual property rights, far from being natural, have been crafted over centuries as part of a modernist worldview. In its blindness to nature’s relational webs and patterns, this worldview has marginalized or even erased possibilities for future human development. Reasserting the principles of ecology and co-evolution today thus amounts to an acknowl­edgment of this loss, while offering the tools to re-harmonize human laws with the laws of nature.

(Capra and Mattei, 2015: 152, 177)

Indeed Capra and Mattei argue for a radical change in the legal order because human institutions must be attuned to ecological facts and principles. Accord­ing to them

[...] law is always a process of ‘commoning’ a long term collective action in which communities sharing a common purpose and culture, institutionalize their collective will to maintain order and stability in the pursuit of social reproduction. Thus the commons — an open network of relationships — rather than the individual, is the building block of the ecology of law and what we call an ‘ecolegal’ order.

(2015: 14—15, emphasis original)

I believe this holistic approach to seed governance, which is key to transition our food and agriculture global system, can be reached through ‘commoning’ (Bol- lier, 2014). Commoning is defined by Commons scholars as assembling three dimensions: a resource, a community and a set of rules to manage the resource collectively and sustainably (Bollier, 2014). Commoning recognizes the relation­ship between humans and their environments. It recognizes the interdependence existing between different elements and living beings of an ecosystem.

[t]his requires that the law as a system of knowledge and jurisprudence fully recognizes the ‘community’ as a sovereign principle. Such a recognition implies in turn a radical revision of the concept of private property as well as of its relationship with state sovereignty, given that the boundaries between private and common property will always be negotiated through the state. From an ecological perspective, however, the state remains a legitimate insti­tution only so long as it is capable of protecting the commons.

(Capra and Mattei, 2015: 139, 141)

Recent literature has explored the idea that managing seeds as a commons would unlock access to seed diversity and promote their efficient conservation and sustainable use (Helfer, 2005; Halewood and Nnadozie, 2008; Dedeurwaerdere, 2012, 2013; Frison, 2016). However, one must be careful when promoting an unfettered access to seeds not to spread the idea that seeds belong to all and nobody at the same time, and therefore that they are de facto available for com­modification. I argue that seeds should be governed as commons by the global seed community, encompassing all local farming communities, in order to ensure both their food security and sovereignty, as well as to support the transition towards a more sustainable agriculture. The theory of the commons sheds light on the efficiency of local collective management systems over natural resources, where private (market) or public (State) controlling failed to sustainably man­age specific resources (Ostrom, 1990, 2010b). However, Ostrom’s work remains within the boundaries of the above-mentioned appropriation paradigm by considering resources as economic objects to be governed for the sustainability of the community’s living (Schlager and Ostrom, 1992). Her work remains within the economic efficiency framework, i.e. the best allocation of resources. It fails to explore the governance of resources outside of the anthropocentric influence, in a more holistic manner (Capra and Mattei, 2015), i.e. by focusing on the relationship between culture and nature rather than on the institutional arrangements designed mainly to manage an object considered exclusively as a ‘resource/good’. As commons, I argue that seed exchange schemes are consid­ered networked knowledge-goods with non-exclusive access and use conditions, which are governed, produced and consumed by communities (Girard and Frison, 2018a).