With this citation below, Jack R. Harlan, a noted American agronomist of the twentieth century, begins one of his most famous books, where he develops a philosophy of the evolution of crop plants and civilization.

In this book, we shall be dealing with evolution. [...] We shall deal with the activities of man that have shaped the evolution of crops and with the influences of crops in shaping the evolution of human societies.

Crops are artifacts made and molded by man as much as flint arrowhead, a stone ax-head, or a clay pot. On the other hand, man has become so utterly dependent on the plants he grows for food that, in a sense, the plants have ‘domesticated’ him. A fully domesticated plant cannot survive without the aid of man, but only a minute fraction of the human population could survive without cultivated plants. Crops and man are mutually dependent and we shall attempt to describe how this intimate symbiosis evolved.

(Harlan, 1975: 3)

Through these first lines of Crops and Man, Harlan stresses that crops were developed harvest after harvest, in the hands of many different farmers, all over the world, generation after generation, following social, cultural and economic trends (Bragdon, 2004: 12-13). Domesticated crops are dependent on farmers and breeders, in the same way that farmers and breeders are dependent on these crops. As a consequence, a crop variety bred nowadays is the result of this past collaboration and interdependence (Palacios, 1997). Similarly, the world’s population relies on farmers and breeders for producing the necessary food to survive, thereby widening the interrelation and interdependence circle between crops and men.

Does the current international setting for the management of PGRFA (the above identified ‘regime complex’, see Chapter 2) apply this philosophy? Is there another choice than respecting (inter alia) both principles of collaboration and interdependence in setting up a sustainable PGRFA regime complex, responding to human needs (and to the planet’s needs too). Following the analysis conducted under chapters 2 and 3 of the present dissertation, it seems that the equilibrium in the interactions between plants and men has not been respected over the last decades.

Rather, the ‘hyperownership’ trend (Safrin, 2004) seems to have led to the predominance of human activities over the evolution of crops, dismissing some of the plants’ vital and intrinsic characteristics: i.e. evolution as a universal, dynamic, cooperative, diverse and interdependent system. Chapter 4 has highlighted how Treaty stakeholders have attempted to legally re-establish some sort of equilibrium by creating the Treaty and its Multilateral System of access and benefit-sharing. However, the legal analysis of the Treaty has shown that its implementation is difficult and that stakeholders are currently unable to reach their goal due to intrinsic conceptual constraints.

To further assess (and cross-check with the legal analysis) whether the current regime of the Plant Treaty allows to reshape an equilibrium by reaching the set objectives of conservation, sustainable use and exchange of PGRFA, a Treaty stakeholders’ analysis (Freeman, 2010; Friedman and Miles, 2002) was carried out through the publication of an edited book: Plant Genetic Resources and Food Security: Stakeholder Perspectives on the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Frison et al., 2011a). By briefly describing who these actors¹ are and by summarizing the findings of the stakeholders’ analysis, the present chapter gives a voice to PGRFA actors that have participated in the negotiation and current implementation of the Treaty. The objective is to identify the various needs and interests of these stakeholders, their expectations regarding the Treaty and assess whether the Treaty satisfies their needs. The overall goal is to allow stakeholders to identify constraints they are faced with when implementing the Treaty. These constraints are then used in Chapter 6, as a basis for suggestions to mitigate the dys-functioning of the Treaty. As the reader will see, the constraints identified by stakeholders below confirm and complement the results of the legal analysis of the Treaty in the preceding Chapter 4.

Several remarks are to be noted regarding the edited book.

While the effort to have Treaty stakeholders’ views expressed in a publication constitutes an original contribution in itself, it has some limitations. First and foremost, the book’s sole ambition is to provide a compilation of stakeholders’ views on the Treaty and a preliminary analysis of these views.² The book is not a rigorous social science study complying with all the requirements and methods of stakeholder analysis (Reed et al., 2009); rather, the purpose was to gather information directly from Treaty stakeholders in support of the legal assessment of the Treaty. Second, deriving from this first limitation, the stakeholders who participated in the book are those people already present and active within the FAO/Treaty forum.³ A classical definition of stakeholders is ‘any group of individuals who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization objectives’ (Freeman, 2010: 46). Stakeholders may be natural persons, groups or legal entities; they are not limited to ‘insiders’ within the organization (for a narrow definition see Bowie, 1988; for a wider definition see Starik, 1995; Hubacek and Mauerhofer, 2008). The participating authors of the book were the people who identified themselves as Treaty stakeholders and which were (relatively easily) accessible within the limited means of this research (i.e. the ‘usual’ accredited representatives present at FAO Treaty meetings, well-known in the field by the other stakeholders). It is acknowledged that this constitutes a bias, in that the voices of other people

Seeds and people 141 active in PGRFA management, but not present in the Treaty forum, are not represented in the book. However, an attempt was made to mitigate partly this bias with the inclusion of a chapter representing views of consumers. Several attempts to obtain the participation of a representative of the food processing industry failed, resulting in no chapter from that category of actors. Third, the content of the book remains cautious.

Although it is the first time that Treaty stakeholders have spoken relatively openly on the subject in a collective book, the very fact that the means chosen to express their voice is a written publication has led stakeholders to write cautiously. Views, which might have been expressed quite openly during conversations, have necessarily been translated into a ‘politically’ correct language, without retrieving on the basis for their argumentation. Finally, the book was published in 2011. Although seven years have passed, the up-to-date legal assessment of the Treaty in Chapter 4 shows that the Treaty evolution concur with the results of the stakeholders’ analysis. It also further confirms the suggestions made by the book editors in 2011 on ways and options to reach the Treaty’s objectives and to improve its implementation.

Despite the above mentioned biases, the edited volume fills in an information gap and provides a published and freely accessible source of information on the subject.⁴ It constitutes a useful contribution for researchers wishing to better understand the role of stakeholders and of their relationship during the negotiations of the Treaty, especially when taking into account the fact that there exists no verbatim (written or oral recording) of negotiation meetings expressing stakeholders’ positions at the time of the negotiations.⁵

This chapter is divided into two sections. First, major stakeholders who participated in the Treaty negotiations are identified and their specific interests and concerns are explained. This picture is followed by a table recapping (in an overly simplified manner) stakeholders’ various (and contradicting) views. Second, based on the content of the 18 book chapters, the challenges identified by the authors are identified in a table listing 17 ‘specific implementation challenges and constraints’ (Frison et al., 2011b: 276-277).

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Source: Frison Christine. Redesigning the Global Seed Commons: Law and Policy for Agrobiodiversity and Food Security. Routledge,2019. — 294 p.. 2019

With this citation below, Jack R. Harlan, a noted American agronomist of the twentieth century, begins one of his most famous books, where he develops a philosophy of the evolution of crop plants and civilization.

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