The joint challenges of population increase, food security and conservation of agrobiodiversity demand a rethink of plant breeding and agricultural research from a different perspective. While more food is undeniably needed, the key question is rather about how to produce it in a way that sustains biological diversity and mitigates climate change.
This book shows how social sciences, and more especially law, can contribute towards reconfiguring current legal frameworks in order to achieving a better balance between the necessary requirements of agricultural innovation and the need for protection of agrobiodiversity. On the assumption that the concept of property can be rethought against the background of the 'right to include', so as to endow others with a common 'right to access' genetic resources, several international instruments and contractual arrangements drawn from the plant-breeding field (including the Convention on Biological Diversity, technology exchange clearing houses and open sources licenses) receive special consideration. In addition, the authors explore the tension between ownership and the free circulation and exchange of germplasm and issues such as genetic resources managed by local and indigenous communities, the ITPGRFA and participatory plant-breeding programmes.
As a whole, the book demonstrates the relevance of the 'Commons' for plant breeding and agricultural innovation.
Introduction: Commoning the Seeds: The Future of Agrobiodiversity and Food Security 1. Farmers, Innovation, and Intellectual Property: Current Trends and their Consequences for Food Security Part I: Access, Benefit-Sharing and Licensing 2. Beyond Access and Benefit-Sharing: Lessons from the Emergence and Application of the Principle of Fair and Equitable Benefit-Sharing in Agrobiodiversity Governance 3. Patent & Benefit sharing. What can we learn from the Quassia amara lawsuit? What is the problem? 4. Open Sesame: Open Source and Crops 5. Creating universal and sustainable access to plants and seeds: The role of clearinghouses, open source licenses, and inclusive patents Part II: Theoretical Frameworks 6. Private Law Arrangements for the Commons: A New Comparative Perspective 7. Composing the Common World of the Local Bio-Commons in the Age of the Anthropocene Part III: The Struggle for the Recovery of the Shrinking Bio-Commons 8. An Anthropological Lens on Property and Access: Gudeman’s Dialectics of Community and Market 9. Which scale to understand seed fluxes in small-scale farming societies? Snapshots of sorghum from Africa 10. Making the Difference with a Common Plant: The Recovery of Guarana by the Sateré-Mawé (Brazil) 11. What Legal Framework for Safeguarding Traditional Seeds? Building the Commons in Colombia Part IV: A New Vitality for the Bio-Commons? 12. Governing Landraces and Associated Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to Practice 13. ‘Free our seeds!’ Strategies of farmers’ movements to reappropriate seeds 14. Geographical Indications and the Commons: What Matters? 15. Bio-commons in an industrialized country: a viable option? Part V: Thinking Global: a Global Commons for the Seed? 16. The Benefit Sharing Mechanisms under the International Treaty: Heterogeneity and Equity in Global Resources Management 17. Planting the Commons: Towards Redesigning an Equitable Global Seed Exchange
Fabien Girard is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), France, and also an Associate Research Fellow, Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO), UK. Christine Frison is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow both at the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) with the Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and at the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) with the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Legal Sciences (JUR-I) of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.
