Breeding Grounds for Biodiversity: Renewing Crop Genetic Resources in an Age of Industrial Food

"My third and final paper explores the US-based Open Source Seed Initiative as one example of repossession. OSSI has created an alternative to intellectual property rights with a ‘protected commons’ for seed. Commons scholarship has contributed much on theories of institutional governance. But, I argue, attending to the practice of ‘commoning’ helps illuminate a more complex triad: communities who manage shared resources according to negotiated social protocols. Employing the metaphor of ‘beating the bounds’ – a feudal practice of contesting enclosures – I ask how OSSI defends the commons in intersecting arenas. First is legal, as OSSI negotiates a move from contract law toward moral economy law. Next is epistemic, as a ‘freelance’ breeder network revitalizes informal farmer-breeder knowledge, proving less structurally constrained than formal university breeders to lead commoning efforts. Third is seed sovereignty, as OSSI engages with global South movements whose diverse cosmovisions and seed cultures pose new challenges for constructing transnational commons...."