Karine E Peschard

For the last three decades, the Neoliberal regime, emphasising economic growth through deregulation, market integration, expansion of the private sector, and contraction of the welfare state has shaped production and consumption processes in agriculture and food. These institutional arrangements emerged from and advanced academic and popular beliefs about the virtues of private, market-based coordination relative to public, state-based problem solving. This book presents an informed, constructive dialogue around the thesis that the Neoliberal mode of governance has reached some institutional and material limits. Is Neoliberalism exhausted? How should we understand crisis applied to Neoliberalism? What are the opportunities and risks linked to the construction of alternatives? The book advances a critical evaluation of the evidence supporting claims of rupture of, or incursions into, the Neoliberal model. It also analyzes pragmatic responses to these critiques including policy initiatives, social mobilization and experimentation at various scales and points of entry.

The book surveys and synthesizes a range of sociological frames designed to grapple with the concepts of regimes, systemic crisis and transitions. Contributions include historical analysis, comparative analysis and case studies of food and agriculture from around the globe. These highlight particular aspects of crisis and responses, including the potential for continued resilience, a neo-productivist return, as well as the emergence and scaling up of alternative models.

For the past decade, seeds have been at the centre of a relentless global war. This is a war of rhetoric—fought in courts, in corporate publicity campaigns, and in international environment and trade negotiations; but it is also a “down-to-earth” struggle, fought in farmers’ fields around the world. Indeed, with the advent of plant genetic engineering, seeds have undergone a formidable transformation. Formerly a common good, produced by peasants/farmers and exchanged freely among them, seeds are becoming a tradable commodity on the global marketplace covered by extensive patent rights. As the first link in the food chain and the basis of our food supply, seeds carry tremendous material and symbolic importance. Not surprisingly, these developments have proven highly controversial, and Brazil is one of the terrains where the global struggle over seeds is being played out. This dissertation combines an ethnographic analysis of how genetic engineering is transforming small farmers’ seed practices in Southern Brazil with a broader analysis of the Brazilian transgenic seed landscape. It includes a discussion of the recent evolution of Brazilian seed industry, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) and seed legislation; a detailed account of the transgenics controversy in Brazil; and an examination of the role played by civil society in the transgenics debate. I argue that the right of farmers to save, use and exchange their seeds—and not genetic engineering per se—is at the heart of farmers’ resistance to genetically engineered organisms in Southern Brazil. Small farmers’ response to transgenic seeds does not reflect so much a distrust of a new technology as an acute awareness of the power relations intrinsic to the current biotechnological revolution. Indeed, small farmers are aware that recent technological developments open the way to the heightened commodification of seeds, and that, in this process, they are being dispossessed of the right to seeds, the most fundamental input in farming. I conclude by briefly discussing how these developments have prompted the emergence of “farmers’ rights” in an attempt to reassert the age-old practice of seed saving.

Drawing on interviews with Indian and Brazilian farmers’ rights activists, lawyers, agronomists and plant breeders, this article aims at better understanding how farmers’ rights are protected on paper and implemented on the ground in these two countries. Brazil and India offer important case studies because they are biologically megadiverse countries, and because small farmers represent an important segment of the rural economy. In this article, I show that India has adopted an ownership approach to farmers’ rights, while Brazil leans towards a stewardship approach. Based on an examination of the progress made in enforcing these rights, I further argue that the stewardship model adopted by Brazil is more conducive to the realization of farmers’ rights, and I explore why this is the case. Finally, I show how farmers’ rights provisions in the Brazilian and Indian legislations represent fragile gains that could be curtailed by several bills currently under discussion in the field of seed and plant variety protection.

Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researchers and activists who are sympathetic to farmers' rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India's unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on an analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmers' rights.

A Iniciativa BRICS para Estudos Agrários Críticos (Bicas) é uma rede de pesquisa que combina estudos e engajamento sobre Brasil, Rússia, Índia, China, África do Sul. O principal objetivo da Bicas é promover pesquisas e intercâmbios sobre mudanças no campo, a partir da cooperação e competição dos estados e investimentos governamentais, resultando não só em desenvolvimento e apoio em políticas públicas de agroinvestimentos, mas em transformações agrárias e ambientais, conflitos e (in)segurança alimentar interna e regional nos BRICS. As reflexões deste livro têm como base trabalhos e análises da VI Conferência sobre Desenvolvimento e transformações agrárias: BRICS, competição e cooperação no Sul Global, realizada na Universidade de Brasília (UnB), em 2018.

This article analyzes legal disputes involving Monsanto's patents and royalties for Roundup Ready soybeans, Bt cotton and Bt eggplant in two important GM-crop producing countries. It argues that Monsanto implemented private royalty collection systems adapted to the specificities of crops and agrarian conditions in Brazil and India. The corporation thus enjoyed in practice the same extraordinary degree of IP rights in these countries as in the United States irrespective of significant differences between patent and plant variety laws of both countries and the US. NGOs and farmers' movements played a key role in drawing public attention to these issues while challenging the legality of the patents and royalty collection systems.

Ce document d'information donne un aperçu des enjeux de propriété intellectuelle entourant les nouvelles techniques de génie génétique d'édition du génome (également appelées édition génomique ou édition de gènes), en portant une attention particulière à la technique CRISPR-Cas9.

The human right to adequate food and nutrition has not paid enough attention to seeds and agricultural biodiversity, but the time has now come to turn this trend around. Peasant seed systems feed the world and are resilient in times of natural disasters. Yet they face severe threats due to the increasing corporate capture of seeds and nature on the one hand and the accelerated destruction of agricultural biodiversity on the other. Right to food and nutrition activists can strengthen the work of small-scale food producers to protect their agrarian, fishing, pastoral and agro-ecological systems by granting seeds and agricultural biodiversity their well-deserved place. WHAT ARE THE MAIN THREATS TO SEEDS AND AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY TODAY? Peasants are steadily losing their seeds: Their collective seeds systems are being made illegal and are destroyed and contaminated by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The Green Revolution's agricultural policies, trade agreements, and more recently, the national and international legal frameworks protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) are behind this encroachment on peasants' seeds. 2 IPR protection regimes such as the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) have been devised so as to protect the interests of the seed and breeder industry. 3 They severely impair access to seeds outside of UPOV by restricting peasant practices and seed management systems. In Tanzania and Colombia, among other countries, peasant practices have been declared illegal, and criminalized. Furthermore, IPR protection regimes tend to create monopolies, which then place them in the position to reap profits and to enlarge their market power. It is estimated that Monsanto, DuPont, and Syngenta control 53% of the global commercial market for seeds. 4 The big six agro-chemical corporations (BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta) have recently announced that mergers are in the pipeline, leading to even more market concentration. 5 The economic, ecological, and socio-political risks of a monopolized seeds and breeds supply system are innumerable. Other major threats relate to the destruction of agricultural biodiversity. This sad state of affairs is the result of land clearing, population pressure, overgrazing, environmental degradation, and industrialized farming, fishing and livestock keeping practices. 6 The industrial seed and breeding systems favor standardization and homogeneity. These have a negative impact on the very variables that underpin biodiversity. 7 The destruction of agrobiodiversity is particularly problematic given the challenges that climate change is posing on the realization of the right to food and nutrition.

A Brazilian appeals court has decided in favor of Monsanto, the global agribusiness conglomerate, in a landmark class-action lawsuit filed by Brazilian farmers’ unions. The court’s nine justices unanimously ruled on Oct. 9 that farmers cannot save seeds for replanting if the seeds are harvested from Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically engineered to withstand direct application of the company’s Roundup herbicide.