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Journal of Agraria Agrarian n Chang Change, e, Vol. 16 No. 4, Octobe Octoberr 2016 2016,, pp. 711 – 719. 719.
The Red de Semillas Libres: Contesting Biohegemony in Colombia LAURA GUTIÉRREZ ESCOBAR AND ELIZABETH FITTING The Red de Semillas Libres (Network of Free Seeds ) in Colombia contests the expansion of, and dominant narratives on, agricultural biotechnology and intellectual property rights (IPRs) protections protec tions on seed – or what has been called ‘ biohegemony biohegemony’. We argue that despite its challenges, the Network contests ‘ biohegemony biohegemony’ through lawsuits, supporting ‘ seed seed sover sovereignty eignty’, and reframing the often taken-for-granted discourse on local seed varieties as raw material and a resource to be ‘ discovered discovered ’, ‘ invented invented ’ and commodi � ed ed by industry and Western-based technoscience. Based on ethnographic research, we extend the concept of biohegemony to include struggle and contestation by examining how the Network pursues seed sovereignty. Keywords:
seed sov seed sover erei eignt gnty, y, act activ ivism ism,, Col Colomb ombia, ia, bio biohe hege gemo mony ny,, in inte telle llect ctual ual property rights INTRODUCTION This is a pivotal moment in the debates and regulation of seed and genetically modi �ed (GM) crops in Colombia. Since 2013, there has been a shift from silent or supportive media coverage of genetically genet ically modi�ed organisms (GMOs) to more critical coverage of agricultural biotechnology. We argue that the Red de Semillas Libres (Network of Free Seeds, or RSL) a a network made up of grassroots and activist organizations challenges challenges biohegemony or the expansion of, and dominant narratives on, agricultural biotechnology and intellectual property rights protections on seeds. Biohegemony refers to the alignment of material, institutional and discursive power which sustains a coalition of forces which bene �t from the prevailing model of agricultural development (Newell 2009, 38). We br brie ie� y analys analysee chang changes es to intell intellectua ectuall property property rights (IPRs) and seed regula regulation, tion, and focus on three main, and overlapping, ways in which the RSL s mobilizations challenge biohegemony: � rst, through lawsuits; second, through enhancing and supporting seed sovereignty in rural communicommunities, notably notably indigenou indigenouss territories; territories; and third, third, through refram reframing ing the deba debate te about seed and and biodiverbiodiversity as commodities and inventions. These issues are central to the current international food system or food regime the the policies, norms, institutions and trade relations related to food and agriculture between unequal nations (Friedmann 1987; McMichael 2009). As Otero and Lapegna point out in their the ir int introdu roducti ction on to this this sym sympos posium ium,, the the neo neolib libera erall foo foodd regime regime is char charact acteriz erized ed by by a shift shift in agr agricu iculltural policy from a national to global focus via trade; the rise of genetic engineering as a key technology for capitalist agriculture and by changes in regulation that accommodate this technology, at the –
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Laura Gutiérrez Gutiérrez Escob Escobar, ar, PhD candi candidate date in Anthr Anthropolog opology, y, Unive University rsity of North Carolina Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Mai aillin ingg ad adddre ress ss:: Aven enid idaa Cra. 30 # 60 60-4 -49, 9, Ed Edii�cio An Anar arez ez 2, Ap Apto to.. 50 502, 2, Bo Bogo gotta, Co Collom ombbia ia.. E-mail E-m ail:: lau lauritt rittag@y ag@yahoo ahoo.co .com. m. Eli Elizab zabeth eth Fit Fittin ting, g, Asso Associa ciate te Prof Professo essorr in Soc Sociol iology ogy and Soc Social ial Ant Anthro hropol pology ogy,, 6135 University Ave, Dalhousie University, PO Box 15000, Halifax, NS, Canada, B3H 4R2. E-mail: elizabeth. �
[email protected]. We would like to thank our interviewees and the RSL for sharing their perspectives with us, and Pablo Lapegna, Gerardo Otero and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
doi: 10.1111/joac.12161
712 Laura Gutiérrez Escobar and Elizabeth Fitting national and supra-national levels (Pechlaner and Otero 2008); and an increase in state support for agribusiness multinational corporations. Our ethnographic research contributes to this literature by providing insight into the ways in which the so-called harmonization of legal and regulatory frameworks for plant genetic resources play out ‘on the ground’ in particular ways. GMOs and the issue of protecting farmer-saved seed have garnered media discussion and increased public debate in Colombia thanks to the free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States (US) – which required minimum intellectual property rights standards, and took effect in 2012 – the national agrarian strike of August 2013 and the controversial documentary 9.70, which criticizes Resolution 970 of the Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) for criminalizing the informal sale of farm-saved seeds. The documentary denounces how the riot police unit seized 62 tons of rice seed in the town of Campoalegre, and threw them into a land �ll, after the ICA declared that it was non-certi�ed and illegally saved seed that posed phytosanitary and health risks for the rice sector and consumers. The documentary caused public indignation and went viral, with over 10,000 visitors in the �rst two days after it appeared on the web (Ruíz Navarro 2015). In Colombia, the regulation of GMOs began in the late 1990s. As a branch of the Ministry of Agriculture and Development, the ICA is responsible for the regulation and control of GM crops (ICA 2012). Colombia is one of 19 countries in the world growing more than 50,000 hectares of transgenic crops (ISAAA 2014, 5). In 2014, GM crops were grown on just over 100,000 hectares, consisting largely of GM maize and cotton. BIOHEGEMONY In his work on Argentina, Peter Newell (2009) argues that agribusiness and biotech interests had broad-based consent in the country because of the economic importance of export-led agribusiness and the extensive participation of biotech corporations in trade and biosafety regulatory decisions (p. 48). Drawing on Antonio Gramsci (1971 [1929 – 35]), Newell argues that biohegemony involves the ‘successful projection of particular interests as general interests such as that the bene�ts and value of agricultural biotechnology acquire the status of common sense and go largely unquestioned’ (p. 38). We �nd the concept of biohegemony helpful because it asks us to think about both how the ‘state’ – or a set of government of �ces and actors – contributes to the making of GMOs and IPRs on seed as ‘common sense’, in discourse and institutional and material arrangements. It also asks us to consider how non-state actors, such as transnational corporations, activists and non-pro �t organizations, may support or contest such ideas and arrangements. Additionally, we �nd the concept useful because we see the pre �x ‘bio’ as foregrounding how, at this moment in capitalism and the neoliberal food regime, what often goes unquestioned is the commodi �cation and usurpation of biological ‘resources’, or life itself, in this case seed. The commodi�cation of seed through new biotechnologies, regulations and IPRs is a prime example of what David Harvey (2003) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’, or a renewed process of capital accumulation through the enclosure of the commons. In the case of seeds, biological reproduction constitutes a natural barrier to commodi �cation and guarantees farmers ’ capacity to independently reproduce a part of their means of production. Capital has pursued farmers ’ dispossession of their seeds through commodi�cation in two ways: a technical solution that involved hybridization during the Green Revolution and currently genetic engineering, and a legal solution through seed regulations and IPRs on plants and their genes (Kloppenburg 2004). We contend that the Red de Semillas Libres challenges the often taken-for-granted discourse about local seed varieties (or landraces and creolized varieties, called criollos in Spanish) as raw material and a resource, to be ‘ discovered’, ‘invented’ and commodi�ed by industry and Western-based science. In © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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this way, we not only apply Newell ’s concept of biohegemony to the Colombian case, but we also extend the concept. We provide empirical illustrations of the RSL’s collective mobilizations, and the opportunities and challenges that it faces. In the Colombian media, the biotech industry and government of �cials reproduce common ideas found in the IPR system about seed, and even earlier ideas that privilege Western science, including plant breeding, over other knowledge systems (Nader 1996). The advance of scienti �c plant breeding in the late nineteenth century helped distance ‘ local’, ‘ traditional’ and ‘landrace’ seed from ‘scienti�c’ seed, or ‘modern’ ‘cultivars’ (Zeven 1998). As Van Dooren (2008) importantly points out, IPRs on plants recognize the scienti�c knowledge and labour in the Western tradition as genuinely inventive while rendering the labour and knowledge of indigenous and peasant communities invisible, as ‘ nature’s raw material’. IPRs are granted to ‘ improved’ and certi�ed seeds, such as GM varieties, because they involve modern scienti �c techniques. Similar to discussions of seed and IPRs elsewhere, the biotech industry and some government of �cials in Colombia describe local seed (criollos) in a way that distances such seed from the human labour involved in its creation and maintenance, as a raw material for science and industry. The ICA ’s General Director, for example, contrasts ‘native, natural seed’ with scienti�cally improved and certi�ed seed (Beltrán 2013). The Colombian Seed Trade Association, Acosemillas (2013), which represents both domestic and transnational seed companies, has portrayed uncerti�ed seed as ‘illegal’, and as a phytosanitary risk that diminishes crop productivity, and affects peasants ’ incomes and the food security of all Colombians. As discussed below, RSL members challenge such descriptions. Biohegemony in Colombia: Protecting Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) A key component of biohegemony in Colombia is the alignment of the country’s IPRs on plants and seed with that of the World Trade Organization ’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Transnational seed and biotech companies have supported modi �cations to Colombian legislation that advance their economic interests and further commodify seed, notably through seed regulations and IPRs. As part of its free trade agreement (FTA) with the US, Colombia committed to signing an extended version of the TRIPS, or what has been called a ‘ TRIPS-Plus’ agreement (Sell 2009, 194). There were major differences between the US and the Colombian Intellectual Property Rights and Sanitary and Phytosanitary systems at the time they started negotiating the FTA in mid-2004. Colombia was a signatory to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) 1978, the Convention on Biodiversity, the Cartagena Protocol and the Andean Community (CAN, according to its Spanish acronym) Common Regime on Access to Genetic Resources. The US, in contrast, was not a member of any of these agreements but only the UPOV in its 1991 version and, like Colombia, had signed but not rati �ed the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA). In concrete terms, these differences meant that the US allowed the patenting of living organisms, including plants and their parts, such as seeds, and of a wide range of genetic engineering methods and products. In contrast, Colombia not only forbade patenting of living organisms and allowed a much more limited patenting in the �eld of biotechnology, but also guaranteed farmers ’ rights to use, save and exchange seed, as well as committing to the fair and equal distribution of bene �ts derived from the use of genetic resources (Nemogá Soto 2009; Grupo Semillas 2011). By adhering to UPOV 91, the US – Colombia FTA is a TRIPS-Plus agreement that contravenes the Cartagena Protocol, ITPGRFA and CAN’s decisions. In 2005, Colombia began to adjust legislation to FTA requirements on intellectual property and phytosanitary controls. These include the ICA ’s Resolution 970 of 2010 and Law 1518 of 2012. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
714 Laura Gutiérrez Escobar and Elizabeth Fitting Resolution 970 required that all seeds in Colombia are registered and certi �ed for reasons of quality, productivity and plant disease management and prevention, following the WTO ’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement. In effect, this means that farmers who wanted to use their seeds needed to register and certify them at the ICA ’s of �ces, an expensive and time-consuming process. The resolution enforced phytosanitary and quality standards that favoured the use of certi �ed over local seeds. It granted patent-like protections to plant breeders by stating that farmers can only save and reuse certi�ed seeds once, in � elds up to 5 hectares, and for self-consumption only; and they cannot exchange or sell certi�ed seeds without the breeder ’s permission. Between 2010 and 2012, the ICA ordered the con�scation of close to 5,000 tons of seeds, mostly rice, and the destruction of about half of them (ICA 2013). In 2012, Law 1518 approved Colombia’s adherence to UPOV 91. This law maintains breeder ’s rights rather than patents as the IPR system for plants. However, both kinds of IPRs are similar, because the breeder ’s rights in Law 1518 restrict farmers’ rights to freely use, save and commercialize certi�ed seeds. Such property rights bene�t biotech companies: they help monopolize the seed market and increase revenues from IPR royalties. Transnational companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta own the majority of patents and breeder ’s rights for commercial seeds worldwide, both hybrids and GM (ETC Group 2013). In Colombia, the market power of such companies is growing. The fact that the US – Colombia FTA does not comply with the treaties mentioned above does not mean that we believe – and nor does the RSL – that adherence to such treaties constitutes an adequate system to protect local, agricultural biodiversity and related scienti �c and ‘traditional’ knowledges of communities from the global South. All of these treaties allow for the patenting of microorganisms and contain ambiguous language in regard to protection of farmers ’ rights. Furthermore, these treaties are framed within the modern capitalist regime that holds the commodi �cation and exploitation of nature and the primacy of monopolized technoscienti�c knowledge as the basis for ‘progress’ and ‘development’.
CONFRONTING BIOHEGEMONY IN COLOMBIA The Red de Semillas Libres (RSL) is the articulation of multiple groups and communities that seek to strengthen and promote local, regional and national processes to produce, conserve, recuperate and freely exchange criollo seeds. The RSL has a presence throughout the country, although it is strongest in the Andean and Caribbean regions, where the most active communities and organizations are located. It brings together indigenous, afro-Colombian and peasant communities and organizations; national and international environmental and human rights NGOs; academic researchers; artists ’ collectives; and consumers’ and urban agriculture groups. This network draws from the experience of other seed sovereignty movements, particularly the Network for a Transgenic-Free Latin America (RAALT), the Biodiversity Alliance, the Mexican coalition Sin Maíz No Hay País and La Vía Campesina. The RSL defends ‘seed sovereignty’ or farmers’ control over biodiversity and seeds, which is an integral part of their right to democratic models of agricultural production that respond to people’s food needs, and are culturally appropriate and socially and environmentally sustainable – what the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina terms ‘food sovereignty’ (LVC 2008). For the RSL, seeds are a ‘collective patrimony of farming communities for the bene�t of humanity’ (2013). In other words, small-scale farmers ought to have priority rights over the use and control of seeds because they have domesticated and developed the majority of crops available today. Seeds are considered living beings belonging to speci�c agricultural systems and access to them © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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should be ruled by communitarian norms. The Reglamentos (regulations) of the Transgenic-Free Territories and the Communitarian Seed Houses discussed below are key examples of such norms. The network pursues seed sovereignty through two main strategies: (1) opposition to GM crops and to the system of IPRs; and (2) strengthening ‘live seed systems’ characterized by seed development on-farm and at communitarian seed houses, and based on handed-down knowledge and �eld experience combined with agro-ecology, collective seed ownership and sharing, and alternative seed markets. Among the RSL’s many activities, members have attended public hearings at the Lower House of Congress on the issue of agricultural crisis and food sovereignty and lobbied representatives to debate IPRs and GMOs; as well as participated in public consultations to draft ‘municipal development plans’ that promote the use of criollo seeds in food aid and agricultural programmes, and anti-GM and IPR policies. During the agrarian strike of 2013, the RSL joined the marches in Bogotá and released a list of demands to the government calling for public policies to promote and protect IPR-free seeds under farmers’ control, and invalidate all IPR legislation applicable to seed, including Resolution 970. After its �rst national meeting, the RSL released a manifesto (2013) af �rming its commitment to civil resistance against GMOs and IPRs on seeds, and to the defence of criollo seeds as an integral part of the defence of communities’ territories, livelihoods, biodiversity and identities. The manifesto ends by stating: ‘For each seed that is seized, we will make them sprout and bloom again, multiply, spread, and walk freely with farmers in the �elds of Colombia.’ The RSL ’s Legal Demands Since 2005, organizations within the RSL have taken legal action to contest the government ’s framing of seed as potential material for IPRs. The network sees legal action as a strategy that complements, but does not replace, civil resistance. In 2008, the RSL � led two lawsuits to revoke the approval for the cultivation of two varieties of transgenic corn and a lawsuit against Decree 4525 that approved the Cartagena Protocol; however, the Council of State has not yet ruled on these cases. In 2012, when Law 1518 approved Colombia ’s adherence to UPOV 91, the RSL collected 7,000 signatures and solicited the Constitutional Court to consider the law unenforceable on several grounds. Such grounds included its restriction of farmers’ rights to freely use, save and commercialize certi �ed seeds, and that it was enacted without previous consultation with indigenous and afro-Colombian communities, required under the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Convention No. 169. In December 2012, the RSL had a landmark victory when the Constitutional Court declared Law 1518 unconstitutional for not having previously consulted indigenous and afro-Colombian communities. The court’s summary of its decision recognizes that IPRs on seed under UPOV 91 might affect the biodiversity, culture and ecosystems of such communities (Campaña por las Semillas Libres en Colombia 2013). The RSL also submitted an ‘acción de tutela ’ to the Constitutional Court about Resolution 970, arguing that it had not previously consulted indigenous and afro-Colombian communities. In 2013, they were supported by agrarian strike leaders who included the repeal of Resolution 970 on their own list of demands forwarded during negotiations with the government. Following the public attention given to Resolution 970 by RSL campaigns, the documentary and the agrarian strike, the government suspended it for 2 years in order to rewrite it. In September 2015, ICA released Resolution 3168 to replace Resolution 970. It contains small changes that address some of the concerns articulated by activists and farmers. For instance, the ICA eliminated the requirement to register seed in its information system. The new resolution also © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
716 Laura Gutiérrez Escobar and Elizabeth Fitting states that it does not apply to creole or native seed, but yet it does not de �ne these kinds of seeds. The RSL argues that Resolution 3168 is similar to its predecessor in at least two ways: it mandates that all seed used in the country must be certi �ed seed (indirectly making creole and native seed illegal); and it maintains the restrictions on saving and commercializing certi�ed seed (helping to ensure market control and IPRs for seed companies). It appears that the ICA is also attempting to control the commercialization of criollos by other means. Under the banner of the UN’s declaration of 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming, the Ministry of Agriculture created the Programme on Family Farming, which includes a section on ‘native and creole’ seeds. The objective is to support local processes of seed development through training and technology transfer in order to help farmers be more competitive and certify their local seeds. However, the RSL argues that the programme encourages communities to adopt a system of IPRs, creating a division between legal, certi �ed seed and non-certi �ed, illegal seed (RSL 2015).
Seed Sovereignty in the Resguardo of Cañamomo and Lomaprieta Cañamomo and Lomaprieta together are one of four resguardos – or indigenous territories of colonial origin that are endowed by the Constitution with the right to self-government – of the Embera – Chamí indigenous communities located near the town of Riosucio, in the Department of Caldas. This region is characterized by small-scale coffee and sugar-cane farming, and the average farm size is between 1 and 2 hectares, although many families own less than a hectare of land. From the mid-twentieth century, and particularly since the 1991 Constitution that granted ethnic-based rights, there has been a process of recovering the resguardo’s lands, reconstituting indigenous identities and political autonomy after centuries of colonization that expanded mining and export-oriented agriculture on their territories, particularly coffee monocropping. Resguardo residents link defence of criollo seeds, especially maize and beans, to the defence of territory and culture. Due to its cultural signi�cance and importance as a subsistence crop, maize has been the focal point for Colombian anti-GM campaigns (Campaña Semillas de Identidad and Grupo Semillas 2011; Fitting 2014). With the impending approval of GM crops, the Cañamomo and Lomaprieta resguardo declared itself as a ‘Transgenic-Free Territory’ (TFT) – one of six such territories in the country. The resguardo also created a Seed Savers Network and built a Communitarian Seed House. These initiatives are examples of seed sovereignty, or how this community strives to exercise local control over which kinds of seeds are considered valuable, and how they are grown, owned and circulated. These initiatives have been actively supported by the RSL and member organizations, notably the Colombian NGOs Corporación Custodios de Semillas and Grupo Semillas, and by SwissAid’s Seeds of Identity Campaign. They have also received support from the autonomous indigenous government or cabildo and the municipal government. Riosucio’s current mayor is the � rst indigenous person elected to this position in 25 years, a period in which three indigenous candidates were assassinated. The resguardo’s declaration as a Transgenic-Free Territory states that indigenous people’s seeds and knowledges are their ‘collective patrimony’ and belong to ‘mother earth’. Seeds cannot be ‘altered in their natural condition of being, contaminated’ nor privatized through any form of intellectual property rights.1 The declaration also forbids the implementation of any ‘food security and agricultural development programs that contain GM seeds, food, or technological packages that put at risk our traditional seeds, ancestral knowledges, and territory’. Finally, the declaration says that the resguardo 1
This might suggest that the community considers seeds as ‘natural’ rather than as socio/cultural-natural entities. However, the wording of the sentence is strategic, as part of strategy to reject GM seeds. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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is committed to growing and conserving their criollo seeds and related knowledges, supporting seed savers and strengthening their traditional systems of cultivation and food sovereignty. Seed savers and authorities from Cañamomo and Lomaprieta are conscious that declaring their resguardo as TFT is largely a political statement that is dif �cult to implement. First, it is not easy to distinguish between GM and non-GM seeds and food, particularly when labelling of food is not required, and the labelling of seed is implemented at entry ports and gets lost as it goes down the commercial chain. Second, seeds circulate rapidly and informally among farmers, and through the market and institutional programmes, making it dif �cult to control their use and propagation. Third, because there are no large markets for criollos, growing them, rather than hybrid or GM seeds, requires sacri�ces on the part of already marginalized farmers. The Communitarian Seed House strives to maintain criollos outside the IPR system, create alternative markets that allow for barter and reciprocity, and provide a space for selling seeds without commodifying them. Their seed bag labels state: ‘This seed is not a commercial product. Its cost is to recognize the seed saver ’s effort and dedication.’ Local seed savers and other indigenous farmers may sell their criollos to the Seed House. Seeds are then reproduced and sold or redistributed to local families or to other seed-saving networks. The cabildo supports seed savers by allowing them to cultivate on communal land, providing them with criollo seeds – bought from or exchanged with seed savers from other indigenous communities – and organic inputs, such as green manure. The Communitarian Seed House has implemented a system of safety and quality standards or Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) as a rejection of the ICA ’s mandate to regulate seeds and conventional certi�cation schemes for the production of hybrid and GM seeds, based solely on productivity and genetic homogeneity. Seed savers from the resguardo, and the RSL more generally, often refer to hybrids and GM seeds as ‘degraded’ seeds as a way of challenging the superiority of conventional scienti �c breeding. They believe that criollos are well adapted to local conditions, and that they help support agro-ecological farming, traditional knowledges and food sovereignty (Gutiérrez Escobar 2015; RSL 2015). The RSL views small-scale agriculture and peasant subjectivities not as inef �cient and backward in comparison to biotechnology and corporate agriculture, but as maintaining biodiversity and contributing to food sovereignty. CONCLUSION Seed sovereignty and anti-GM activism are not among the main issues currently on the political agenda of Colombian agrarian organizations, as land reform, the peace process, and opposition to mega-mining and FTAs continue to be more salient issues. This may prove challenging for ongoing and future alliances between the RSL and other grassroots organizations, particularly in times of economic crisis. Small-scale farmers, on the brink of bankruptcy and expulsion from their lands, are often not in a position to reject GM seeds and food, be they in the form of donations or credits and aid programmes. Some peasants and indigenous farmers are reluctant to grow criollos. This is even the case among non-seed savers in Riosucio ’s resguardos, who may not reject GM seeds or hybrids, or be willing to plant part of their small plots with criollos for which there are no large markets. With the coffee bonanza of the 1970s, farmers in Riosucio, and across the country, had been encouraged by high prices and the Colombian Coffee Growers ’ Association to shift to a high-input, monetized model of coffee monocropping. Farmers grew accustomed to growing coffee ‘right up to the house’s kitchen’ and buying food in town. With the current coffee crisis and the strengthening of indigenous politics, farmers in Riosucio are diversifying their production and increasing the cultivation of subsistence crops, but this may not be as fast and steady as seed savers and the RSL hope for. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
718 Laura Gutiérrez Escobar and Elizabeth Fitting Despite these dif �culties, the Red de Semillas Libres is contesting biohegemony in signi �cant ways. Although an increasingly homogenized international legal framework for biological resources treats certain seeds as inventions and thus available for protection under IPRs, the RSL is shifting public debate around seed through their activism, and in the way members discuss local criollo seeds. Local varieties are not treated as ‘nature’s raw material’, ‘illegal’ ‘ inef �cient’ and ‘backward’, but as the result of generations of labour and knowledge, adapted to local conditions. For the seed savers, seeds are neither a collection of genes that can be privately owned nor a commodity for capital accumulation, but living beings intimately related to humans and that belong to speci �c agricultural systems. Seed savers follow the RSL’s call for an ‘ integral defence of seeds’, which highlights the cultural, political and economic importance of seeds. Their claim that seeds are neither things nor commodities is a powerful rejection of conventional approaches to rural development that seek to turn peasants into ‘entrepreneurs’, and their biodiversity into ‘environmental services’ to be sold in �nancial markets. Even when communities such as Cañamomo and Lomaprieta sell seed, they do so in ways that support alternative markets, the elimination of IPRs and the conservation of local seed. On a �nal note, we suggest that it is important to situate the adoption of legal and regulatory frameworks for plant genetic resources in particular contexts of negotiation and resistance. Similar to other places in Latin America, seed activists in Colombia see their work as a continuation of a long history of struggle against imperialism and (neo)colonialism. They pursue seed sovereignty because they see defending criollo seeds not only as a form of resistance to corporate agriculture and the commodi�cation of life, but as part of a larger struggle for political autonomy, cultural survival and food sovereignty. REFERENCES Acosemillas, 2013. Press release, http://www.acosemillas.org/novedades.php?id=36 (accessed 25 March 2015). Beltrán, T., 2013. ‘ Lecturas de la 970: la 970 no le prohíbe a los agricultores resembrar su semilla nativa ’. El Espectador , 30 August, http://www.elespectador.com/noticias/nacional/970-no-le-prohibe-los-agricultores-resembrar-su-semillaarticulo-443719 (accessed 17 March 2015). Campaña por las Semillas Libres en Colombia, 2013. ‘La Corte Constitucional de Colombia declaró inexequible la ley 1518 de 2012, que aprueba UPOV 1991 ’. Biodiversidad, sustento y culturas, January, 75: 9 – 11. Campaña Semillas de Identidad and Grupo Semillas, 2011. Diagnóstico de maíces criollos de Colombia: Región Cafetera. Bogotá: Arfo Editores. ETC Group, 2013. ‘Putting the Cartel before the Horse … and Farm, Seeds, Soil, Peasants, etc. Who Will Control Agricultural Inputs, 2013?’ Communiqué no. 111, September, http://www.etcgroup.org/sites/www.etcgroup.org/ �les/CartelBeforeHorse11Sep2013.pdf (accessed 17 April 2015). Fitting, E., 2014. ‘ Cultures of Corn and Anti-GM Activism in Mexico and Colombia ’. In Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy, eds C. Counihan and V. Siniscalchi, 175 – 192. London: Bloomsbury. Friedmann, H., 1987. ‘ International Regimes of Food and Agriculture since 1870’. In Peasants and Peasant Societies, ed T. Shanin, 258 – 276. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gramsci, A., 1971[1929 – 35]. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith. New York: International. Grupo Semillas, 2011. Las leyes de semillas aniquilan la soberanía y autonomía de los pueblos. Bogotá: Arfo Editores. Gutiérrez Escobar, L., 2015. ‘Soberanía alimentaria: La Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia ’. Revista Contextos, 4 (13): 11 – 24. Harvey, D., 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ICA (Colombian Agricultural Institute), 2012. ‘ Quiénes somos’, http://www.ica.gov.co/El-ICA.aspx (accessed 15 August 2012). ICA (Colombian Agricultural Institute), 2013. ‘Solicitud recti�cación información inexacta, falsa y errónea – documental 970 publicidad en la web ’. In El Espectador , ‘El ICA pide recti�cación a Victoria Solano’, 30 August, http://static. elespectador.com/archivos/2013/08/69d6b9ee48f48f49ff464ff86401ece6.pdf (accessed 20 March 2015). ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications), 2014. Executive Summary, Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2014, Brief 49, http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/49/ executivesummary/default.asp (accessed 5 March 2015).
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