ABSTRACT
Globalization and liberalization were rallying cries of the 1990s and, as a consequence, the world economic system at the turn of the 21st century is much more open than it was only a decade ago. Yet world agriculture, in many ways, has been a rather stubborn holdout. One particular subsector of agricul ture - plant germ plasm - provides a particularly arresting counter-example to globalization. Herdt (1999) has described the consequences of privatization and nationalization of plant genetic materials as the closing of another ‘com mons’, comparable in importance to the closing of the land commons in England between the 15th and 19th centuries.
