Introduction

The joint challenges of food security and conservation of agrobiodiversity are making us rethink the issue of agricultural production. Food production has to increase so as to answer the growing needs of the world’s population.

So far, agricultural and food policies have remained narrowly focused on increasing productivity by relying on an industrial model of agriculture inherited from the ‘Green Revolution’. What might be called the ‘efficiency-oriented’ model is overly turned to agricultural supply, productivity and technology, the scaling-up of the formal seed sector and the adoption of improved crop varieties deemed to produce higher yields.

This system is now supported by strong intellectual property laws and regulations related to registration, performance testing and certification, which has largely resulted in a series of adverse effects.

This introduction recalls the aim and scope of this book: finding a way out of the current political and legal impasse.

The first avenue of reflection explored in this book is the concept of property as it has been established by classic liberal and neo-liberal thinkers. It questions private ownership and what can be seen as its main distinguishing feature in the Western world, namely the right to exclude. The series of chapters investigates standard licence clearinghouses and open licences for seeds against the backdrop of the ‘right to access’ or the ‘right not to be excluded’. In addition, two chapters assess the right not to be excluded within the framework laid down by the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing.

In the following parts, the book works toward a full-fledged assessment of the meaning, as well as the value and drawbacks of the ‘Commons’ for the future of plant breeding and agriculture research. To this end, it examines the relevance of Ostrom’s work on collective governance of natural and intellectual resources (knowledge commons) to grasp the way landraces, traditional varieties and associated knowledge are ‘held’ and managed by local and indigenous communities. It also explores the potentialities of the key design principles for successful commons to understand and sustain the new bio-commons recently developed in industrialised countries. Finally, it focuses on the framework set up by the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and specifically addresses the challenges facing the advent of a global seed commons.