Abstract
Costa Rica's entry into the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was hotly contested and the subject of a national referendum. For activists opposing the treaty, questions of 'privatizing seeds' through imposing intellectual property rights were among the main concerns raised by the treaty, as one requirement of CAFTA was signing the international Convention on Plant Variety Protection known as UPOV. The threat to farmers' seeds in Costa Rica and many other parts of the world is more complicated than being a clear-cut issue of privatization. Struggles for control over seeds are a crucial part of the political economy of agriculture that are grounded in debates over the significance of the physical and social properties of seeds as a natural resource. This article explores how debates over intellectual property rights to seeds confound simple distinctions between public domain and private property, and the implications for agricultural genetic diversity. Moreover, through the story of Costa Rica's engagement with CAFTA and UPOV, I contemplate the broader effects of the free trade paradigm on reconfiguring ideas not only of property but also of personhood and democracy. I will argue that through reconfiguring the boundary between the public domain and private property in the realm of seeds, recent intellectual property trends also reinscribe the definition of farmers along pre-defined class lines. Through their actions, groups involved offer competing visions of how a local resource should be defined and internationally connected; these visions can be understood as competing visions of political ecology in practice.Keywords: Costa Rica, CAFTA, UPOV, intellectual property, seeds
Highlights
On October 7th, 2007, Costa Rica became the first nation in the world to hold a referendum on the ratification of a Free Trade Agreement
Do Free Trade Agreements and their associated legislation transform seeds into property, and what properties of the seed or plant variety must be foregrounded for this transition to take place? And how does this contrast with the characteristics that make seeds valuable to the organic farmers and the social movements opposing UPOV? While many discussions about the need for plant variety protection, cited above, invoke the issue of seed quality, I will argue that at the heart of this debate are definitions of the authenticity and legitimacy of seeds and germplasm, which must be delineated in order to designate the most appropriate stewards of seeds as resources
While activists opposed to Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and UPOV focused on the ecological issues surrounding the genetic diversity of seeds and the rights of farmers propagating and selecting them, proponents of making seeds an object for international trade emphasized that they must be legally registered and protected entities, held at the national scale in a gene bank, from whence they may enter global circuits of circulation
Summary
Groups involved in struggles for control over natural resources routinely foreground or deny various socio-ecological, political, or legal properties of resources at various temporal or spatial scales in order to justify their rights to claim these resources By examining struggles over seeds through the lens of political ecology, I will show how the imposition of intellectual property rights to seeds is an attempt to 'remake' seeds They move from being naturally and socially co-evolved, genetically mixed, locally adapted, and freely reproducible cultural objects to genetically pure, individually created, legally protected, and globally tradable products. In the conclusion I reflect on what this struggle over seeds shows about the competing visions of the political ecology of property, personhood, and democracy in Costa Rica
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