Exploring the ‘grey areas’ of state-society interaction in food sovereignty construction: the battle for Venezuela’s seed law

Abstract

In late December 2015, amidst plummeting oil prices, highly politicized food shortages, and an all-around tense political climate in Venezuela, an unexpected event took place in the country's National Assembly just days before a major shift in its political leadership. A new seed law was passed, with provisions including bans on genetically modified seeds and the patenting of life forms, recognition of both formal and informal seed systems, and protections for the seeds of the country's peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities. The processes behind the Law's passage were long, messy, dynamic and contentious, with unanticipated twists and turns, betrayals and alliances. This article shares an 'intimate perspective' into these processes, as described by those directly involved in them, and as seen through the combined analytical lenses of a historical, relational and interactive approach to food sovereignty construction. This includes an exploration of the shifting of roles across state-society lines; the interaction of threats and opportunities as catalysts for collective action; and incremental shifts in power as social movements engage strategically in different types of spaces, including inside, outside, through and between formal structures of the state. Such an approach complicates simplified narratives around state co-optation of movements on the one hand or idealized depictions of statesociety synergy on the other, revealing the many shades of grey involved. The aim is to contribute new insights into the complexities of state-society relations in the construction of food sovereignty, and into bottom-up policy-making processes more generally.

‘Keeping seeds in our hands’: the rise of seed activism

“…Following the lead of the first article in this forum by Felicien et al (2020), what is needed at this stage are more in-depth and empirically-grounded studies by scholar-activists that report on the important debates concerning property, ownership and the commons happening within these movements, explore their fault lines and contribute to sharing the practical lessons and theoretical insights learned from three decades of activism. There is an urgent need for these studies, especially in regions, such as Africa, parts of Asia and the Middle East, that remain under-represented in the literature.…”

“…These varieties have well-determined phenotypic traits that are recognized by these communities, and are not substantially similar to commercial cultivars (Peschard 2017). In some cases, agrarian activists participated directly in the drafting of legislation that supports peasant seed systems, for example, in the case of the Venezuelan Seed Law (Felicien et al 2020) and of regional seed laws in South Korea (GRAIN and LVC 2015). In other cases, they launched participatory processes to design new seed policies, as in Mali for instance (IRPAD/BEDE 2016).…”

Democratizing CRISPR? Stories, practices, and politics of science and governance on the agricultural gene editing frontier

“…More nuanced accounts (eg. Felicien et al, 2018, Lapegna, 2016Fitting, 2011;Levidow and Carr, 2010) encourage us to see that those who shape a particular space affect who has power within it -and that those who are powerful in one space may in fact be less powerful in another. Participatory governance work by Gaventa and colleagues over the years (Brock, Cornwall, and Gaventa, 2001;Gaventa and Pettit, 2011) provides us with a typology to evaluate how spaces are created, : "The Power Cube" is a framework for analyzing the spaces, levels, and forms of power, and their inter-relationship.…”

L’agrobiodiversité sous les tropiques, débats et controverses en marge du concept d’Anthropocène ?

“…Dans les pays émergents qui ont adopté la culture intensive à grande échelle, les effets de l'homogénéisation des semences provoquent aussi la perte des variétés paysannes et une prise de conscience de la dépendance aux multinationales phytosanitaires. Depuis le début des années 2010 et face aux mouvements paysans de protestation, plusieurs pays, l'Inde, le Venezuela, l'Équateur, ont fait évoluer leurs cadres législatifs pour reconnaître explicitement les droits des agriculteurs à produire leurs semences (Peschard, 2017 ;Felicien et al, 2020).…”