Paper short abstract:

The history of "safety duplication" within and across seed banks as the go-to strategy for conserving crop genetic diversity offers an opportunity to reflect on the history of backup—a Cold War compulsion turned cheap failsafe for a neoliberal age—and its present hazards as a conservation measure.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary efforts to salvage endangered crop diversity in seed and gene banks emphasize "safety duplication" as a key strategy. Important collections of seeds or other genetic materials are copied, in whole or part, and sent to physically distant sites to provide a backup in the case of local disaster. At the same time, undetected or unnecessary duplication within and across seed banks seen is as a threat. Since the 1980s, researchers have described "rationalization" of collections as an urgent need, and devised systems for rooting out unwanted duplication in the name of increased efficiency. My research grapples with this paradox. As I show, the ascent of safety duplication in seed banks cannot be understood apart from anxieties about social, political, and cultural survival during the Cold War and amidst catastrophic environmental change. Cold war catastrophism does not explain all, however. The dichotomization of wanted from unwanted redundancy bears the distinct mark of neoliberal reorganization. After years of urgent salvage of endangered seeds, state-funded seed banks found themselves under pressure to reduce expenditures, including even if it meant culling collections of the same resources they'd labored to protect. This history invites reflection on the history of backup as a Cold War compulsion turned turned cheap failsafe for a neoliberal age. It also calls attention to the hazards of safety duplication—that is, of establishing conditions for security that valorize copying as a solution instead of addressing the root causes of insecurity.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the Turkish example, I explore how seed banking can challenge the universalist underpinnings of conservation science, and discuss the work that seeds do in cold storage.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on two years of ethnographic research at the Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), this paper examines the work that seeds perform in cold storage. Following the Convention on Biological Diversity that granted sovereign rights to nation states over nonhuman genetic material and intellectual property rights to private parties over modified varieties, national seed banks proliferated across the globe. In this new ownership regime, national seed banks came to demarcate the sphere of national sovereignty from that of private property, as they nationalized nature on the one hand and naturalized the nation on the other. Today, historical anxieties that stem from colonial legacies of bioprospecting continue to inform the protectionist sensibilities of biodiversity-rich countries in the Global South, leading seed banks like the TSGB to close their collections to scientific institutions in the Global North for fear of losing the chance to research and commodify potentially profitable samples that can be used in the development of new, climate-ready crop varieties. This paper analyzes this future oriented, capitalist promise that seeds generate at the TSGB, which challenges the universalist underpinnings of conservation science along with the universalist readings of the Anthropocene that erase historical difference. By banking on its future ability to profit from latent nonhuman capital and by investing in competitive climate change futures, the TSGB puts into question the technology-driven hope of surviving climate change as a unified humanity through technocratic governance. How can we comment on the work that seeds perform in this endeavor?

Paper short abstract:

In The Gambia, farmers describe the life cycle of a cultivar in ways that often parallel that of people. Their accounts offer a perspective of human-plant relations that unsettles the paradigm of genetic resources and economic assets presented in global agricultural diversity assessments.

Paper long abstract:

Among rice and groundnut farmers in The Gambia, it is common for people to speak of the emergence of new cultivars in terms of making seeds well-behaved, much as one would care for and instruct a child. Good cultivars, also like good people, may be described as having or being baraka, a type of divine grace or goodness that implies sincerity or earnestness of deed or action—something hardworking, serious, and open-hearted. And when farmers speak of cultivars now lost, their accounts often evoke affectionate, commemorative narratives of past varieties of rice and groundnut. Sometimes these lost cultivars can even re-emerge as the ‘same but different.’

Yet since the mid-twentieth century, concerns about crop diversity loss have spurred large-scale, coordinated efforts to assess, measure, collect, and conserve agricultural biodiversity. In this context, plants, seeds, and their genes have emerged as vital ‘genetic resources’ that provide essential ‘ecosystem services’ to humans. In The Gambia, national level assessments sent to the FAO for compilation into global assessments present agricultural diversity as a valuable economic ‘asset,’ the loss of which provokes ‘grave concern.’

The accounts of crop diversity offered by Gambian farmers complicate such reports by unsettling the paradigm of an abundant past, ruined present, and precarious future presented in global diversity assessments. Instead, farmers offer a perspective of affective human-plant relations based on temporal care and respect, one in which loss sometimes happens but wherein emergence is predicated on the ongoing, everyday actions of both humans and plants.

Paper short abstract:

I argue that agricultural forgetting emerges in especially forceful ways in the camp, where the ruptures caused by displacement clear the slate for new more-than-human arrangements. Such an account of agriculture in the camp is a necessary corrective to discourses promoting refugee “self-reliance.”

Paper long abstract:

Here I illustrate the ways in which the process of becoming refugees in Mae La refugee camp in Thailand (technically a “temporary shelter”) severs Indigenous seed sovereignty and inter-generational agricultural memory for forcibly displaced Karen people. This severing occurs in the camp in large part through agricultural forgetting: the process by which linkages between people and plants are broken generationally. Along with dispossession and exile, such enforced forgetting is facilitated by the enclosure of the commons and commercialization. I argue that agricultural forgetting emerges in especially forceful ways in the camp, where the ruptures caused by displacement clear the slate for new more-than-human social arrangements. Such an account of agriculture in the camp is a necessary corrective to upbeat discourses of livelihoods programs promoting refugee “self-reliance.” This is because livelihoods programs and their discourse of self-reliance in the context of closed encampment obscure the enforced epistemological and bodily forgetting taking place. This forgetting, I suggest, takes place across generations of both people and plants in this space of exception.