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.