Short bio:

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, heirloom seeds sharing emerges as a space to experience care and regain connection with culture, food tradition, and biodiversity perseverance. This paper explores invisible reproductive work in (re)producing heirloom seeds as not merely a shared resource.

Additional details:

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, a small circle of women with diverse activist backgrounds established an heirloom seed sharing Facebook group, namely Pamong Benih Warisan (PBW/Custodian of Heirloom Seeds). Started as unpretentious solidarity to distribute reusable masks paired with seeds, the group's founders seized the momentum of the pandemic to rekindle heirloom seeds relation with culture, food tradition, and biodiversity perseverance. Without strict boundaries, heirloom seeds are received by middle-class urban gardeners, farmers, precarious informal workers, communities, and women groups in urban and rural areas across Indonesia. This paper explores how the PBW (re)producing heirloom seeds as not merely a shared resource but also its embedded socio-cultural meaning – or commoning?

The PBW member's relation with seeds is defined through the invisible reproductive work of planting seeds, utilizing the yields, and re-sharing the seeds. Heirloom seeds provided an opportunity to experience care, regain autonomy, access to nutritious food, and create an alternative economic activity based on biodiversity and solidarity. Moreover, knowledge is learned through an exchange of stories, recipes, and cultivation practices. As the members are scattered across Indonesia, commoning practices and approaches are diverse in each offline network. The remaining dilemma is whether to keep the PBW as an open-unstructured hub for seeds sharing with its irregularity online interaction and diverse offline practices or systematize it as consolidated seeds activism.