Seed & food sovereignty

The organisers who treat who owns the seed, and who owns the ground, as the first agronomic question rather than the last.

Notes

Every other page in this database assumes a grower is free to act on what they learn. That assumption is not evenly distributed.

A cultivar under patent cannot be legally propagated by the farmer growing it. A neighbourhood with no grocery store and no land it can buy has a food problem that no amount of soil biology will solve. Those are design constraints in the ordinary sense, and the people recorded here work on them directly — in the courts and the WTO, on the deed and the training programme, in the language used to describe the problem.

The phrase food apartheid belongs on this page for that reason. It was offered as a replacement for food desert on the grounds that a desert is a natural formation and this is not one.

Working now

Karen Washington Naming food apartheid, and building the grower networks that answer it. active practice Leah Penniman Farmer training, land return, and a food-sovereignty curriculum rooted in Black and Brown agrarian tradition rather than imported onto it. active practice Vandana Shiva Seed as a commons — argued in the fields, the courts and the World Trade Organization at the same time. active practice

Notes

Working now

Sources for this record