| For the past decade, seeds have been at the centre of a relentless global war. This is a war of rhetoric---fought in courts, in corporate publicity campaigns, and in international environment and trade negotiations; but it is also a "down-to-earth" struggle, fought in farmers' fields around the world. Indeed, with the advent of plant genetic engineering, seeds have undergone a formidable transformation. Formerly a common good, produced by peasants/farmers and exchanged freely among them, seeds are becoming a tradable commodity on the global marketplace covered by extensive patent rights. As the first link in the food chain and the basis of our food supply, seeds carry tremendous material and symbolic importance. Not surprisingly, these developments have proven highly controversial, and Brazil is one of the terrains where the global struggle over seeds is being played out. This dissertation combines an ethnographic analysis of how genetic engineering is transforming small farmers' seed practices in Southern Brazil with a broader analysis of the Brazilian transgenic seed landscape. It includes a discussion of the recent evolution of Brazilian seed industry, and intellectual property rights (IPRs) and seed legislation; a detailed account of the transgenics controversy in Brazil; and an examination of the role played by civil society in the transgenics debate. I argue that the right of farmers to save, use and exchange their seeds---and not genetic engineering per se---is at the heart of farmers' resistance to genetically engineered organisms in Southern Brazil. Small farmers' response to transgenic seeds does not reflect so much a distrust of a new technology as an acute awareness of the power relations intrinsic to the current biotechnological revolution. Indeed, small farmers are aware that recent technological developments open the way to the heightened commodification of seeds, and that, in this process, they are being dispossessed of the right to seeds, the most fundamental input in farming. I conclude by briefly discussing how these developments have prompted the emergence of "farmers' rights" in an attempt to reassert the age-old practice of seed saving. |
