Gender and Social Dimensions of Improved Seed Technology: Controversy, Complexity, and Uncertainty
The problem of feeding an ever increasing world population has been at the forefront of the agenda of policy makers and scholars as they tackle the grand challenge of food security. Food security is “a condition in which all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”
(FAO 2001).[1] Addressing food security has involved a focus on seeds and specifically improved seed technology (IST); seed that has been genetically modified by humans to express specific traits with claims to increased yields. Increasingly seeds are manipulated with more advanced (and controversial) techniques, such as gene stacking and insertion, creating “genetically modified organisms.”
In a project funded by a Purdue Mellon grant, a group of interdisciplinary scholars examined two issues as related to IST. The first is a review of the literature to understand the social and gender impacts of IST in developing countries and the second focused on the struggle between farmers and plant breeders over intellectual property rights of seeds. Our project lead to two policy briefs. We provide below an overview of the policy recommendations that we covered in two policy briefs.
The first policy brief discusses two main issues and offers four main policy recommendations. The first issue relates to cost. IST is promoted as a solution to poverty because it increases yields, but those benefits come at a price: IST can be up to 400% more expensive than traditional varieties. Women and poor smallholders often lack sufficient monetary resources or land ownership rights to use as collateral, making it difficult for them to access IST. The second issue concerns how IST is increasingly developed and distributed by private entities. Private firms aim to sell products for a profit, and are not required to adhere to the same standards of transparency as public institutions when conducting field trials of their varieties. We suggest policy makers address these two broad issues by 1) carefully accounting for existing gender and class inequalities in agricultural systems in order to avoid aggravating prevailing disparities based on class and gender; 2) working to understand how a shift towards private IST development and distribution may inadvertently disadvantage socially-marginalized farmers; 3) hold private IST developers to the same transparency standards as public institutions, and; 4) encourage interdisciplinary research teams so that IST developers may better understand the social landscapes into which their products will be delivered.
The second policy brief focuses on the complex issue of balancing farmers’ rights and breeders’ rights over plant genetic material. Private IST development and distribution is deeply intertwined with global issues of intellectual property rights. Global treaties mandated by the World Trade Organization require member countries protect plant material such as seeds with intellectual property rights. Yet another multilateral treaty, the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity, requires countries ensure biological resources are shared and protected as public resources. Using India’s “Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act” as a case study, we illustrate how these competing institutional pressures are translated into legislation that is complicated and occasionally contradictory. We recommend that policy makers 1) clarify the rights of both parties to make IPR laws practical; 2) ensure that formal policies actually have an impact on informal practices such as seed sharing.
Overall, we urge policy makers to acknowledge the social landscape into which IST will be introduced, particularly in reference to marginalized groups such as smallholders and women. Institutionally, they must address the conflicting overlap of IPR and benefit-sharing agreements over plant genetic material in order to achieve lasting food security in the future.
[1] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). 2001. FAO Hunger Portal. Retrieved December 1, 2011 (http://www.fao.org/hunger/en/).
Blog post written by Andrew Raridon, Graduate Research Assistant, Improved Seed Technologies Project
