Cacophonous harmonies: The commodification of organic seeds and social relations in Costa Rica and Latvia

Increasing efforts to "harmonize" intellectual property rights on seeds and plant varieties throughout the world are having profound impacts on food production, small farmer livelihoods and social networks, and agricultural biodiversity. This talk uses multi-sited ethnography to explore the social and environmental consequences of the implementation of intellectual property rights on seeds in the historically, culturally, and ecologically diverse contexts of Costa Rica and Latvia, as small farmers in these countries negotiate their place in the regional trade blocs of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the European Union(EU), respectively. The juxtaposition of two such different cases reveals the micro-processes of globalization, through which social seed exchange networks are displaced by bureaucratic transactions. The shift from exchanging seeds among kin to tracing the purity and genetic lineage of seeds is a necessary step for the commodification and control of seeds at the global level, which carries significant ecological and social consequences. The talk will further investigate efforts to coordinate resistance to such harmonization by farmers' groups in different countries. While farmers in Latin America and many other parts of the world have actively fought for "farmers' rights" to freely reproduce, use, and exchange seeds cultivated in their communities for generations, defending "farmers' rights" is far more complex in post-socialist Eastern Europe, where farmers only recently re-gained land through de-collectivization and much "traditional knowledge" has already been lost.

Guntra Aistara is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment, Peace, and Security at UPEACE. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Central European University at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy. She completed her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2008 in Natural Resources and Environment with a focus on environmental anthropology. Her research focuses on the development of organic agriculture movements in the historically, ecologically, and politically diverse contexts of Latvia and Costa Rica, as well as how these movements are changing as these small countries join regional economic trading blocks.