Seed saving and seed sharing: countermapping a liminal legal space

Based on preliminary research in Colombia and the UK, the authors propose that seed saving and seed sharing practices of certain growers and agroecologists occupies a liminal legal space with the capacity to promote inter-generational equity. Such occupation is both precarious and necessary. It manifests a conscious act of political resistance and, we suggest, is a counter-map to a restrictive (global) governance regime complex of seed law and regulation. Actors within this space are part of an international activist spatial and relational movement to preserve, recover, and protect practice and ways of being that diametrically oppose the dominant legal framework governing seed that has evolved since the 1960s, namely the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and its convention.

In the so-called Age of the Anthropocene, liberalism has prospered as a means of pursuing and protecting individual liberties and freedoms, be they economic, social, or cultural, from state and institutional interference. However, principles of liberalism have supported the emergence of a neoliberal paradigm contributing to environmental risk and degradation. Too often, ‘development’ policies and practice involving the extractive industries and agri-business have presided over the use of, and value attributed to, land and ecosystems. In tandem, the Green Revolution and food security rhetoric has supported the advancement of transnational corporations. This has seen ever-greater investment in and reliance upon high input farming and homogenisation via transgenic and genetically modified organisms and F1 plant varieties. In this context, an exclusionary legal regime complex has developed to prioritise individual property rights over global commons, peasant rights, and indigenous ontologies. The result is an anthropocentric mapping and valuation of land based on monocrop yield, upsetting environmental dynamic equilibrium and ecosystem resilience. Soil is increasingly exhausted and degraded, its natural life source of diverse flora and fauna and pest control depleted, and previously biodiverse landscapes rendered monocultural (waste)lands.

The concept of liminality and the liminal space, commonly associated with the field of anthropology, situates people and practices in ‘in-between’ spaces. They defy categorisation based on fixed approaches by eluding or slipping through ‘the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’, meaning that ‘[l]iminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. Legal scholarship has applied the idea of liminality to uncertainty in the context of an individual’s documented or undocumented immigration / migrant status, and with regard to the regulation and law of human health research.

The practices within the liminal legal space we present are not new; they have been carefully (re)constructed and (re)positioned as a defensive response to straightjacketing and enclosure by a complex restrictive legal framework. This enclosure has forced age-old farming, community, and cultural practices into a state of legal liminality. Operating in spaces between law and regulation, we observe novel means to maintain traditional approaches to protect, grow and distribute native and heritage seed, often deploying collusion, negotiation and mimicry of the dominant legal system. The concept of legal liminality is thus ripe for exploration in the context of seed saving and seed sharing practices.