Banking Seed: Use and Value in the Conservation of Agricultural Diversity

Freezing Seeds and Making Futures: Endangerment, Hope, Security, and Time in Agrobiodiversity Conservation Practices

“…Peres (), drawing on the work of Parry () and van Dooren (), goes on to show that the present system of genebanks is the outcome of debates in the 1960s and 1970s surrounding the most appropriate methods of agrobiodiversity conservation—in situ or ex situ—in which the frozen seeds held in seed banks across the world came to act as “proxies” for crops. These debates were closely related to, and indeed stimulated, the development of broader technologies of ex situ cryogenic, as well as other cold and frozen preservation practices, across a large number of different fields of conservation (see Radin , ; chapters in Radin and Kowal ).…”

Seed Banking as Cryopower: A Cryopolitical Account of the Work of the International Board of Plant Genetic Resources, 1973–1984

“…Moreover, Kloppenburg () argued that seed banks were part of a process of commodification of nature and “accumulation by dispossession” with the rise of biotechnology. As an ex situ method, seed banking has been critiqued as important, yet reductionist and utilitarian, privileging the molecular scale and facilitating access for future utilization (van Dooren ), while cleaving plants from their biocultural environment and thus preventing the continued flourishing and evolution of plant diversity.…”

Seeds as biosocial commons : an analysis of various practices in India

“…The success of this institutionalisation, thus led to the replacement of diversity with uniformity, changing the agricultural landscape in the direction of mono-cropping industrial production and away from the original rationale of the genebank project (Hawkes et al, 2000;McCouch et al, 2012). Thus, the institutionalisation of PGRs in from of seeds at genebanks has led to their transformation into genetic information capsules bypassing, as it were, the range of farmers' needs; or, this institutionalisation effectively neglects the different relations that seeds have with different stakeholders (van Dooren, 2009).…”

“…At the same time, the appropriation of seeds through the institutionalisation and the use of plant breeding techniques transform seeds into intellectual resources (Dedeurwaerdere, 2012;van Dooren, 2009). Thus, the genebank enabled transformation not only affects seeds and related socio-cultural relations but also introduces issues of institutional dynamics, access and commonisation of PGRs.…”

“…Figure 1.1 offers a pictorial representation of these different components (tangible and intangible) of PGRs and serves as a starting point for our research. other scholars' view the political-economic interests of industrialised agriculture can be inscribed into the seeds as a specific informational content (Kloppenburg, 2005;Richards et al, 1997;Ruivenkamp, 1989Ruivenkamp, , 2005Ruivenkamp, , 2008van Dooren, 2009). …”