Following the Open-Source Trail Outside the Digital World: The Case of Open-Source Seeds

Abstract

In this article, we assess the application of the open-source development model in the field of agricultural research and development, as a potential tool for upholding both public scientific research, and farmer-led innovation and farmers’ rights. First, we provide an overview of the problems associated with the rise of IPRs in agriculture in view of global challenges such as food security and environmental sustainability, and present the debate on farmers’ rights, including its rationale and international policy and legal responses. We then review open source initiatives in the digital domain, including successes and shortcomings, and offer our understanding of relevant terminologies. We explore the parallels between software development and innovation in agriculture and review ongoing open-source agriculture-related initiatives. We particularly address the potential for open-source systems to address existing asymmetries in capabilities and contribute to global challenges such as food security.

Open Source Seeds and the Revitalization of Local Knowledge

“…This material can be seen as a hybrid between empirical sources and secondary research, and it tends to focus on defining the problem of seed enclosure through intellectual property rights and analyzing the possibilities of addressing that problem through the promotion of an open source seed approach [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. There are, furthermore, a very limited number of studies that address the open source seed movement from the outside, analyzing the legal implications of the licenses [15,16] or the social and political significance of the movement [1,[17][18][19]. The overview of the open source seed movement is thus based on a kind of narrative literature review where the results from previous studies are interfolded in an analytical narrative about the formation and character of the movement (presented in Sections 3 and 4).…”

“…Over the 20th century, global agriculture transformed from a seed supply system based on the farmers' own seed production and informal systems of seed exchange, to the centralized and regulated seed system of today [19]. Modern scientific plant breeding-where plant varieties are developed by scientists at research facilities rather than by practicing farmers-first emerged in Germany in the 1860s, but caught speed at the turn of the century [13].…”

“…The internationalization of plant variety protection entered a new phase with the passing of the agreement of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) as one of the pillars in the newly formed World Trade Organization in 1994. Since article 27.3 of the TRIPS agreement requires all member states to provide some form of intellectual property protection for plant varieties, the principle of plant variety protection is now globally enforced [9,10,16,19,[46][47][48].…”

“…[49] Seed regulations thus impose a distinction between industrially produced seeds and local varieties which have been developed and shared by small-scale farmers. These regulations hamper the distribution of local varieties and promote a limited number of globally marketed varieties that are stable, homogenous and respond well to pesticides, but are less adapted to the local growing conditions than many landraces and farmer-selected varieties [19,49,50].…”

Contributions to Sustainable Development Goals in Environmental Quality Management

“…At the same time, SDGs contribute to the sustainability of biodiversity. This circular relationship makes the biodiversity a vital factor for a sustainable future (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020; Tsioumani, & Tsioumanis, 2020; https://www.bioversityinternational.org/sdgs/). The interrelationships between biodiversity and SDGs are depicted in Figure 1.…”