The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy is pleased to announce the Special Forum on Seed Activism, forthcoming in the Journal of Peasant Studies and co-edited by Karine Peschard and Shalini Randeria.

By bringing together ethnographic case studies from different parts of the world, the objective of this special forum is to document and analyse the remarkable growth and evolution of activism around seeds and plant genetic resources over the past three decades. This publication emerged from the international seminar “Seed activism: global perspectives”, organised by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in May 2018 in the context of the SNF project "Bringing the seed wars to the courtroom: legal activism and the governance of plant genetic resources in Brazil and India”.

In their introduction to the Special Forum, Karine Peschard and Shalini Randeria examine the context of the mobilisation “against the new enclosures created through the private appropriation and commodification of seeds. Peasant organisations, social movements and NGOs have used the courts, pressurised national legislatures and taken to the streets to variously challenge these developments, which deprive peasant communities of their rights to conserve, plant, reproduce and develop seeds. But they have also envisioned/crafted alternative frameworks to protect these rights and ensure the preservation of agricultural biodiversity”.

Their introduction as well as the first article are available online, and more articles will follow in the coming months.

Karine Peschard & Shalini Randeria (2019) JPS special forum on seed activism: an overview of the issues, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2019.1578752