The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research

Fabien Girard is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), France, and also an Associate Research Fellow, Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO), UK. Christine Frison is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow both at the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) with the Law Faculty of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and at the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) with the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Legal Sciences (JUR-I) of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

Introduction: Commoning the Seeds: The Future of Agrobiodiversity and Food Security 1. Farmers, Innovation, and Intellectual Property: Current Trends and their Consequences for Food Security Part I: Access, Benefit-Sharing and Licensing 2. Beyond Access and Benefit-Sharing: Lessons from the Emergence and Application of the Principle of Fair and Equitable Benefit-Sharing in Agrobiodiversity Governance 3. Patent & Benefit sharing. What can we learn from the Quassia amara lawsuit? What is the problem? 4. Open Sesame: Open Source and Crops 5. Creating universal and sustainable access to plants and seeds: The role of clearinghouses, open source licenses, and inclusive patents Part II: Theoretical Frameworks 6. Private Law Arrangements for the Commons: A New Comparative Perspective 7. Composing the Common World of the Local Bio-Commons in the Age of the Anthropocene Part III: The Struggle for the Recovery of the Shrinking Bio-Commons 8. An Anthropological Lens on Property and Access: Gudeman’s Dialectics of Community and Market 9. Which scale to understand seed fluxes in small-scale farming societies? Snapshots of sorghum from Africa 10. Making the Difference with a Common Plant: The Recovery of Guarana by the Sateré-Mawé (Brazil) 11. What Legal Framework for Safeguarding Traditional Seeds? Building the Commons in Colombia Part IV: A New Vitality for the Bio-Commons? 12. Governing Landraces and Associated Knowledge as a Commons. From Theory to Practice 13. ‘Free our seeds!’ Strategies of farmers’ movements to reappropriate seeds 14. Geographical Indications and the Commons: What Matters? 15. Bio-commons in an industrialized country: a viable option? Part V: Thinking Global: a Global Commons for the Seed? 16. The Benefit Sharing Mechanisms under the International Treaty: Heterogeneity and Equity in Global Resources Management 17. Planting the Commons: Towards Redesigning an Equitable Global Seed Exchange