A governança dos comuns em organizações de sementes

Abstract

This research focuses on seed organizations and their possibilities for the governance of the commons in the context of civil society as the governance of the commons and at a governmental level through Brazilian public management. The forms of seed organization are varied and include seed banks, seed processing units, communities with family units of seed guardians, associations, cooperatives and state germplasm banks. The theoretical framework is the theory of the commons and in order to understand it, it was necessary to know the perspectives that corroborate or oppose the tragedy of the commons perspective of the American ecologist Hardin (1968), who was responsible for inaugurating the debate on the commons. To define a lens of analysis for the research, the contributions of Olson (2002), Ostrom (1990), Ricoveri (2012), Shiva (1997), Dardot and Laval (2017) and Federici (2022) were presented, who were responsible for looking at the issue from different theoretical foundations. To understand more about the context of seeds, a heritage of humanity and a strategic national asset, the theoretical contribution on biocultural memory by the Mexicans Toledo and Barrera-Bassols was fundamental in drawing up a picture of traditional knowledge from indigenous populations, quilombolas, communities and traditional farmers historically associated with the use and management of plant genetic heritage. The main objective is to understand how this has been done and what the main challenges are for Brazilian seed organizations in terms of the governance of the commons. The specific objectives involve the analysis of Brazilian legislative movements on the advances and limits of intellectual property rights over plant genetic heritage and the study and comparison of state organization and community seed organizations. The research is exploratory and descriptive in nature with a qualitative approach, initially understanding the historical and legislative path, both international and Brazilian, of the management of access to genetic heritage and associated traditional knowledge, contrasting it with issues linked to biopiracy, bioprospecting, biotechnology, the identification of the origin of the population to which each traditional knowledge belongs and the possibilities of benefit sharing. The empirical research, based on a comparative case study, seeks to learn about the experiences of managing the commons in seed organizations created for various purposes by conducting interviews and observing digital media. The results made it possible to construct a typology of seed organizations categorized according to their purpose, which is marketing, sustaining community life, ecological restoration and exploiting intellectual property, complementing the existing literature on the subject. Situating these experiences in the field of organizational anthropology, community seed management practices present consistent forms of governance of the commons that have lasted tens or hundreds of years and are maintained for different purposes. Associations with social movements linked to agriculture and practices based on the ancestry of traditional peoples and communities have been observed in different regions of the country. This study can support the development of public policies and constitutes a growing research agenda due to the emergence of the topic in the current context of climate change.