PLANTING RESISTANCE: A history of seed sovereignty

Abstract

Seed sovereignty has emerged as a powerful grassroots social movement that seeks to overturn the dominance of industrial agriculture in the twenty-first century. By centring the collective knowledge of small farmers and indigenous groups who safeguard crop diversity, seed sovereignty activists highlight the socioeconomic and ecological significance of the diverse food landscapes created, tended, and reproduced through farmers’ everyday practices. This thesis tells a history of seed sovereignty and excavates the understudied narratives that shaped its political and ecological manifestations. It critically engages with the histories of modern grassroots agrarian resistance and western activism to illustrate how the shared and conflicting motivations of their actors shaped the trajectory of seed sovereignty and its praxis across rural and urban geographies (chapters 1–4). I explore the contested meanings of seed sovereignty through an evaluation of the uneven power dynamics that have shaped the movement’s radical politics. The thesis confronts and historicises the sociopolitical and economic tensions that have shaped the representation and practice of agriculture in contemporary political movements, and in doing so contributes to our understanding of food politics and the challenges of transnational activism. At the same time, seed sovereignty continues to be reinterpreted and reshaped by today’s small farmers and activists. I contextualise these manifestations through a reflective ethnographic study of three institutions engaged with seed sovereignty in Britain (chapter 5). Utilising field notes, participant observation, walking interviews, and narrative inquiries, the thesis not only illustrates the different expressions of seed sovereignty within Britian’s food policy arena, but raises critical questions about its transformative potential to challenge the hegemony of industrial agriculture.