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Pedagogies for seed sovereignty in Colombia: epistemic, territorial, and gendered dimensions

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Abstract

In this article, I examine the pedagogical practices of La Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia, a grassroots national organization that works towards the construction of seed sovereignty. Using participant observation and interviews, I show the epistemic, territorial, and gender dimensions of these practices. I draw from extant scholarship on seed struggles, decolonial feminism, and feminist political ecology to analyze two specific practices: (1) experimentation and demonstration and, (2) visual technology creation, including drawings. I demonstrate how these practices organize territories through collective epistemic gendered labor around seeds. These territories are spaces for community-based power creation that have the potential to advance agrarian and environmental agendas from below. However, they also reflect and embody the enduring character of patriarchy and the challenges it presents to achieve systemic transformations in the Colombian countryside.

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Notes

  1. In Spanish, we use the word campesino. La Via Campesina defines campesinos as small- and medium-size farmers, landless people, women farmers, indigenous people, migrants, and agricultural workers from around the world. Besides a relationship to the land, campesinos also have a form of life that, although not homogenous, produces specific senses of identity among them. As Sara Koopman writes in her blog “Spanish for Social Change,” campesino is an encompassing term. Thus, when translating it to English using the word peasant, it is not to be confused with the ideal type of the pre-capitalist era European peasant.

  2. I conceptualize gender as being always already raced and classed in particular ways, as pointed out by the intersectional tradition of feminist scholars and activists (Bohrer 2020).

  3. The gesture of talking to people in a language that belongs to the culture they experience as oppressive was problematic, and I reflect on it elsewhere in my work.

  4. Elizabeth Hoover (2019) and other scholars have shown that seed struggles are as old as the colonization process. However, extensive legislation based on intellectual property and technoscientific standardization has a more recent history.

  5. Drawing from extant literature on patents, I have shown (Hernández Vidal 2018) that patents in agriculture can be traced back to the XIX century in the US, through the work of the Patent Office. My intention in this section is, however, not to discuss the agricultural patent system; it is to show the expansion and intensification of knowledge privatization through the patent system once biotechnology applied to agriculture develops.

  6. Seed movements across the world call non-technoscientific seeds differently, depending on how they understand seed enclosures and seed sovereignty. In Colombia, activists call them traditional, criollo, and/or native. Criollo seeds are seeds that have been adapted by communities, whereas native are those that come from their place of origin and have changed little throughout time.

  7. There is an extensive body of work about how gender identity politics has played an important role in the creation of counter-expertise for social justice struggles. I do not have time to develop this point further in this article, but more discussions can be found, for example, in Aya Kimura’s scholarship (2013; 2016; 2019).

  8. In the country, black Colombians and indigenous people are segregated from mestizxs and whites, both in rural and urban spaces.

  9. 51.3 in 2019 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=CO&most_recent_year_desc=false). Accessed 25.

    Aug 2021.

  10. In a 2018 report, OXFAM America shows that 1% of landowners own 81% of agricultural land in the country (Paz Cardona and Latam 2018).

  11. Approximately 31.3% of women agricultural workers in Colombia are unpaid (Meneses 2020).

  12. Only 26% of women have ownership on the lands (Meneses 2020).

  13. 78.5% of victims of physical violence in rural areas are women, 78% of aggressors are men (Meneses 2020).

  14. Because of the structure of racial domination in Colombia, only people who belong to recognized indigenous communities or Afro-Colombian communities are thought of as having a “race.” That is why Rosalba distinguishes between peasants (thought of as mestizos) and indigenous people, even if in many cases, they share common practices of seed saving. In this text, however, I use the word peasants as a class ideal type, and not as a racial one.

  15. Although the CMI is no longer the CU, it has continued to promote peasants’ initiatives, such as agroecological local markets and the construction of a seed house run collectively by the regional network of seed savers of Valle (that belongs to the RSLC). The CMI is also a current member of the Latin American and Caribbean Agroecology Movement (MAELA), a movement that has promoted popular agroecology initiatives across the continent for more than a decade.

  16. Mija is a colloquial word in Spanish used in Colombia to refer to women. It is a contraction of “mi hija”, which means my daughter. Thus, it has a special affective content charge with a sense of familiarity.

  17. Life outside the domestic space.

Abbreviations

RSLV:

National Network of Free Seeds of Colombia

LVC:

La Via Campesina

FTA:

Free Trade Agreement

UPOV:

International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants

UC:

Universidad Campesina

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kelly Moore, Abby Kinchy, Priscilla Ybarra, and Miguel Gualdrón for reading previous versions of this article and making valuable suggestions. I also appreciate the careful reading of the anonymous reviewers and the precise comments they made. I am indebted to all the women and men in the RSLC who shared their time and stories with me.

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  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Cir, Denton, TX, 76203, USA

    Nathalia Hernández Vidal

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Hernández Vidal, N. Pedagogies for seed sovereignty in Colombia: epistemic, territorial, and gendered dimensions. Agric Hum Values 39, 1217–1229 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10310-9

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