Agricultural Politics | Governing the seed
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Heilig’s ‘Thrillerama’ | The subject position of the observer-as-producer. Source | hyperbate.fr |
Pennsylvania
goes Big Brother over local seed library
PATHOLOGIES
OF SOVEREIGN POWER IN THE (UN)CIVIL SOCIETY
Devon G.
Peña | Seattle, WA | August 4, 2014
This is a parable about how the state attempts to
govern the tradition of seed saving and exchange. There are a good many lessons to be
drawn from the unfolding case of the recent closing by the state government of
a Pennsylvania seed library. Most obviously, it seems like an example of utterly
absurd overreach by the national security state and also reveals how insidious this has become as the leading force fomenting a particular kind of militarized civic culture dedicated to
fighting terrorism as the central focus of national identity politics.
In this post, I argue that this act of governmentality
reproduces an uncivil society in which even the innocent and free act of saving and exchanging garden seed can be rendered as a form of bio-terrorism.
The incident reported on below painfully illustrates
the ubiquity of a culture dominated by the norm of the authoritarian personality as part of a structural condition in which too many
citizens negate themselves basic rights and freedoms while internalizing the militaristic outlook of post-9/11
totalitarian craziness. I am obliged to report on what could easily become the
year’s most unjustifiably overlooked and miscast illustration of police state
kookiness.
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Burpee Store Building, ca. 1880s. Source | burpee.com |
The news comes out of rural Pennsylvania, from a
place close to the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch territory.[1]
The Heirloom Seed Project (HSP) at the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum
in Lancaster, PA is nearby and commemorates the region’s significance as a center for
commercial seed production. This museum project presents the history and
culture of the Keystone State through the lens of the region’s traditional role
as a seed supplier to the nation. The famous garden and farm seed company, Burpee
Seeds, got its start here.
The HSP project recognizes that the heart of this
industry is the informal seed saving and plant breeding pursued by the
multitude of local farmers, home kitchen gardeners, and increasingly urban
farmers. Yet, the State of Pennsylvania just acted as if none of this history
existed and in practice erased part of the living history of seed saving and
traditional plant breeding that gave rise to the commercial seed industry in
the first place.
The governmental rationale is that the state must
seek to protect this vital industry by restricting and regulating the ability for
citizens to establish and manage their own community-based seed libraries,
since they would have to first certify seed purity, quality, and safety. Few
citizens groups involved in this sort of informal community-based seed saving
and exchange can afford to certify the small seed collections at stake.
Governmentalizing seed
A few days ago (July 31, 2014), a local journalist in
Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Naomi Creason, the City Editor for the on-line and print editions of The Sentinel Newspaper, filed a report
that could lead the reader to conclude that the Pennsylvania State Department
of Agriculture (PDA) does not like seed libraries. Indeed, it dislikes them so
much it sent a letter to the local authorities and followed up with a
threatening visit from a group of lawyers and bureaucrats who met with local
elected officials to shut down a newly established seed library and exchange
service designed to serve a rural hamlet outside Carlisle in Cumberland County.
One of the local county commissioners associated with
the seed library project decided to close it down after receiving a rather
spurious interpretation of Pennsylvania’s 2004 Seed Act. According to Creason, “the commissioners were flabbergasted…with how
the agriculture department handled the investigation — sending a high-ranking
official and lawyers to a meeting with the library.”
I should note that the Pennsylvania Seed Act
primarily focuses on commercial seed sales. The library project was not selling
the seeds but the PDA staff nevertheless expressed “…concern about seeds that
may be mislabeled” and apparently also complained about the potential for “…the
growth of invasive plant species, cross-pollination and poisonous plants.” This last statement is very strange since the
propagation of invasive (introduced noxious) plants involves inadvertent
introductions of wild not garden seed. No one is trading Russian knapweed seed.
Creason explained how the PDA concluded the community
could keep the seed library if “staff tested each seed packet for germination
and other information.” The county executive director in charge of the library,
Ms. Jonelle Darr, confirmed that this was not something the staff could handle
and this placed the project out of active status; the seed library has closed.
The cultural and political implications
of the incident lay beyond the obvious error of the state’s regulatory
over-reach; and here I thought conservatives were for less government
regulation. Some commentators think the seed library ‘raid’ was motivated by pressure
from corporate agribusiness contributors to the Republican-dominated state
legislators who appoint and evaluate the regulators. Neither of these concerns
explain how the state officials, local elected and appointed officials, and
citizens construct and negotiate this process of self-regulation of a basic set
of rights set to governmental oversight.
Seed saving as agri-terrorism?
More disturbing is what this incident
illustrates about the making of citizen subjects. The neoliberal echo chamber
is of course present as some of the officials in Cumberland County questioned if
the seed library “was the best use of the department’s time and money”. But the neoliberal logic of fiscal
responsibility [sic] is paired with an intrusive surveillance norm that
requires every citizen to keep an eye out for suspicious activities.
This is evident when County Commissioner
Barbara Cross tells reporter Creason that seed libraries on a large scale could
very well pose a danger. “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” Cross
told Creason. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an
overwhelming challenge – so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and
agri-terrorism on the other.”
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Commemorations of the uncivil society? Source | bondseniors.org |
This bizarre conflation of seed saving with
agri-terrorism presents an awful and distinctly American example of the
post-9/11 paranoid style of politics and the shaping of a particular form of
the citizen subject. But does this mean governmentality can also be used to
suppress informal networks of seed savers and exchangers and plant breeders in
a broader context? We need to put a stop to this type of thinking right now,
while it remains a small and fringe type viewpoint.
This is a perfect scenario for the Monsanto Moms to come out in defense of seed regulation: What could be better than to be able to pose unregulated citizen seed saving and exchange as a
potential terrorist threat? The incident reveals an incredible level of
ignorance on the part of our elected and appointed officials and is a prime
exhibit of the widespread failure for the public to understand the science
behind genetics, recombinant DNA, the rise of transgenic crops and, yes, the
highly unlikely (because ineffective) use of seed as a bioweapon.
The irony is that there are indeed more
direct threats posed by Monsanto or Syngenta seed encapsulated in a fungicide
and insecticide mix than whatever moldy heirloom variety lurks in the seed
libraries of Cumberland County. The Monsanto seed package, after all, does
carry a warning that livestock and people should not consume the seed; it is poisonous and can kill you. Moldy
seed? Not so much.
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Modern Pennsylvania Dutch seed-saving terrorist? Source | Farmwars |
We live in a topsy-turvy world in which
real threats get inverted as safe while much of our citizenry clings to a fear-driven worldview in which bioterrorists lurk inside every seed library
and Bolsheviks wait to pounce unsuspecting youth in our public bathrooms; I am
sure. Meanwhile Monsanto and Syngenta, whose GMO products truly represent a
source of scientific concern, get off looking like shining white knights and saviors, arriving just in time to feed the hungry, relieve the wretched, and provision Pennsylvania farmers with the best seed imagineered.
I am not sure what motivated Ms. Cross
to link the seed library with the pole and counter-pole of agri-terrorism and
agri-tourism, but one thing is very clear: On reviewing the 2004 statute, as far as I can tell the Pennsylvania Seed
Act does not include any specific
sections dealing explicitly with the definition or proscription of “agri-terrorism”.
Yet here we have a citizen subject asserting a worldview that encapsulates
acquiescence to a regime in which self-regulation means everyone is for herself
but everyone is also under another’s watchful eye. Total information awareness
as the interiorized norm of the citizen subject of the (un)civil society – this
is what we face.
Taking seed back from the state of
exception
The response to this incident has been rather muted
but I feel it constitutes a brazen act of authoritarian overreach and an
example of the worst that is possible under a neoliberal regime of agricultural
governmentality. The state authorities enforcing the closing of the seed
library justified their actions on the basis of certification requirements set
forth under Pennsylvania’s 2004 Seed Act despite the fact that there is no specific language in the statute that
bans citizen’s rights to seed collecting, saving, and exchanging. Such a ban,
if it were inserted in the law, would in my estimation still constitute a
violation, at a minimum, of First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
In a recent study of agricultural governmentality,
Vaughan Higgins and Geoffrey Lawrence (2005:8)
make an interesting observation that I believe applies to the dynamics at play
in this Pennsylvania case:
An analytics of
governmentality provides a strong conceptual basis for exploring…modern
agricultural governing. The governmentality literature is based on the
assumption that governing cannot be reduced to a singular actor or logic such
as the state or the profit-making logic of capital. Such a focus is of
particular significance in examining projects of agricultural regulation in
that it enables closer attention to the “surfaces, practices and routines” (Larner
and Walters 2002:2) that assemble globalization…Based upon a Foucauldian
‘micro-physics’ of power, regulation is instead conceptualized as an effect of
heterogeneous and shifting discursive and material relations, in which
capacities and limits of governing, and the governed, are constituted. In this
sense, the problem of power is reformulated as ‘not so much a matter of
imposing constraints on citizens as of “making up” citizens capable of bearing
a kind of regulated freedom’ (Rose and Miller 1992:174).
In other words, governmentality is not simply the
exercise of power by one actor to control a given object (e.g., seeds).
Instead, think of this as the motion of a regime that produces a particular kind of citizen
subject and specifically a subject that is able and willing to internalize the rules of the regime (dispositif, or apparatus). The aim is to
impose a system of self-regulation in which the individual acquiesces and
conforms to the normative order without recognizing that an act of domination
has occurred. In this case, Ms. Cross plays the role of the citizen subject as ever-vigilant observer committed to the exercise of total awareness of the possibility of terrorist intent behind any given mundane activity. Ms. Cross produces herself as a Homo sacer (a body without rights) since she now denies herself and others the right to save and trade seed, which are extensions of the First Amendment right of assembly with others in common cause or trade. She has become an unwitting accomplice in the Monsanto Army, ever watchful of harmful terrorist seeds.
My reading of the statute suggests that the State in
the seed library case has misinterpreted the law. The lawyers and mid-level
bureaucrats misapplied standards developed to regulate commercial sales and
marketing and applied them to the case of a not-for-profit social networking activity. This is a protected activity and the
fact that it is centered on the freedom to assemble in order to engage in seed
saving and exchanging through a shared communal trust in the particular form of
a seed library does not abrogate the First and Fourteenth Amendment protections
– indeed, it is precisely what should always be protected!
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At a minimum: Someone in the PDA overreached and
decided that the informal seed library failed to meet certification
requirements. Then the local appointed and elected officials acquiesced to this
act of governmental rationality and then even
went further and over-reacted by equating in public statements seed saving
with bio-terrorism. This would all be very
amusing if it were not so indicative of the malaise our civic culture suffers
from under an enduring state of siege mentality.
The interesting quality of this incident, for me as
an anthropologist, is how the current chatter and conjecture taking place on the
Internet and Blogosphere largely involves anti-government pundits and
commentators speculating that Monsanto probably called a friend in the PDA and
got them to go after the organic seed savers in rural Pennsylvania. Also, people seem frustrated with the state of
siege mentality that appears to seize any opportunity to put a damper on the
citizenry’s self-activity. The minimalist social contract state remains
maximalist in its surveillance function. “Care for none but watch over all.”
It is equally interesting that the immediate response
by many people, to what they righteously frame as totalitarianism, is to
imagine that an evil corporation probably lurks behind all this exercise of state
power. It is not Bolsheviks we should be worried about but capitalists
exercising the Citizens United expansion of the rights of corporate personhood.
People appear to be starting to view the sovereign economic exception with contempt
rather than fear.
This incident also says a lot about the public’s
perception of state bureaucrats and (un)civil servants. The comments section to
the original story run by Creason reveals opinions that run the gamut across
the populist critique of the corrupt influence of large corporations holding
sway over elected officials and governmental decision-makers. This is what the
public thinks about state government and corporate power: “You guys tend to overreach;
all the time.”
But the acquiescence exhibited by Director Darr and Commissioner Cross seem more disturbing because they reflect the enactment of a restrictive worldview that reinforces our lack of confidence in their willingness to stand for and
protect our most basic freedoms. The
defense of the seed library should have instead been recognized as an issue about the freedom of association (of assembly); we are talking First Amendment here. Seeds are the medium but the social
function is the creation of a common network of people freely associating and
assembling together to pursue a common need and interest and this is the truest form of liberty which is at stake here.
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Monstruosidad. Source | Millions Against Monsanto |
This incident reveals the state of exception in the biopolitics of
seed in Pennsylvania: An authoritarian actor decided to intimidate local
officials and participants in a seed library. What compels this erroneous
exercise of political control over the assembly of people based on the common
value of sharing their own heirloom seeds? This represents an abuse of the sovereign ban by those who feign to be able to exercise authority over other people’s free access to a natural and cultural asset like heirloom seeds by crafting citizen subjects able and willing to
enact restrictive self-regulation without protest.
Oddly, this comes at a time when the National
Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in
Washington, D.C. is supporting projects that help people organize their own
seed libraries and exchange networks; no certification required. This is
nationally evident.
There is another – agroecological – twist to this
issue. It is the very nature of heirloom seed saving and exchange that makes
the peoples’ seeds difficult to “certify”– e.g., one person’s frost-tolerant
bean variety is another’s moldy allele. Context is everything in agroecology.
Farmers and gardeners have always used the tradition of seed saving and exchange
to discover and share information about what works and does not work in this or
that place. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson certainly did. This is also how
the continued evolution of plant varieties unfolds as part of ancient cultural
practices.
The state does not, or should not, have authority to interfere with the exercise of any
incipient and emergent community-based networks and affiliations. The
self-organization of cultural and social capital is sacrosanct – it is the
province of the civil society and not the state. Like I said, this is about the
peoples’ right to assemble, even if in this case it is to share and learn about
seeds for their home kitchen and small farm and subsistence gardens.
As a parting refrain, I offer this reflection: The
Pennsylvania authorities do not have much to fear from bio-terrorist threats to
the dominant commercial seed supply from unregulated seed libraries. Ironically, the more substantial threat is
internal since it turns out that seeds can
kill people and other organisms (e.g., honey bees). Try eating a fistful of
alfalfa seed while it is still encapsulated in neonicotinoid treatment and see how well that goes. The absurdity of the argument
being pandered by the state to justify the raid on the rural seed library – the
premise being that it was enforcing the 2004 Seed Act requiring certification
of seed – is an obvious ruse and must be challenged as unconstitutional.
Seed freedom is under attack in a quiet insidiously
indirect form that could easily escape notice. The derangement of our civic
culture – bathed in the suspicious gloom of a sustained post-9/11 ecology of
fear – cries out for an intervention to re-orient our civic culture away from
some largely phantasmagoric eternal war on terror and toward a focus on the value
of living and working together to create our own economy and democratic polity.
Restoring our communities through the practice of
conviviality and peacemaking through affiliation (the right to assemble) is the
root of democracy and the sharing of seeds is a cherished path to the exercise
of our autonomy and liberty. Seed saving is as vital a part of the American
story as any other and plenty of studies of the early Founders reveal how their
cupboards and storehouses were filled with heirloom seeds they shared and exchanged
with their neighbors as well as far-off colleagues.
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Indigenous heirloom varieties of corn seed in Mexico. Source | Regeneración |
[1] The Dutch Country Roads region is comprised of
Lancaster, Adams, Berks, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lebanon, Perry, and
York counties. This rural region is significant because of its role in
nurturing the rise of the commercial seed industry.
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