Farmers have created collective systems of conservation and innovation of crops and of seed sharing since the earliest plant domestications. The early spread of agriculture, but also modern imperialism, colonialism, trade and development assistance, have been accompanied by a relatively open flow of germ plasm. Limitations to this open flow have arrived in the course of the twentieth century in several guises. Hybrids offer a kind of biological property protection if the parental lines are not made available. Proprietary claims over plant varieties have become more and more common, through either patents or plant variety rights. In order to counter this privatization of plant varieties, politics fashioned its own set of limitations: the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992) recognizes that countries have sovereign rights over genetic resources on their territory and that access to genetic resources should occur on mutually agreed terms and never without prior consent. However, ensuing policy debates have emphasized again that plant genetic resources rather ought to be treated as a ‘common heritage of mankind’. This debate culminated in the adoption of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) in 2001, which established a freely accessible common global pool of plant genetic material and mechanisms for financial and non-financial benefit sharing with developing countries.
Courtney Fullilove's book recounts how the stage was set for these contemporary developments. She shows how seeds and knowledge about them were acquired, traded and exchanged within the context of the flourishing economy of the nineteenth-century United States. The first part looks at the natural-science collections of the museum in the US Patent Office in Washington, a precursor to the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the US National Herbarium and US Department of Agriculture, describing how seeds were variously understood as objects of global nature, diplomatic gift or private property. The collections of James Morrow, the agriculturalist of the US Expedition to Japan, provide a case study of the making of scientific and market values, in which the concepts of Euro-American property forms influenced the classification and institutional ownership of plants, seeds and tools. Next the author tells the story of failed public and private efforts to make tea a worthwhile cash crop in the American South, focusing on the efforts of the entrepreneur Junius Smith and the US Patent Office's agricultural department. Fullilove identifies a number of reasons for this failure, in particular the narrow-minded focus on the acquisition and distribution of seeds. Missing were visions of how to link imported seeds to the systems of labour required to cultivate and maintain them.
The second part describes the arrival of Turkish wheat in the Midwest – the famous ‘amber waves of grain’, iconic of the midwestern landscape, were maybe not more than twenty years old when Katharine Lee Bates penned her poem in 1893. Fullilove traces the arrival of the hardy wheat back to Mennonite immigrants from the Crimea. Southern Russia was home to a large number of Mennonite communities from Germany who were promised substantial privileges in return for establishing modern agricultural practices in the newly conquered areas. New policies revoking these privileges led to a large emigration to the United States, who had just started to open the West to settlement and agricultural cultivation. With their emphasis on private property and economies of scale, the Mennonites laid the foundation of modern US agriculture. When trying to explain this success, many accounts prioritized the seeds the Mennonites brought with them and not capital or systems of ownership and labour. This helped establish a myth of origins, which remains ubiquitous in modern accounts of the history of crops and their cultivation.
The third part recounts the efforts of Ohio pharmacist John Uri Lloyd to secure a supply of Echinacea angustifolia from the shrinking prairie. Echinacea was esteemed by Plains Indians for its anti-infective properties and incorporated into Euro-American phyto-therapeutical practice. The conversion of prairie to farmland, along with economic factors such as private landownership and increasing labour costs, threatened the wild grass prairie and its native materia medica. Although usually described as the triumph of professionalization and progressive reforms at the turn of the twentieth century, the demotion of botanic medicine in the United States was as much a result of changes in land use and political economy as of medical knowledge.
Fullilove succeeds in raising important questions. She contends that the act of learning a seed's story demands ‘shift[ing] focus from institutions of research to the broad field of agrarian knowledge on which they [draw]’, and situating ‘the contingency and variety of environmental decision making at local, regional, national, and international scales’ (p. 9). Her book, however, does not fully deliver on that programme. I have in particular some reservations about a number of basic elements of the framing narrative embraced in the book. There is, for example, little differentiation regarding intellectual property rights in her account. Patents on plant traits are uncommon in Europe and many other parts of the world. Plant varieties are mostly protected by plant variety rights, which include the obligatory breeders’ exemption. This entails that protected varieties can be freely used for further breeding. This in practice establishes an open-source system of innovation and thus, in this specific system of property rights, plant varieties are neither entirely privatized nor fully a common good, and such rights acknowledge that any breeder needs to build on the efforts of earlier breeders. Fullilove's narrative also uncritically accepts that functional genomics has become, at the expense of agronomic knowledge, the favoured discipline for analysing and improving seeds. This is difficult to square with the facts that, at least in Europe, performance in field trials is the major bottleneck for market authorization of new varieties and that analysis of genotype–environment interactions and field-based phenomics have become all the rage in plant science – mainly because functional genomics alone has proven to be inadequate to breed new, successful varieties.
Also, when it comes to the contemporary international governance of cultivated plants and plant genetic resources, the author's perspective is too narrow. She does not take into account a large body of literature addressing the definition and role of landraces or farmers’ crop varieties in agriculture (a literature which also takes agrarian knowledge very seriously), the legal challenges these varieties pose for systems of access and benefit sharing, and intellectual property rights or the role of formal and informal seed systems in securing the livelihood of small farmers. In contrast to what Fullilove claims, multilateral agreements, in particular the ITPGRFA, do not prioritize achievements of institutional research and development, and neither do they trap small farmers in a life shaped by narratives of heritage and unchanging tradition. These agreements certainly do struggle to find a workable path between – to use, for the sake of brevity, two loaded terms – tradition and modernity. The policies enacted in the framework of these international agreements recognize and support the role of farmers in the maintenance and development of local varieties, but also attempt to diffuse new, appropriate technologies. These agreements face challenges because the entire policy field has turned into a political battlefield, where numerous skirmishes are fought out – between different conceptions of how agriculture can and should work, between defenders and detractors of different forms of intellectual property rights, or between those who put all their hope in so-called traditional varieties and those who think that only modern varieties can solve the task of feeding a growing population under climate change. It is, however, not fair to situate such agreements squarely on one side of these battle lines.
Courtney Fullilove's book is, despite these concerns, a highly welcome addition to an increasing number of historical studies which address important issues at the interface of science, agriculture and policy. As this book, like most of the other studies, also strays into current controversies, it also demonstrates that historians dealing with these issues need to get more familiar with the complex, dynamic and contentious legal, political and scientific framework – which is one inheritance of the story told in the book – shaping agriculture, food systems and plant breeding.
