Farmers' rights and food sovereignty: critical insights from India

IF 4.4 1区社会学 Q1 ANTHROPOLOGY

Journal of Peasant Studies Pub Date : 2014-10-15 DOI:10.1080/03066150.2014.937338

Karine Peschard

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引用次数: 27

Abstract

Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties. However, the issue of their realization has proven so thorny that even researchers and activists who are sympathetic to farmers' rights now express growing skepticism regarding their usefulness. In this article, I explore this debate through a case study of India's unique Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights (PPV&FR) Act. Based on an analysis of advances and setbacks in implementing the PPV&FR Act and a discussion of other relevant pieces of legislation, I argue that the politics of biodiversity and IPRs in India in recent years has been characteristic of the cunning state, and that this has seriously compromised the meaningful implementation of farmers' rights.

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农民权利和粮食主权:来自印度的重要见解

农民获得和拥有种子的权利是农业的支柱，因此是粮食主权的重要组成部分。在首次提出农民权利一词30年后，人们普遍认为，这一新的权利类别具有历史基础，在当前植物品种知识产权扩张的背景下是必要的。然而，它们的实现问题已经被证明是如此棘手，以至于即使是同情农民权利的研究人员和活动家现在也越来越怀疑它们的用处。在本文中，我通过对印度独特的《植物品种和农民权利保护法》(PPV&FR)的案例研究来探讨这一争论。基于对实施PPV&FR法案的进展和挫折的分析，以及对其他相关立法的讨论，我认为近年来印度的生物多样性和知识产权政治具有狡猾国家的特征，这严重损害了农民权利的有意义实施。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Journal of Peasant Studies Multiple-

CiteScore

10.50

自引率

17.60%

发文量

期刊介绍： A leading journal in the field of rural politics and development, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) provokes and promotes critical thinking about social structures, institutions, actors and processes of change in and in relation to the rural world. It fosters inquiry into how agrarian power relations between classes and other social groups are created, understood, contested and transformed. JPS pays special attention to questions of ‘agency’ of marginalized groups in agrarian societies, particularly their autonomy and capacity to interpret – and change – their conditions.