From collection to cultivation: seed sovereignty and small farmers movements

This talk explores how agricultural development projects have reshaped farming landscapes by treating seeds, land, and farmers as technical problems to be solved. Using historical examples from Nepal, including Peace Corps–era interventions, it shows how development aid promoted standardized seeds, new farming practices, and expert-led planning in the name of productivity and progress. These approaches often simplified complex farming systems and shifted ecological and economic risk onto small farmers.

The talk then situates today’s seed sovereignty movements within this longer history. Rather than looking backward, these movements respond to the enduring effects of top-down agricultural planning by defending farmers’ control over seeds, knowledge, and land. Finally, the talk connects these histories to current debates over genetically modified crops, biosafety regulation, and trust in expertise in the UK and beyond. Using recent UK field trials and regulatory reforms around gene-edited crops as an example, it shows how techniques and assumptions developed in earlier development contexts now shape contemporary decisions about experimentation, risk, and public accountability. The talk argues that these controversies reveal long-standing tensions over who gets to decide how agricultural landscapes are transformed.

Speakers:

• Hitesh Pant, History and Philosophy of Science
• Tejas Rao, Land Economy/Lauterpacht Centre for International Law