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Seed Sovereignty and the Agrarian Question in Contemporary Tunisia
Abstract
This paper examines the interwoven land and seed questions in contemporary Tunisia through a survey of post-2000 national and local, institutional and collective, attempts at seed sovereignty. Seed sovereignty is based on the notion that juridical control over land, without national control over seed-stock, especially including autochthonous landraces, can simply lead to new forms of dependence and the hemorrhage of sovereignty which control over land is supposed to prevent. The notion further suggests that the agrarian question is one whose answer is not simply linked to equal distributions of land endowments, but in fact is also a question of the technics used on that land. Land struggles are in fact struggles about the relationship of people to each other, through land; and that relationship is mediated by the technics used on that land, too. Post-colonial Tunisia has seen a process through which indigenous knowledge and local land-races have been gradually replaced by either seedstock owned by multinationals or oriented to monocrops such as the Deglet Nour in the oases of the South producing for the international market, leading to the razing of indigenous genetic variety. Questions of which varietals to plant, or whether to use indigenous landraces or foreign species of crops, are in fact intertwined with questions of the entire orientation of the rural economy. This paper thus considers several attempts at seed sovereignty in Tunisia, especially post-revolutionary Tunisia. Such moves towards seed sovereignty have taken form both in the state and in non-state voluntary associations. Through survey evidence, interviews, and other material, I assess the current state of struggle concerning moves towards seed sovereignty, especially as they have occurred through the Ben Ali-era National Gene Bank and the various initiatives which have burst out of the Tunisian oases in the pre- and post-revolutionary era oriented around restoring the country’s control over its endogenous genetic treasure, the fruit of thousands of years of living experimentation on the land.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
African Studies