Casa Robino

hello friends! I just returned to Italy and started a masters course in gastronomy and human ecology... lots of eating and a lot of informations that I would like to share. It's kind an academic approach about ideas we've been discussing about for years!
Reading this particular essay "Impeding Dispossession, Enabling Repossession: Biological Open Source and the Recovery of Seed Sovereignty" by Jack Kloppenburg I just couldn't stop thinking about all the people I met in and around casarobino and who have first taught me about open source...

Turns out I never actually learnet how to use computers so I can't figure out to attach a pdf to this message. I'll go ahead and copypaste the introduction, and someone can tell me how to share the whole thing, or I can email it to interested people.
much love,
Martina

IMPEDING DISPOSSESSION; ENABLING REPOSSESSION: BIOLOGICAL OPEN SOURCE AND THE RECOVERY OF SEED SOVEREIGNTY
by JACK KLOPPENBURG

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose . . .
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
(Anon., English, c. 1821, quoted in Boyle 2008, 42)

Corporate appropriation of genetic resources, development and deployment of
transgenic varieties, and the global imposition of intellectual property rights are
now widely recognized as moments of accumulation by dispossession. Though
robust and globally distributed, opposition to such processes have been largely
defensive in orientation, and even accommodationist in demands for the development
of market mechanisms for compensating those from whom germplasm is
being collected.A more radical stance founded on legal and operational mechanisms
drawn from the open-source software movement could not only function
to impede processes of dispossession, but might actually facilitate the repossession
of ‘seed sovereignty’. Implementation of ‘biological open-source’ arrangements
could plausibly undergird the creation of a protected commons populated by
farmers and plant breeders whose materials would be freely available and widely
exchanged, but would be protected from appropriation by those who would
monopolize them.