Seminar by Susannah Chapman, "Disciplining the Seed: Local Practice and Agricultural Governance in The Gambia"

Dr. Susannah Chapman, an environmental and legal anthropologist at the University of Queensland, will present her research on seed practices in the Gambia. All are welcome! Chapman is a visiting scholar affiliated with From Collection to Cultivation for Easter Term 2023.

Disciplining the Seed: Local Practice, Plant Improvement, and Agricultural Governance in The Gambia

In October 2011, policymakers and agricultural officials in The Gambia met to formulate a project that would address “an urgent need” for a state agency that could oversee the development of seed technologies and seed markets across the small West African country. At the crux of their efforts was the potential that seeds might hold for the agricultural sector. “Improved seeds,” their report argued, “have been widely recognized as the main ingredient for enhancing farm productivity and overall crop production.” In the years since, the Gambian government has committed to a variety of measures intended to “improve” seeds. These measures have included the ratification of a regional intellectual property agreement for plant breeders rights and the formalisation of a system of state-coordinated seed certification, a kind of emerging technolegal infrastructure dedicated to the discipline of seeds. In this talk, I situate recent efforts to innovate, standardize, and certify seeds in The Gambia within a longer history of plant and varietal improvement during the twentieth century. In following the stories of Basse and Burukusoo, two groundnut varieties that were central to British colonial plant breeding efforts in Gambia, I follow the differential practices of naming and narrating seeds used by Gambian farmers and British administrators within their agricultural research networks. I show how designations of plant “improvement” and human “expertise” emerged and circulated within colonial agricultural projects in ways that made—and remade—attachments between people and plants. These attachments, I argue, continue to surface in deliberations over seed governance and agricultural today, as local agricultural officials, who have been tasked with building a commercial seed market, grapple with making the seeds produced by Gambian farmers and agricultural officials legible to international donors.