How do farmers select and conserve local varieties?

Описание: Vidéo 2 : Interview of Mrs. Sang, Tu Lê (Province de Yên Bai, Vietnam)


This video was made during a series of surveys in Tu Lê commune (Yen Bai province in northern Vietnam) between July 2016 and December 2018. The aim was to follow two cultivation cycles of a variety of sticky rice of exceptional quality: Nêp Tu Lê, whose name has been protected by a collective trademark since 2006. These surveys were conducted as part of the Up Landraces! research program funded by the ANR Govenpro. It brought together an interdisciplinary team composed of a historian and sociologist of science from the IRD, a specialist in the history of crop genetics (Frédéric Thomas, project coordinator), two geneticists from the Agricultural Genetics Institute in Hanoi (Dr. Mai Đuc Chung and Dr. Nguyễn Thị Cam Giang), an anthropologist from IRD, specialist in non-market exchanges in Vietnam (Emmanuel Pannier) and a young anthropologist in charge of field monitoring (Phan Thị Kim Tâm, student at the University of Social and Human Sciences of Hanoi, USSH).

The surveys carried out in Tu Lê were aimed at analyzing the role played by the commune's farmers in the selection and conservation of the local variety by studying in particular their breeding practices and the exchange of seeds between households in the different villages of the commune. The fundamental question we wanted to shed new light on was whether these practices and exchanges contribute in one way or another to the conservation of the genetic diversity of the variety in question. Here we enter into a controversial academic debate: do farmers' knowledge and practices of selection and seed exchange constitute a system of collective actions in itself that ensures the conservation of local varieties and, more generally, the conservation genetic diversity of cultivated plants? In short, do they constitute commons in the Ostromian sense of the term?