GEOG 130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Germplasm, Primitive Accumulation Of Capital, Genetic Erosion
Gerplas ad Plat Biotehology February ,
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• Kloppeurg’s projet:
o How the urge to commodity in relation to time, space, and time affects germplasm
o Relate to institutions and the division of labor
o Transfer of germplasm around the world
• Primitive accumulation
o Acknowledges that it is the separation of workers from the means of production, so that
workers have to sell their labor
o Creation of conditions of which wage laborers sell their labor as a means of production -
commodification of labor
• How can seeds be commodified?
o Farming has shifted from subsistence to production for exchange
• Value added in agriculture
o Bulk of the shares made from crops do not go to the farmers
o Farmers are not wage laborers, but are propertied laborers
o Farmers are trapped i the tehologial treadill – farming is highly competitive
▪ They must adopt new technologies to reduce their per unit cost, giving them a
temporary advantage
▪ Once everyone adopts this technology, there will be more competition → smaller
farmers are not able to compete
• How to commodify the seed
o Biologial: iterrupt the seed’s atural self-reproduction (modify the biology) through
hybridization
▪ Outcome: making farmers have to buy their seed every year
o Socially: make seed varieties private property such that replanting them can be made illegal
▪ Plant patent act, plant variety act, supreme court cases → a private entity (company)
can assert property claims/ownership on the seeds that they sell to the farmers and
what is grown in the future
• Institutions and the division of labor in agricultural research
o Scientific R&D have been key to the capitalization of seeds
o Seeds were a valuable research
o Treasury Secretary instructs the consuls to send plants to the US – iperial hess gae
between countries
o Morril Act: federal role to support state universities to provide education on agriculture
• Program run by the USDA: public seed improvement by simple mass selection
o Collection of germplasm (genetic varieties of seeds) from around the world
o Free distriutio to farer’s aross the U“ seeds that ould e replated
o They select seeds from most successful plants to replant the following year – most of the
seeds failed everywhere
▪ Does’t atter eause you oly eeded a sall uer of suesses for it to spread
everywhere
o How could private enterprises compete with the USDA? This was a question
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