Situating In Situ: A Critical
Geography of Agricultural
Biodiversity Conservation in the
Peruvian Andes and Beyond
T. Garrett Graddy
Global Environmental Politics, School of International Service, American University, Washington,
DC, USA; graddy@american.edu
Abstract: This paper investigates seed politics through the case study of a native potato
repatriation and related livelihood projects at the Parque de la Papa (Parque) in the
Peruvian Andes. This in situ oriented agrobiodiversity initiative launches a compelling
critique—framed in distinctly spatial terms—of standard ex situ conservation paradigms
and policies. Specifically, it works to decentralize seed conservation and to re-situate
agrobiodiversity within in situ sites and situations. This spatial reconfiguration has political
and epistemological implications: it recontextualizes agricultural expertise and the fruits
thereof in the farms and daily lives of Andean communities; it grounds political interventions,
which recently led to Peru’s decade-long moratorium on transgenics; and it offers a
decolonizing vision of genetic resource value. Through a variety of practices and discourses
the Parque is articulating and actualizing a critical geography of agrobiodiversity and its
conservation.
Keywords: agricultural biodiversity, in situ conservation, critical geography, Peruvian
Andes, repatriation
Introduction
Geographers have long explored the human dynamics of biodiverse agriculture,
from Sauer (1963) to Zimmerer (1992, 1996), Whatmore (2002) to Moseley
(2012). Much of this scholarship has explored how the ecological and economic
diversification of agriculture could help mitigate the growing ecological and
economic vulnerability of small-scale farming by providing a foundation of resilience.
But, how would and does this diversification happen? This paper engages this broad
question by addressing agricultural biodiversification in particular. Of note, I resist
the reduction of all agricultural diversity to mere genetic agrobiodiversity—an
oversimplification that molecularizes the rich social, cultural ecological context
entailed in agricultural diversity, thereby erasing the knowledges, skilled labor,
and relationships that (re)generate such resources (Brookfield 2001; Graddy 2013;
Ishizawa 2006; McAfee 2003; Nazarea 2005). Yet, agricultural biodiversity does
provide a primary basis for resilient, sustainable agriculture and it is declining
precipitously around the world—though seed and gene banks have grown in size,
holdings, and funding concurrent with this decline. Accordingly, in this paper I start
with the subject of agricultural biodiversity, its erosion, and ex and in situ strategies
for its conservation. I then focus on one salient in situ agricultural biodiversity
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doi: 10.1111/anti.12045
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regeneration initiative and explore the significance of its political and epistemic
mobilizations.1
Historically and currently, the bulk of financial and political support for agricultural
biodiversity conservation flows to ex situ methods of preservation: particularly,
mega-gene banks and seed vaults. Considering the dire pace of agrobiodiversity
erosion worldwide, such measures do serve a purpose. Yet, as analyzed below, a
myopic focus on ex situ preservation will stockpile and store germplasm—but not
keep alive agricultural biodiversity, which thrives when actually cultivated in fields,
on farms, in practice.
I begin this analysis by engaging a recent repatriation in the southern Peruvian
Andes—the Parque de la Papa (Potato Park, hereinafter “the Parque”)—wherein a
collective of six communidades, together comprising nearly 4000 people, successfully
“returned” nearly a thousand papa nativa varieties from the International Center for
the Potato (CIP, for Spanish acronym) in Lima back to the communities and fields that
originally bred and grew those varieties. This repatriation—alongside corresponding
economic, ecological, cultural, and political initiatives—serves as a landmark (though
not necessarily representative) example of effective in and ex situ collaboration. This
agricultural biodiversity repatriation and affiliated initiatives are reconfiguring the
spatial and epistemic dynamic between in and ex situ, such that ex situ conservation
of agrobiodiversity exists so as to facilitate its in situ cultivation and regeneration—not
the other way around. This re-prioritization of in situ ecological knowledge and
agricultural expertise works to decolonize conservation dynamics that have, despite
intentions, remained vestigially colonialist; this case study thereby offers insights into
debates on political mobilizations around place and scale underway within critical
geography. After contextualizing and introducing the case study, the paper relates
research findings within ongoing debates in critical geography literatures, namely,
place-based political-ecological mobilizations and the spatiality of coloniality—as
exemplified in agriculture.
Drawing on participant observation, participant action research, interviews, and
focus groups (in 2007, 2008, and 2011–2012) as well as public document analysis
and ongoing conversation and dialogue with this agrarian collective, I explore how this
community group is articulating and actualizing an alternative geography of agricultural biodiversity: an in situ critical geography of seeds, space, place, and power. Of
note, the question of methodology deserves more attention. I worked with the Parque
and with ANDES in 2007 and 2008, serving in a volunteer capacity as needed in
exchange for the opportunity to ask questions, conduct formal interviews and focus
groups, take pictures, and take notes.2 This was an attempt to build trust between
myself and the communities of people from whom I have been learning about
agribiodiversity over the past 6 years: growers at the Parque and agribiodiversity
advocates at ANDES. It was also an attempt to bring in a layer of reciprocity in my
relationships with these communities of people—many of whom expressed a
longstanding frustration with non-reciprocal, extractive research (Robbins 2006; Smith
1999). Suffice it to say, I am still navigating these important—but nebulous—goals.
This paper emerges from and aims to contribute to conversations underway—
within and beyond geography—regarding agricultural policies that foster (bio)
diversified agricultures by diversifying agricultural economies and epistemologies.
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Situating In Situ
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Situating In Situ
The Catch-22 of In Situ
Agricultural biodiversity—the variety and variability of domesticated crops, their
wild relatives, soil organisms, and pollinators—has declined in fields and regions
around the world since the mid-twentieth century. According to the UN Food &
Agricultural Organization (FAO), three-fourths of the world’s genetic diversity was
lost over the last hundred years, and a third of remaining diversity could disappear
by 2050 (FAO 2011). Currently, 90% of food consumed in the world is produced
from fifteen plant and eight animal species, while increasingly homogenous wheat,
rice, and maize supply more than half of global food intake (CBD 2013a). A number
of causal agents have been proposed to account for agrobiodiversity erosion, such
as the industrialization of agriculture (Fowler and Mooney 1990; Polanyi 1944), its
colonizing tendency (Berry 1978; Shiva 1993) the “globalization” of agribusiness
(Kloppenburg 2005; Shiva 2000), homogenizing of the global diet (Nabhan 2006),
and de-agrarianization (Fitting 2011; Fry 2011; Nazarea 2005), among others.
Analysts have also considered the consequences of such loss, framed most often
as both short-term lack of diverse nutrition, specific micro-nutrients, climateadaptive ecological traits, cultural significance, and collective memory and as
long-term foreclosure of specific possibilities and general potential.
To stem the loss of crop diversity and crop wild relatives, national and international
seed and gene banks—such as those in the Consultative Group for International
Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—have worked over the past few generations to collect
samples from in situ settings to store in ex situ reserves “for the benefit of humanity”
(CGIAR 2013a) as international public goods. One on hand, this ex situ mode of
conservation has effectively kept hundreds of thousands of open-pollinated crop
varieties and their wild relatives from disappearing. On the other hand, ex situ
preservation has eclipsed in situ realms of cultivation as the chief means of
conservation. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), CGIAR, and the
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture (Treaty) all
affirm the need for in situ cultivation, yet the chief funding mechanism, the Global
Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) funds only ex situ-oriented collection, storage, and
use. Similarly, CGIAR also focuses the lion’s share of their considerable resources on
ex situ conservation.3 According to a recent impact statement, “[h]istorically the
CGIAR’s research investments have not explicitly focused on [‘in situ conservation,
i.e. on-farm’] as an objective…” (CGIAR 2013b).
Scholars, across and beyond the disciplines have noted the need for in situ (Altieri
and Merrick 1997; Posey 1996; Thrupp 2000), particularly in the Andes (Brush 2004;
Brush et al. 1995).4 They have sought farmer’s perspectives to understand
agrobiodiversity decline (Rhoades and Booth 1982; Zimmerer 1996) and its
regeneration on the margins (Nabhan 2001; Nazarea 2005). The UN FAO’s High
Level Panel on Experts of Food Security and Nutrition affirmed this focus in their
June 2012 report: “All that is possible must be done to minimize genetic erosion
of the remaining biodiversity both in situ and in gene banks” (CFS 2012).
Meanwhile, conservation biologists have noted the tendency to conflate biodiversity
with biological resources—though the former remains “a necessary precondition for
the long-term maintenance of” the latter (Wood 1997:252, italics in original), and
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the latter could be understood as an attempt to give quantifiable value to the
former. The actual, potential, adaptive, and contributive values of in situ biodiversity
by definition exceed numerical valuations of biological resources, such as
germplasm and desired agronomic traits, and such an oversimplification, though
well intended could lead to a neoliberalization of this conservation (McAfee 1999).
Moreover, stored germplasm does not interact with and adapt to changing abiotic
and biotic pressures (Tuxall and Nabhan 2001). Molecular biologist Hamilton
warned nearly 20 years ago that “ex situ collections may be ineffective at preserving
genetic diversity and the evolutionary potential of populations for adaptive or
neutral evolution” (1994:39).
Over the decades, this conflation persists, and even grows—as in the case of crop
wild relatives. Around the world, in situ cultivation deliberately preserves crop wild
relatives in the forms of wild-flower buffers, adjacent woodlands, and protected
“weeds”. Such niches do not often survive agricultural transitions from semi-subsistent
or biodiverse farming to more intensified, industrial crop production. Yet, recently,
crop wild relatives are increasingly recognized as critical to viable, adaptive genetic
diversity—particularly amidst climate changes. Some scholars contend that crop
wild relative (CRW, as now acronym-ized) “form the most important component
of PGRFA [plant genetic resources for food and agriculture], because they hold so
much potential for crop improvement” (Ford-Lloyd et al. 2011:560). Because
CRW thrive with no inputs, they can contain characteristics of exemplary heat,
drought, and saline soil tolerance—all useful traits amidst abiotic stresses. The GCDT
notes that CRW “represent a vital source of untapped genetic diversity, which is now
at risk of disappearing just as it is most needed” (GCDT 2013a). Accordingly, GCDT
—with financial support from the Norwegian government—has launched a large
project to collect, store, and pre-breed the wild relatives of 23 major world crops
so as to facilitate their availability to laboratory-based plant breeders.
Though such initiatives bring needed attention and resources to the genetic
treasuries within crop wild relatives, they nevertheless perpetuate an ex situoriented spatiality of conservation. Here, in situ sites of cultivation, upkeep, and
exchange remain peripheral from centralized and centralizing vantage points of
collection, modification, and privatization—peripheral, and yet admittedly crucial
as re-sources. Ex situ sites exist as repositories of goods gleaned from in situ sites,
and from the genetic standpoint, need constant new injections of fresh, rich
germplasm from the fields. Hence ongoing collection missions—and calls for more
(GCDT 2013b).
Meanwhile, the majority of CGIAR holdings are utilized by professional plant
breeders who are increasingly working for private industry. CGIAR has grappled
with the rise in private-industry research and the subsequent tensions between the
intellectual property rights such research demands and CGIAR’s own commitment
to international public goods; in 2008 CGIAR underwent major institutional reforms
to allow it to better partner with private-sector giants. A 2011 CGIAR report on
strategies and frameworks begins with the reality that “Private-sector research is
playing a growing role, and although its reach in low-income countries is still very
restricted, its potential is considerable.” Accordingly, “[t]hese changes … which have
long been in the making, compel the CGIAR to reach out to these new partners,
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Situating In Situ
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devolving responsibility to them so as to concentrate more intensively on the things
[CGIAR] does best” (CGIAR 2011:3).5 All the while, the ex situ holdings have
historically remained inaccessible or simply un-accessed by growers (Graddy
2013; Mooney 1979; Parry 2000). Of note, geographers have worked with—while
proposing constructive critiques to—CGIAR research centers for decades;
Bebbington and Carney (1990) describe Carl Sauer’s warnings to the Mexican
Agricultural Program (that became the International Maize and Wheat Improvement
Center in 1966) of the social and ecological risks of the “green revolution” model
of agricultural research and industrialization—namely loss of biodiversity and
cultural agrarian knowledge. They also describe subsequent geographic collaboration
with CGIAR, and the potential of such scholarship to deepen and broaden
agricultural research.
Moreover, through the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
(TRIPS) and bilateral trade agreements such as the 2007 US–Peru Trade Promotion
Agreement, the products resulting from this breeding research are increasingly
subjected to both a growing net of intellectual property rights “harmonized” with
the US Patent Office requirements and to the proliferation of global seed certification
and standardization laws. Such products are bred—often through transgenic
modification—processed, and distributed as annually purchased inputs to growers
in the global North as well as to new and emerging markets of small-scale growers
in the global South. These “improved” varieties are of course the source of
worldwide controversy, in part because they typically necessitate affiliated packages
of insecticides, herbicides, fertilizer, and irrigation: inputs that are increasingly prone
to volatile market prices (USDA 2007).
In the 1980s, international tension grew over such access and benefit sharing
(ABS) inequities: Kloppenburg (2005) among others demonstrated how the
plant-genetic-resource-poor global North benefitted from gene banks at the
expense of the resource-rich global South. Such debates prompted multilateral
negotiations that ultimately led to the 1996 Global Plan of Action on the Conservation
and Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture and the 2001
International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture (Treaty). In
effect since 2004, the Treaty instituted the binding Multi-lateral System (MS) of ABS
wherein genetic material obtained from gene banks cannot be directly subjected to
intellectual property protection.6 Nevertheless, as agribusiness markets became
increasingly and exceedingly concentrated over the 1990s and 2000s, the rising
numbers of patents on modifications of traits found in and obtained from gene bank
systems has fueled rising allegations of “biopiracy” (Argumedo and Pimbert 2006;
Delgado 2002; Mgbeoji 2006; Shiva 1997). The 2010 CBD Nagoya Protocol further
emphasized the need for equitable ABS and reiterated the Treaty’s formulation of
“Farmers’ Rights” to save seeds. Article 9 of the Treaty urges nations to protect and
promote the rights of growers to use and save seeds, to have fair access to plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA), to share equitably in the benefits
from such PGRFA, as well as to participate in policy decisions related to PGRFA.
Farmer’s Rights were proposed as a means of acknowledging and valuing farmer
contributions to agricultural biodiversity and the genetic resources it affords; the
concept was included in the Treaty as a counter-balance to the growing, rights-based
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language of intellectual property “protection”—or, plant-breeders’ rights (Halewood
and Nnadozie 2008). Yet, meanwhile, the ABS debate has persisted and intensified,
particularly as Plant Variety protection policies [following International Union for
Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV for French acronym)] superseded the
commons-based approach asserted and protected by the “Farmers’ Rights” language
(see Martinez-Gomez and Torres 2001 for Mexico example).
Conventional agrobiodiversity conservation measures—indeed, sustainable
agriculture and food security goals at large—remain caught in the Catch 22 of in
situ: namely that in situ cultivation has historically been valued for its contribution
to ex situ conservation, yet myopically ex situ conservation has perpetuated the
peripheralization of in situ realms of (re)generation, which in turn does not aid
the conditions for agrobiodiversity continuity and renewal. Farmers’ ongoing
contribution to genetic reserves is recognized as necessary, even as they are
increasingly targeted as potential consumers for “improved” seeds. The International
Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)—CGIAR’s policy research center—has
instigated a multi-million dollar research project with the “output title” of “Adoption,
socioeconomic, and gender impacts of transgenic crops: guiding methods and
policies to maximize the potential of biotechnologies for the poor” (CGIAR 2013c).
Such attentiveness to farmer perspectives and needs is to be commended, but it
remains to be seen whether such research on farmer behavior and risk perception
presupposes the universal utility of agribiotechnologies, seeking only to better market
the biotech products themselves. Here, growers of open-pollinated “native” or
“traditional” crop varieties appear as anomalies, lagging behind in the allegedly
inevitable technology adoption curve (Yapa 1993). This tension accompanies a set
of paradoxes regarding in situ cultivation of agrobiodiveristy, which is seen as both
vulnerable, yet the site of resilience—insecure yet the foundation for “climate-smart”
food security. In situ growers are lauded for their global contribution, yet marginalized
as mere recipients and beneficiaries of agricultural expertise and products engineered
from ex situ holdings.
In response to these ongoing debates, there emerges a small but growing countermodel of conservation that seeks to support growers who have decided to continue
or begin biodiverse farming. In 2011, Bioversity—the agrobiodiversity research center
that links CGIAR to UN’s FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development, and
World Food Programme—instigated a 3-year project entitled: “Reinforcing the
resilience of poor rural communities in the face of food insecurity, poverty and climate
change through on-farm conservation of local agrobiodiversity” (Bioversity 2013).
Bioversity has also begun a pilot study of “payments for agrobiodiversity conservation
services” (PACS) in Peru, Bolivia, and India. This PACS scheme could help financially
poor small-scale growers forge a livelihood while growing traditional, biodiverse
varieties. However, as with other payment-for-ecosystem-service enterprises
(Büscher et al. 2012; McAfee 1999), potentially neoliberalizing tendencies abound.
The PACS factsheet identifies Syngenta and other agribusinesses as interested
partners: “In addition, private sector entities with forward or backward linkages to
agriculture may be identified as an additional category of beneficiaries through
potential future product development” (Drucker 2011:4). Nevertheless, these initiatives
expressly focus on fostering in situ cultivation and thus merit further analysis.
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Situating In Situ
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In general, more research is needed to investigate and help break through this
paradoxical peripheralization of in situ by learning more about its unlikely persistence:
the deliberate and grassroots regeneration of on-farm realms of cultivation. (Bio)
diverse agriculture has never been more needed—or more elusive. Its marginalized
resilience begs many questions: Who is still cultivating it? How, where, why, with
what obstacles, and to what effects? What are such growers articulating and
actualizing with this practice?
Repatriation De Papas Nativas
Geographically speaking, in situ agrobiodiversity is happening on the margins—in
rural villages and urban gardens around the world. This marginality is spatial, even
as it is also economic, social, political, and epistemic. Usually, agricultural diversity
correlates with linguistic diversity (Maffi 2001)—both of which face pressures under
world-market integration. Agrobiodiversity often persists in mountain communities
that have maintained strong agrarian identities and have not integrated into capitalintensive, export-oriented, high-input agri-food markets: Himalayan (Saxena, Maikhuri
and Rao 2005), Appalachian (Best 2013), and Andean highlands (Tapia 2000;
Zimmerer 1992), among others. Accordingly, many centers of world diversity of
various crops are found in rural areas with little political or economic power, that
bear the brunt of the classification “underdeveloped”. Yet, despite—or perhaps
because of political-economic and epistemic pressures to adopt “modern” seed
varieties and more monocultural farming techniques—explicitly in situ initiatives have
emerged around the world under the banner of safeguarding agricultural (bio)
diversity by revitalizing it. From Navdanya in northern India to Nayakrishi Andolan
in Bangladesh to the Sin Maíz no Hay País movement in Mexico to numerous First
Nations’ seed-saving projects in the US and Canada, agricultural collectives and
networks have arisen and often employing the language of “seed sovereignty”.
One such initiative is the Parque de la Papa, located above the Sacred Valley and
Pisaq village in the Cusco state of the Peruvian Andes (Figure 1). The Parque is an
agricultural commons collectively managed by six indigenous communidades
(comprising a total of nearly 4000 inhabitants), who in 2003 merged nearly
10,000 ha of their ancestral farmlands for growing, selling, and demonstrating
nearly 1200 “native” varieties of potato. The Parque is a burgeoning educational
and agro-eco-tourism center and instigator of a large repatriation of native potato
varieties from CIP. Also the site of a number of other community, conservation,
educational, and economic livelihood projects, the Parque has become a key example
of in situ agrobiodiversity cultivation. The Parque receives financial, legal, and
administrative support from the Cusco-based NGO Associacion para Naturaleza y
Desarolla Sostenible (ANDES), which has been funded by international grants from
FAO, the Treaty Benefit-Fund, as well as other international NGOs.7
To contextualize, the Cusco region of Peru has long been recognized internationally
as a Center of World Origin for the potato (Vavilov 1992), and the region is home to
eight known cultivated and native potato species and to over 2300 varieties of
the 235 species and over 4000 varieties in existence (Argumedo and Wong 2011).
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Figure 1: Agricultural biodiversity, harvested at the Parque, Amara, Peru, May 2007
(source: photo by author).
These are cultivated alongside wild relatives and an equally impressive array of biodiverse tubers, grains, herbs, vegetables, and fruits—many native to the region
(Bebbington 2000; Gade 1992; Winters, Hintze and Oritz 2006; Zimmerer 1998).
Abundant and drastic topographical changes occur, from field to field, and even
within fields, where abrupt slopes can render one plot staggeringly steep. The land
holdings stand at 3400–4500 m above sea level. The complexity of the Andean
agroecosystems and the masterful adaptation of and exploration with local species
by farmers have resulted in a stunning agrobiodiversity. Intercropped spatially with
wildflowers and other grains and temporally with winter crops and regular fallow
periods, this cultivation style bolsters disease and insect resistance. It also prevents
soil erosion, along with an extensive, ancient system of terraces and a non-adoption
of tractors—for soil compaction and safety reasons (on highly erodible, steep
slopes). Despite the renowned agricultural achievements, however, the region has
not been immune to the global and rapid decline of agricultural biodiversity
(Zimmerer 1996).
In 2005, the Parque and ANDES initiated and secured an unprecedented contract
with CIP in Lima to repatriate regionally bred potatoes to their original Andean
fields in the Parque, which has since become a “living library” of potato genetic
diversity (FAO 2008). Leaders of the six communities had been in negotiation since
the late 1990s with the nearby NGO ANDES, who had the legal and the financial
capacity to facilitate the repatriation with CIP—and particularly CIP Director General
Pamela Anderson. The repatriation agreement secures the restoration of native
potato crop varieties as well as their monitoring and renewed cultivation within
the six communities of the Parque. According to Alejandro Argumedo, the Associate
Director of ANDES, this means that Andean communities are able to “unlock the
potato gene bank and repatriate biological diversity to farming communities and
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the natural environment for local and global benefit” (Suri 2005). More than
400 native potatoes were repatriated in 2005 and another 500 in October 2010
(ANDES 2013; personal communication 2012).
The Parque’s commitment to revitalizing agricultural biodiversity and associated
knowledges is not unique in the region. A key hub for many, comparable initiatives
is the Proyecto Andino de Tecnologias Campesinas (PRATEC) organization and
initiative. Based in Lima, PRATEC is comprised of and works with indigenous and
campesino communities throughout the Andes to value, learn, and circulate “traditional
ecological knowledge”—particularly expertise regarding agriculture, cosmovision,
artistry, and climate change resilience. PRATEC has a long history of critical,
community-based, decolonial research and workshops (Grillo Fernandez 1998;
Ishizawa 2006; PRATEC and Apffel-Marglin 1998; Rangifo 1998). The Parque is part
of a larger landscape of revaluation, but through the repatriation effort, has forged a
compelling counter-narrative to the persistent epistemological biases governing
support for agrobiodiversity conservation.
Recent interviews and focus groups with Parque growers reveal that elder
farmers recall these repatriated varieties, and express relief and optimism at the
prospect of re-adapting additional traditional varieties.8 The Papa Arawiwa
leaders—or “guardians” of the repatriated varieties—whom I interviewed present
this reintroduction as beneficial, particularly in the face of increasingly irregular
and extreme weather caused by global climate change. The usually regular weather
patterns of the region have altered, bringing unseasonably hot days and cold nights
as well as rain in the dry season, droughts in the wet season, increased torrential
rains, and erratic hail. Moreover, sporadic frosts—specifically those in the cold
season—pose greater threats and were blamed for multiple crop failures. In addition
to weather stresses, farmers note the melting glaciers—a starkly visible reminder of
the climactic changes afoot; Parque growers are acutely aware that this will affect
water flows throughout the region and beyond. Focus group participants from
across the Parque communities and groups expressed concern regarding climate
changes on multiple occasions—even when the question was about a seemingly
different subject. One community leader noted that such abiotic stresses had increased
recently; climate conditions “are different now than they were six years ago”.9 Growers
described these climate changes as alarming wake-up calls to the urgent importance
of agricultural biodiversity and the biological and genetic resiliency it affords. These
findings corroborate with other documentation and synthesis of farmer perspectives
in the Peruvian Andes (Salazar 2012).10
In focus groups with the dozen collectives operating within the Parque, interviewees
viewed the repatriation as a catalyst for larger renewals that are agricultural and
environmental—as well as social, cultural, and political. The homecoming of these papas
nativas heralds a broader recovery of plant varieties and their multiple, valuable
properties—from nutrition to taste, ecological resilience to cultural continuity: leaders
of the culinary group reflected that amidst the challenges of their work, the main
success has been “la transmisión de conocimientos, de generación a generación”. The
intergeneracional transmission of tradicional Andean cuisine also entails the
recollection and re-adaptation of customary or “typical” gastronomy, gardening, and
affiliated knowledges: “estamos recuperando las costumbres, y como utilizar las hierbas”.11
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The repatriated varieties grounded a wider project of remembering and regenerating
place-based agrarian practices, such as the cycle of agriculturally oriented celebrations,
festivals, and ceremonies held throughout the year. Like the seeds themselves, such
traditions are not static, but are re-adapted to new environments, circumstances,
pressures, needs, and desires in each new season and generation. In this way, the
very biological life cycle of papas nativas helps overcome the contradiction between
the allegedly dynamic adaptivity of “modern” seeds and farming methods and the
supposedly static stagnation of “traditional” seeds and methods.
Affiliated Projects
The elder growers also expressed concern in focus groups that many young adults
have not learned the ancient and intricate agricultural traditions, opting instead to
move to the nearby town of Pisaq, to Cusco, or even to Lima to earn money as taxi
drivers, maids, janitors or street vendors. Interviewees also lamented the lack of
inclusion of agrarian knowledge and skills in the public school system curricula.
Accordingly, one of the central premises of the Parque is to support the young
growers who remain interested in continuing Andean farming traditions with native
seed varieties.12 This support encompasses a wide range of projects, such as cultivating
an economically and ecologically sustainable agro-eco-tourism, wherein would-be
Machu Picchu trekkers hike the six communities, learn about agricultural traditions in
the area, and then feast at a Parque restaurant devoted to papas nativas cuisine.13
Women from each of the six communities gather twice a week as part of the
Gastronomy Group to learn professional food handling skills and to work on a menu
consisting of traditional Andean cuisine prepared and arranged for domestic and
international tourist consumption. Each of these projects is aimed at recognizing
and re-activating agrarian practices and knowledges—from video skills to horizontal
linkages for commons management to the protection of TEK as prior art; each
project also aims to build a steady income source.
Another Parque project endeavoring to build economic self-sufficiency involves
the conservation of medicinal plants in the region through the development of a
line of cosmetic and medicinal herbal products. Sipa Swarmi, or “young women”
in Quechua, gathers women from each of the communities for weekly harvesting,
processing, and packaging of local herbs into soaps, shampoos, tinctures, tea bags,
and medicinal skin creams. This program also involves an extensive research and
categorization of the wild and traditionally cultivated herbs across the six-community
region. Such cataloguing serves three main purposes: firstly, local communities have
a more thorough knowledge of what has grown or is growing in their respective
communities, along with the medicinal properties of these plants. Archiving has
become more important as such knowledges have become less ubiquitous over
the generations. This database also assures documentation of local knowledge
and use of these plants and their properties, thus providing legal “prior art” in the
case of exploitative bioprospecting, or attempts at foreign patenting of such plants.
Finally, once catalogued, particularly profuse medicinal plants can be processed
into products, and according to those interviewed, contribute to a burgeoning,
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local micro-economy within and among the six communities. Women involved in
Sipa Swarmi gain economic recompense for their work, but also receive production,
sales, and accounting skills as well as Spanish literacy training. In focus groups with
members from Sipa Swarmi and the Gastronomy Group, women reflected upon the
multiple benefits of receiving even a modest income from these Parque projects.14
“Les permite dar propino a sus hijos”, explained the translator [the income permits
the women to give pocket money to their children].15 Moreover, focus group
participants described a widespread recognition within the Parque that this money,
if spent on local goods and services, would generate multiple levels of benefit within
the communities, such that one woman’s income can be empowering to her while
being “aporte comunal” [communal contribution] (Figure 2).
Meanwhile, the Botanical Garden group works to cultivate medicinal and culinary
herbs in gardens around the six communities, and the Textile Collective hand-dyes
and weaves traditional, Andean textiles from wool sheared off local sheep. The
weavers described in their focus group the litany of skills, knowledges and plants
needed to hand-dye each of the dozens of different woolen yarn colors, weave the
distinctive textile patterns, and sell the final products for fair prices.
Primarily, each of these various initiatives aims to value, document, re-adapt, and
circulate local ecological, agricultural, agrarian craft knowledges, and affiliated natural
resources. Additionally, however, these initiatives have been designed, implemented,
modified, and practiced so as to help cultivate what focus group participants call
“creative economies”,16 wherein growers and artisans can make livelihoods not
only as a supplement to but directly by keeping alive the skills, knowledges, and
resources of the region’s agrarian heritage.
Figure 2: Focus group with Gastronomy Group, Sacaca, Peru, January 2013 (source: photo
by author).
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Moratorium: In Situ Influence on Politics, Policy
In addition to these agrarian/artisan collectives and community economy projects,
Parque growers are explicitly involved in political mobilization and policy reform. The
Parque launched a widespread—and ultimately successful—campaign to declare the
Peruvian state of Cusco GM-potato free. In May 2007, despite the overtly
neoliberalizing political climate of the Alan Garcia administration in Lima, the
Cusqueño governor agreed to their petition (Marris 2007). ANDES, the Parque and
the affiliated Indigenous Coalition Against Biopiracy also successfully protested the
agribusiness giant Syngenta and thus halted field tests of transgenic potatoes
containing genetic use restriction technology (GURT), or “terminator technology”
(Newswire 2007) (Figure 3). Additionally, in 2009, the Parque successfully proposed
the world’s first ever Law Against Biopiracy for the state of Cusco (Portillo 2009)—
the first law of its kind and a global precedent.
Then in November 2011, under the new Humala administration, the Peruvian
Congress unanimously approved a decade long moratorium on transgenic seeds,
foods, and animals, on the grounds of protecting the country’s renowned agricultural
biodiversity. This policy was the result of a broad coalition of advocates across the
country, from indigenous campesino growers (the Parque chief among them) to
Peru’s burgeoning organic food, drink, textile, and herbal medicine export industry.
The ban stands in direct contradiction to the 2007 US–Peru Trade Promotion Agreement
and diverges from a Southern Cone trend toward high-chemical input, homogenous,
trasngenic agro-fuel (mostly soya) exports to US and China. However, it parallels the
broader Andean political articulations of agricultural biodiversity as central to food
security insofar as such diversity fosters “food sovereignty”. Though it received little
mainstream press, this moratorium stands as a forceful articulation—one that deserves
Figure 3: Parque meeting to prepare petition to Cusco governor to declare the province free
of transgenic potatoes, Chawraytire, Peru, May 2007 (source: photo by author).
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Situating In Situ
13
attention, particularly by scholars of spatial politics. Understanding the causes and
implications of this pivotal legislation require that it be situated amidst its various
geographic contexts and historical antecedents, of which the Parque plays a key role.
The initiatives underway at the Parque, alongside overt political activism, bring the
subject of agrobiodiversity conservation to the political foreground. This political
ecology of seeds actively intervenes in the expressly political laws and policies
regarding genetic modification, patents, and bioprospecting—deemed “biopiracy”
in the Parque’s workshops, press releases, brochures, and website (ANDES 2013)—
as well as the more subtle politics of historically classist and racist devaluations of
local agricultural heritages.
Clearly, “indigenous” is not a simple or monolithic identity. It remains deeply
heterogeneous, contested, and fluid, particularly in Peru (de la Cadena 2000)—with
its influential and complex history of indigenismo (Coronado 2009). García (2005)
writes about the rise of intercultural education in Peru, which parallels Ecuadorian
and Bolivian cultural-political mobilizations, yet remains unique in the region. The
intersections of class, race, gender, and indigeneity transect the history and
geography of Peru (Orlove 1993), deeply influencing the specific ways that highland
cities, communities, and landscapes endured colonialism, independence, agrarian
reform (Mayer 2009), terrorizing Maoist militias and terrorizing military repression,
and most recently neoliberalism. As scholars in and beyond the academy have
demonstrated, the “the indigenous Andean” identity—called at times “lo andino”—
remains a construction.
Indeed as de la Cadena (2000), García (2003, 2005), and Starn (1994), among
others, have elucidated, the construct of the “indigenous Andean” identity or lo
andino is continually (re)constructed and (re)configured in dynamic multi-scalar
processes of political mobilization, social organization, and cultural articulation.
Meanwhile, of course, no one Andean identity, experience, perspective, or voice
exists. Yet, the recognition of agricultural “traditions” as dynamic, multi-faceted,
adaptive, heterogeneous, and resilient would seem to demand more, rather than
less, engagement with invocations of “traditions”.
García’s extensive ethnographic observations lead her to agree with anthropologist
Alcida Ramos that “indigenism” describes the “dialectic relationship between indigenous
peoples and national society” (García 2005:158). These complexities permeate Andean
cultural-political mobilizations, and though not foregrounded, are not absent at the
Parque initiative. The internal, administrative dynamics between ANDES and the Parque
reflect a larger trend in “sustainable development” in the region, namely a transnational
construction of indigenous-led “development”, as explained and analyzed by Andolina,
Laurie and Radcliffe (2009). ANDES works with other projects in the region, as well as a
network of interns, volunteers, international and national partners, funders, and
scholars. The Parque was established by the volition of local community leaders, but
in close logistical partnership with ANDES—who supplied the legal and financial
counsel and support for the repatriation and Indigenous Biocultural Heritage
Territory land tenure status. The relationships between and within the Parque and
ANDES are dynamic and multi-faceted, but in general, built upon attempts at
reciprocity, mutual benefit, and shared goals of revaluing and regenerating
agricultural biodiversity and Andean agrarian knowledges.
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In formal conversations and in formal focus groups, growers at the Parque describe
their own work as a re-affirmation of the dignity of place-based Andean farming
methods—which have borne the brunt of centuries of denigration—from being pagan
in the eyes of colonialists, to being backwards, underdeveloped, and uneducated in
the eyes of national and international markers of rural advancement. In a focus group
with the Papa Arawiwas, elders emphasized the importance of teaching youth the
complex skills needed to sustain biodiverse agriculture; they lamented that such
knowledges were not a larger part of standard school curriculum. The elders debated,
during the focus group, how to allow young people the time to work in the fields
during key agrarian seasons (planting and harvesting), even as public school asked
more and more of students’ daylight hours for formal academic and extracurricular
activities. Accordingly, each of the various Parque initiatives aims to value, document,
re-adapt and circulate local agrarian, place-based knowledges so as to provide
economically viable means of keeping the under-valued practices and skills alive. In
this way, the practices and discourses put forth by the Parque comprise an on-theground, political, social theory critique—in short: an in situ critical geography.
In Situ Critical Geography
Growers working at, with, and through the Parque de la Papa are articulating and
working to actualize an alternative geography of agrobiodiversity that re-centers in
situ as primary. This reorientation reconfigures the spatiality of (and thus the political
and epistemic relations within, between, and among) in and ex situ, such that the
latter exists so as to serve the former. As such, the ex situ conservation of agricultural
biodiversity exists so as to facilitate its diverse in situ cultivation, re-adaptation, and
circulation—through longstanding but evolving networks of seed exchange, gifts,
swap, travel, and local barter and sale (Zimmerer 2006). Ex situ still does play an
important role—since the contexts of in situ face enormous pressures. But what does
it mean to re-situate in situ as primary, as principal means and simultaneous end to
agricultural biodiversity regeneration and thus conservation? I contend that this
reconfiguration offers a powerful and empowering antidote to vestigially colonialist
spatiality and epistemology. As such it merits attention from critical geographers.
In Vivo, Spatialized
Foremost, the reprioritization of in situ realms of cultivation and circulation—as in
swapping—returns conservation to the field—and the praxis—of farming and growing
from seed. Anthropologist Virginia Nazarea demonstrates in her research on US-based
heirloom seed-keeping, that the practice of seed-saving:
needs to be understood as conservation in vivo, or conservation as a way of life. It cannot
be “idiomed” away as haphazard management or sustainability by default … To
appreciate it fully, we have to be open to a different set of epistemology, meaning, and
valuation … And learn the lessons we must as we wean ourselves from the historically
colonial appropriation of plant genetic resources in botanical gardens and genebanks
to a more enlightened position of facilitating conservation in situ and in partnership
with small-scale farmers and old-timey gardeners who have been quietly conserving
biodiversity for generations in their fields (2005:x).
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Situating In Situ
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Indeed, growers at the Parque have repatriated the papas nativas seed tubers
back to their community seed banks so as to re-integrate the practices and
knowledges of growing papas nativas and affiliated crops and herbs back into the
fabric of their daily lives, landscapes, social networks, (agri)cultural memory, and
economies. The community seed banks have been a part of the Andean landscape
and social networks for centuries, but declined in the twentieth century due to
agrarian displacement, urbanization, and rise of annually purchased seeds. The
Papa Arawiwa group is facilitating the repatriation through community seed banks
in each of the six communidades.
Yet, despite the evocative and revealing connotation of in vivo, I argue the
adjective in situ conveys a critical, additional aspect of effective conservation: its
spatiality. In situ explicitly situates the dynamic vitality of in vivo by calling attention
to its locatedness—its situatedness. The Parque exists as an Indigenous Biocultural
Heritage (IBH) Territory due to the primary importance of secure, collective land
tenure, according to Parque leaders and growers. Indeed: “above all, it is vital to
use territoriality as the key starting point, since in the last analysis, biodiversity is lost
in-situ and restored in-situ” (Delgado 2002:316).
Such recentralization of in situ foregrounds place, but not as static, introverted,
bounded place. Rather, in situ serves as the dynamic situation of ongoing upkeep—
the social reproduction of place (and, concurrently, of seeds, food, knowledge,
relationships, families, households, networks, responsibilities, and memory). Specifically,
in re-centering in situ, Parque growers have asserted the spatial primacy of the southern
Peruvian Andes—one of the hottest of global agrobiodiversity hot spots. The IBH model
asserts that conservation take place at a landscape scale of reference—in this case, a
beloved and significant Andean landscape that is deeply engrained into the identity
and worldview of the inhabitants.
Parque growers have also asserted the scalar primacy of the realm and mode of
social reproduction: conservation of agricultural biodiversity happens in the chakra
[field]—itself understood as a familiar and appreciated extension of the household
(Mayer 2002; Valladolid Rivera 1998). Here, the chakra and household are not
merely places, but sites of collective self-upkeep, locations that are made and
re-made in an ongoing mode of collective daily and seasonal maintenance. Here,
agrobiodiversity thrives in and through place and place-making: a certain mix of
crops and wild relatives comprises the identity of this particular landscape even
while this particular landscape (from soil to climate, pollinators to farmers) shapes
and changes that particular mix of flora, and thus fauna. In situ does not describe
a location but, rather, a method of upkeeping local—or place-based—ecologies. This
social reproduction of place happens through social reproduction of place-based
agricultural knowledge and practices.
Concurrently, the re-prioritization of in situ foregrounds the human–“nature”
(inter)relationship, wherein the human and non-human realms constitute, consume,
nourish, and nurture each other (or don’t, as the case may be). This interface is at its
most explicit and literal through agriculture and offers needed depth to static,
dichotomized understandings of humans and their “environment”. Here, cultivated
crops—and thus their cultivators—are continually interacting with (shaping and
being shaped by) non-cultivated realms: from general geographic conditions to
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specific biotic and abiotic pressures to their own wild relatives. In situ agrobiodiversity is
situated in “nature”—which is itself best understood as dynamic, multi-dimensional,
place-based situations.
This nuanced ecological understanding, when practiced, is evoked in the Andean
term Pachamama, often translated as “Earth Mother”. In the Quechua language,
pacha conveys many dimensions, having both temporal and spatial connotations.17
Meanwhile, the re-generative (and intimate) spatiality and temporality of “nature” is
conveyed with the diminutive mama. The inherent dynamism of in situ conservation,
as practiced and articulated by growers at the Parque shares with critical geography
scholarship a strong “[e]mpahsis on flux [a]s a major marker of the idea of nature at
the millennium” (Zimmerer 2000:356). In situ describes collective adaptation to,
with, and of the ecological site at hand—a situation that is continually changing and
regenerating itself anew. From the perspective of in situ, place serves as the site of
interdependence, interaction, and reciprocity—among humans and between humans
and non-human entities.
At the heart of this dynamic conception of “nature” as (inter)relational, ecological
situation is: diversity. The re-centering of in situ declares diversity as means and end.
Here, agricultural biodiversity serves as a marker for good agriculture, a means of
reaching and recognizing skillful, effective human–ecology relations. (Agricultural
bio)diversity exists as goal, method, and gold standard.
The Parque’s spatial and epistemic reconfiguration of conservation instigated
through the repatriation entails a shift in perspective: in situ regains its subjecthood
and moves from being peripheralized resource to esteemed point of view—or rather:
one of multiple points of view. Re-centering in situ decentralizes one dominant locus
of enunciation (Mignolo 2005) to make way for many. Self-professing in situ asserts
and actualizes diversity on many levels—from the agronomic to the epistemic, as
content (within the site at hand) and context (amidst the many in situ sites at hand).
It recognizes and begins to reactivate multiple loci of enunciations. Yet within this
multiplicity emerge common points and scales of reference: namely, that (agricultural
bio)diversity constitutes beauty, reflects nutrition and health (both ecological and
bodily), and serves as an effective means of collectively enjoying life. Self-professed
in situ initiatives also presuppose that agricultural biodiversity is worthy of the time,
labor, effort, and obstacles—that it is worth upkeeping, recalling (to oneself and to
others), adapting, and doing well.
Re-centering in situ highlights and situates the in vivo multi-dimensionality of
thriving (agricultural bio)diversity. Here, however, diversity is not just the objective
or object, but the subject, expressed in the ubiquitous first person plural found
throughout brochures, focus group transcripts, declarations, and informal conversations
at the Parque. The repatriation accompanies a re-commitment at the Parque toward
customary governance practices, which are built around egalitarian and revolving
leadership, communal and collaborative labor, collective property and land tenure,
and consensus-based decision-making. The Parque is not monolithic, but there exists
an articulation of collectivity in various internal and external venues—a collectivity
hard fought for through ongoing dialogue, negotiation, debate, and consensus.
This collaborative mode requires work, but confers more efficacy according to
Parque growers, with regards to, among other things, agricultural biodiversity.18
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Situating In Situ
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Extroverted In Situ
Despite its introspective etymology, in situ, when practiced deliberately—as in the
case of the Parque—is highly relational and extroverted. Geographers studying
the rise of place-based environmental advocacy and the rise of the local scale of
reference in agricultural advocacy have grappled with the limits to localism and
the potential xeonophobia of place-bound identities (Futamura 2007). Yet, “[l]ocal
movements are not either ‘introverted’ or ‘extroverted’ but can be both simultaneously
and with a variety of local and extra-local consequences” (Castree 2004:150). These
extroverted dimensions and orientations take the form of attempts at collaborationbased goals of reciprocity. Below, I discuss two major ways in which this in situ
initiative looks outward: to exchange seeds, agricultural knowledge, and technology
transfers—with ex and other in situ partner; and through explicit political mobilization,
as site organization, on multiple scales (of reference and reckoning).
Repurposing Ex Situ. A key aspect of the Parque’s commitment to reconfiguring the
standard socio-spatial dynamics of crop biodiversity is by deliberately deconstructing
the dichotomy between in and ex situ realms of conservation. Though often positioned
dichotomously, the demarcation between in and ex situ blurs within the work of the
Parque. After all, the repatriation project clearly depends on the International Potato
Center (CIP)’s successful ex situ storage of native potato varieties. Moreover, the
project has led to the revival of traditional community seed banks in each of the six
communidades of the Parque, banks that re-scale ex situ conservation strategies to
facilitate further in situ growing. Meanwhile, CIP has launched La Ruta del Condor,
[Route of the Condor] a broader campaign to repatriate native potato varieties to a
“chain of microconservation sites spanning the spine of the Andes from Merida in
Venezuela to Jujuy in Argentina” (CIP 2013). Thus far, only two sites have been
developed: the Parque and a smaller initiative in Huancalvelica, Peru.
CIP highlights and celebrates the Ruta del Condor project—and the success story
of the Parque in particular—in their Annual Report (CIP 2010), on their website
(repeatedly), in a August 2008 and January 2012 tour of CIP, and in documentaries
(Engel 2011). The CIP Lima visitor center is filled with a prominent and permanent
installation of the Parque’s repatriation project—with extensive maps and large
color photographs alongside elaborate potato displays, botanical drawings, and
quotes by Parque and ANDES leaders. Meanwhile, the International Treaty on Plant
Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture itself lauds the Parque’s repatriation
efforts and successes, chronicling their financial support (through Benefit Sharing
Funds) in brochures, online, in annual reports. CIP benefits from this reconfiguration
because it legitimizes their claim to conserve and research International Public
Goods “for the benefit of humanity”. These prominent and photogenic commemorations rightly speak to the watershed nature of this initiative, but beg the question
as to why there are not more examples in existence.
More recently, however, the Parque further dismantled this binary by formally proposing to include their repatriated collection under the Multilateral System of the
Treaty, a move that would allow for the formal recognition of agricultural landscapes
as important gene banks in and of themselves. The chakras themselves, then, would
maintain the “same but differentiated value and role as ex-situ gene banks” (personal
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communication 2011). This would set a powerful logistical and ideological precedent
for growers living in World Centers of Origin and Diversity around the world.
Growers at the Parque are aware of this, and have emphasized the importance of
communication and collaboration with other indigenous communities engaged in in
situ crop diversity cultivation. Here a hot-spot in situ initiative reaches out to other
hot spot in situ initiatives around the world, such as with a 2002 delegation of Indian
female farmers from the Deccan Development Society. More recently, Parque growers
hosted a delegation of Ethiopian farmers for a week-long workshop to share strategies
for in situ agrobiodiversity conservation as means for locally empowering economic
development (ANDES 2009; Climate Change & Agricultural Research 2009). The fall
2009 workshop culminated with a collectively written Declaration on Agricultural
Biodiversity and Food Sovereignty that begins with a formal recognition of “the sacred
and inherent rights of Pacha Mama to its integrity and to the diversity and richness of its
expressions” and moves on to a call for Farmers’ Rights to save seeds and an “end to
neo-liberal economic policies that promote ‘dumping,’ subsidized agribusiness,
privatization …” such as in 2007 US–Peru Trade Promotion Agreement. Peruvian and
Ethiopian farmers addressed the deeply political ecology of biodiversity conservation
but also the deeply spatial—and inter-local—politics of agrobiodiversity itself.
The Declaration employs distinctly spatial terminology in describing the objectives
and outcomes of the project, such as:
action research and south-to-south technology transfer based on the establishment of
“Contact Learning Zones” to allow geographically and historically separated peoples to
engage in dialogue, creating horizontal and democratic spaces of intercultural practice,
inquiry, and participatory learning, replacing colonial legacies of coercion, inequality,
and conflict, with sharing and solidarity, participatory knowledge discovery, cooperative
management of knowledge and the fostering of interdependent horizontal networks
(Declaration 2009).
Here, the Declaration writers reconfigure the standard developmentalist
discourses of “technology transfer”, shifting its original hierarchical dynamic—
wherein plant-breeding experts generously confer the products of their
laboratory-based research to campesino peasant farmers. The Declaration writers
decided to keep the basic concept of technology transfer but reinvent and use it
to explain the horizontal, interactive, expressly egalitarian premise of the workshop.
This serves as a creative means of re-appropriating both the concept of “technology” to include in situ open-pollinated, “native” crop plant breeding as well as
the concept of “transfer”—which itself is transformed from its standard
core–periphery geography to one of reciprocal—or inter-local—interaction. Comparable to broader core–periphery political-economic dynamics described by Wallerstein
(1974), ex situ conservation has historically been centripetal force to which in situ
resources are pulled. Products produced from these resources are then distributed, sold
in a centrifugal fashion back to farmers (Dove 1996). At the Parque workshop, the flow
of the transfer moves from being a linear, unidirectional transmission of expert information from the ex situ “center of calculation” (Latour 2004) to the in situ recipients into a
circular, mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge, skills, and solidarity.
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Situating In Situ
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These projects—among others underway at the Parque—provide an antidote to
the top-down development and conservation mechanisms, which locate the local
as the passive in situ recipient of information, expertise, education, and counsel
stockpiled in ex situ institutions. Moreover, the inter-local model reconfigures the
scalar hierarchy that positions international agencies as over, above, and beyond
the “local” (Gibson-Graham 2002; Roberts 2004). Growers and community leaders
at the Parque have deliberately engaged the realm of policy—at the departmental
(Cusco), national, and international levels. This engagement, however, must also
be contextualized within other projects and objectives which deflate the power of
the nation-state as the dominant scale of reference. Deliberately sidestepping the
national scale, the Parque’s alliance projects with other agrarian—deliberately in
situ—communities around the world serve as inter-local rather than international
relations.
Concurrently, however, it liberates the stubborn discursive constraint of the local as
place-bound, parochial, and discrete. The inter-local frame of reference grounds
space in places, but keeps places decidedly open, interactive, and the site of agency
and initiative. This helps break down the problematic, false dichotomy between
provincial rurality and cosmopolitan urbanity. Indeed, these “horizontal learning
experiences” fulfill Massey’s (1993) call for a “progressive sense of place” and Escobar’s
(2001) call for an activism grounded in the micro-particularities of the local, but that
re-imagines the local as the primary site of worldly interaction and global political
leverage (Cox 1997). It demonstrates the “parochialism of ‘global thinking’ and
global action, as well as the open nature of ‘local thinking’ and local action, practices
‘down below’ at ‘the margins’ of modern society” (Esteva and Prakash 1998:21–22).
In Situ Aims at Policy. The Parque has also proven extroverted with regard to policy
reform and political action. The foundational act of creating an Indigenous Biocultural
Heritage Area required legal action, and was a central reason community leaders
solidified their alliance and, collectively, partnered with ANDES—who facilitated the
legal work of navigating land tenure laws in the region and who also facilitated
fund-raising to procure enough financial resources for the various Parque projects.
Growers at the Parque have also engaged in more overtly political actions. The
Parque has been a key agent in the national movement against importing
trangenics. Parque leaders fought for and achieved GM-potato-free Cusco Province
through a number of direct actions, community summits, and public press releases.
They also staged Cusco street protests against GM seeds and foods in 2008, and in
the summer of 2011 traveled to Lima to stage a public protest of the decree,
washing papas nativas, and drawing newsworthy support and participation by
Lima’s mayor. These actions—alongside other comparable civil society advocacy—
culminated in the groundbreaking 2011 moratorium. This ban can be understood
as an effective and noteworthy alliance of two groups in Peru: indigenous and/or
campesina growers in the highlands aiming for food and thus seed sovereignty
and the increasingly renowned gastronomic advocates—including famous chefs,
vocal in their allegiance to Andean cuisine—opposed to transgenics (El Comercio
Perú 2011). The Parque is a recognized leader among the former category. The latter is garnering global attention as Peruvian cuisine takes the world culinary stage.
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The Parque’s most salient critique of the nation-state’s dominance as a scale of
reference, however, remains their advocacy for Indigenous Biocultural Heritage (IBCH)
Conservation Area status (Parque de la Papa 2010). As an Indigenous Biocultural
Heritage Area, the Parque serves as a sui generis system for protection of traditional
ecological knowledge and the biodiversity therein. This would grant the Parque—not
the Peruvian government—autonomy over their agrobiodiversity heritage: the
knowledges and seeds themselves. In an attempt to bolster farmers’ rights, the CBD
claimed biodiversity as the “sovereign rights” of countries such that the potential
benefits and recompense of agricultural biodiversity would be garnered at the national
scale. CBD’s Article 8(j) lauds the importance of traditional ecological knowledge
and asserts its protection—yet those protections are, as deemed by all standard
international environmental governance, “subject to national legislation” (CBD 2013b).
This often excludes indigenous groups such as those in Peru who have historically
been and, in many places, continue to be ideologically and politically at odds with
their government. Like its umbrella organization the UN, the CBD is an inter-national
body: indigenous communities do not have voting power in CBD decisions—only
“Parties” or nation-states do. Indigenous people, meanwhile, attend the Convention
of the Parties meetings as “Observers”.19
Decolonizing Through Diversity: In Situ as Intersubjectivity
The repatriation initiative and its affiliated projects respatialize agrobiodiversity
conservation by re-centering in situ cultivation and circulation of seeds and
knowledges. This spatial reconfiguration works to help decolonize vestigially
colonialist epistemologies. The colonial project relied upon local realms even as it
peripheralized them; meaning and value were conferred by the colonial hub.
Today, this dynamic persists subtly, in that an ex situ locus of enunciation subjects
local experience and expertise to its centralized framework. Coloniality still totalizes,
as critical geographers have demonstrated (Gilmartin and Berg 2007; Shaw, Herman
and Dobbs 2006). The twenty-first century political economies have shifted the
specific dynamics of these lingering hierarchies, but colonialities of power remain
(Fals Borda 2000; Mignolo 2005).
This repatriation and related projects elaborate upon geographer Arturo
Escobar’s important article on the rise and importance of place in ecological justice
activism, and its import in decolonizing both geography and politics:
this place-specificity, as we shall see, enables a different reading of culture and economy,
capitalism and modernity … The marginalization of place in European social theory of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been particularly deleterious to those social
formations for which place-based modes of consciousness and practices have continued
to be important … The reassertion of place thus appears as an important arena for
rethinking and reworking Eurocentric forms of analysis (2001:141).
Escobar elaborates upon and expands the influential work of British geographer
Massey on “the spatialisation of story of modernity”—an enduring blindspot in
dominant understandings of “globalization”, which he contends that “is the
universalization of a particular way of imagining cultures and societies as having a
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Situating In Situ
21
particular relation to (national) space” (Escobar 2001:165)—as well as international
spaces. The Parque’s re-prioritization of in situ modes of agrobiodiversity conservation
opens up an alternative spatiality that decentralizes power, highlights the importance
of local or place-based ecological and agricultural knowledge—all amidst explicitly
extroverted networks and partnerships. Massey and Escobar were aiming to
reconfigure the 1990s globalization meta-narrative that assumed and totalized the
perspective of “modernizing” financial centers, cores, and hubs of power.
Can the world be reconceived and reconstructed from the perspective of the multiplicity
of place-based practices of culture, nature and economy? Which forms of “the global”
can be imagined from multiple place-based perspectives? Which counter-structures
can be set into place to make them viable and productive? What notions of politics,
democracy, and the economy are needed to release the effectivity of the local in all of
its multiplicity and contradictions? What role will various social actors—including
technologies old and new—have to play in order to create the networks on which
manifold forms of the local can rely in their encounter with the multiple manifestations
of the global? (Escobar 2001:170–171).
A decade later, in an extended analysis of Latin America’s remarkable “culturalpolitical mobilizations”, Escobar discerns the driving “political activation of
relational ontologies” (2010:1). The Parque’s various endeavors demonstrate this
point: from conservation collaborations with CIP to the horizontal geopolitics of
South-to-South technology transfers.
Meanwhile, other esteemed scholars writing about these mobilizations in Central
and South America also explored their decolonizing impulse and effects. Mignolo
builds upon Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano’s nuanced theory of “coloniality
of power” (Quijano 2000) to argue that “the critique of the modern notion of
Totality doesn’t lead necessarily to post-coloniality, but to de-coloniality” (Mignolo
2007:451). Quijano himself argues for a decolonizing epistemic shift—within, to,
and beyond the academy: this shift “is necessary to make possible and move
toward a truly intercultural communication; to an exchange of experiences and
significations as the foundation of an-other rationality” (Quijano, as quoted by
Mignolo 2007:499).
Mexican scholars Martinez-Gomez, Torres-Gonzales and Aboites-Manrique (2003)
noted how policies to “globalize” Mexican agriculture deployed colonialist discourses
of rationality and modernity, thereby exacerbating and ignoring the social and
ecological costs of these policies on campesino farmers and farming communities.
Mendieta (2008:298), meanwhile, analyzes the difference between globalization
and modernity, noting that the former “seems to have abandoned all strong
universalist claims and pretensions, as was fundamental to” the latter. Yet, discourses
of globalization inherently assert themselves as “global”, and in so doing, they
“pretend to think the World from the perspective of the other. However, all that they
can see or think is themselves. That is, they go to the other in order to see only themselves” (299). Scholars gathered in Peru in 1999 for a conference on “culture and
globalization”, which resulted in an edited volume exploring the opportunities
and the perils that globalized agriculture—among other things—would bring to
Andean growers and the region’s agrarian cultures (Degregori and Portocarrera 1999).
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22
Antipode
This parallels the argument put forth by Fals Borda, who investigated the ways
that initial rounds of “globalization” served as “a composite of linked economic,
political and cultural processes, the fulcrum of which is in Western-American society
(Eurocentered). It tends to homogenize, control, and subvert those different ways of
social organization with which global elements come into contact” (2000:624).
Fals Borda concludes this article calling attention to the (re)emerging networks of
alternative, decentralized, and “humane” modes of global interaction and
interdependence (633). I propose that this repatriation initiative—like parallel
agrarian collectives working for biodiverse agriculture in Peru and around the
world—is decolonizing spatialities of conservation that have retained vestigially
colonialist epistemics. The growers at the Parque have reached out, with the help
of various intermediaries, to work with the CIP gene bank in a collaborative effort
of regeneration; yet this collaboration nevertheless re-centers and re-prioritizes in
situ agricultural biodiversity—as a goal and a means to that goal. The epistemic shift
that this reconfiguration brings is to establish the foundations for bridging ecological
knowledges and ways of knowing seeds—bridging ex and in situ, and bridging
diverse in situ sites and situations (Ishizawa 2006).
Conclusion
The value of agricultural biodiversity is re-emerging—among grassroots organizations
and in multilateral global governance. The UN FAO Agricultural Committee recently
issued a statement that “reiterated the need for greater attention to crops essential
for food security, and on-farm management of plant genetic resources for food and
agriculture” (FAO 2012). Yet, the current state of seeds needs critical, geographic
analysis to inform effective and equitable intervention.
Over the last few generations, agrobiodiversity conservation has been centralized
and centralizing. It has re-inscribed the core–periphery dynamic of colonialist
economies of appropriation and exploitation, politics of governance through
centers of calculation and control, and epistemologies of expertise that justify
and perpetuate these dynamics. As critical geographers have argued, the dominant
conceptions of space hide inequalities, exploitation, and encroachment of the
commons. Concurrently seed saving and seed sovereignty movements around the
world often employ spatial and scalar language in critiquing and rectifying
agricultural injustices. The Peruvian Parque de la Papa serves as an exemplary case
in point.
Parque growers have argued that conservation techniques that fixate on the
preservation of genetic material extricate these genetic traits of value from their
seeds, but also from their original social and ecological context. This pervasive
decontextualization erases the communities that worked to breed, plant, grow,
and save the various varieties that constitute this impressive agricultural biodiversity.
Ex situ oriented conservation efforts focus intently on the collection and storage of
the seeds themselves—and specifically on the genes therein. It freezes biodiversity
in time and space. Here, the value of in situ cultivation has been measured primarily
in its contribution to ex situ storehouses—which stockpile genetic traits as mostly
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Situating In Situ
23
fodder for private plant breeding—itself a notoriously consolidated agro-industry.
Meanwhile, biodiversity in the fields is constantly evolving and adapting to the
intricacies of the microclimates and climactic changes.
The Parque critiques this conception of conservation as non-reciprocal at best
and exploitative at worst. Their work, however, has avoided perpetuating a
dichotomous tension between the two realms and modes of conservation.
Rather, they have concentrated their efforts on ways to break down the binary
between in and ex situ, through the repatriation project and the proposed
Multilateral System wherein the Andean chakras themselves receive the CBD
status as gene banks.
This along with the repatriation and corresponding projects move the prime
location of conservation from the gene bank back to the chakra, as both the originator
and sustainer of agrobiodiversity. The spatiality of this return works to re-contextualize
the seeds—and the agricultural knowledge, skills, and traditions therein—back within
the communities that originally grew and bred this multitude of varieties. It also
re-contextualizes agrobiodiversity in the fabric of daily life, in the domestic realms,
wherein the work and science of growing from saved seed entails accumulated
knowledge of place—knowledges embodied in daily tasks and responsibilities. It
reconfigures the work of agrobiodiversity as powerful not just in terms of its
productivity, but in terms of its social reproductive capacity to renew itself, to sustain
itself season by season. The re-centering of in situ re-orients agrobiodiversity
conservation toward place and thus place-upkeeping. Here place is deliberately
extroverted, and oriented toward cultivating diversity through networks of diverse
centers of agribiodiversity.
Global climate change and the recent drastic decline of agrobiodiversity necessitate
both in and ex situ conservation measures, yet a simplistic concentration on
“doomsday” seed vaulting could preclude support for the communities around
the world keeping alive and adapted treasuries of agrobiodiversity in gardens and
farms. Moreover the layered worth of heirloom/native seeds and their cultivation
and upkeep, articulated alternately as social currency, cultural identity, ecological
resiliency, economic security, political sovereignty, and even cosmological responsibility
risk being reduced to mere genetic fodder within dominant discourses of gene-banking
and the transgenic “improvement” of seed.
Through the repatriation and affiliated collection of artisanal, educational, and
livelihood agrarian collectives, growers at the Parque are working to reconfigure
the dominant core–periphery socio-political dynamic that grounds the gene banks
and confers them with political, economic, ecological, and epistemic core status.
They are setting a global precedent in decentralizing the notion of biodiversity
and conservation from the highly centralized and consolidated gene bank
storehouses back to the thousands of small-scale, interconnected fields that have
generated, are generating, and wish to regenerate more agricultural biodiversity.
Here, conservation consists of cultivation and circulation; seeds are inextricably
linked to the various soils, networks, communities, and cosmological principles
that engendered them. This is in situ critical geography, boldly committed to
“[d]enaturalizing, contesting and altering” hegemonic geographic imaginaries
(Blomley 2006:91). As such, it merits our attention.
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24
Acknowledgements
This paper was greatly improved by the help of Alejandro Argumedo, Adam Jadhav, Sue Roberts,
Anna Secor, and Tad Mutersbaugh. Thanks also to Sonia Saini and Laneydi Martínez.
Anonymous reviewers gave excellent and challenging comments. I thank Antipode’s editors
for their patience as I worked through revisions, and I thank the growers of the Parque for
generously sharing their important knowledge with me—and now you. All errors are mine.
Endnotes
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5
6
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8
9
10
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19
From CBD Article 2, and also quoted in “Intellectual property and the protection of genetic
resources [their derivatives] and associated traditional knowledge: negotiating text—list of
terms” (WIPO 2012:Annex A, p 3): ““In situ conditions” means conditions where genetic
resources exist within ecosystems and natural habitats, and, in the case of domesticated or
cultivated species, in the surroundings where they have developed their distinctive properties.”
Lack of Quechua language is a handicap, particularly in speaking with elder women who
have limited Spanish. Accordingly, I am now pursuing collaborative research projects with
Quechua-speaking female scholars. Of note, the volunteer-based research methodology
itself deserves more critical attention and analysis.
CGIAR posted a US$678 million research budget for 2012 (CGIAR 2013a).
In general, in situ agricultural biodiversity conservation refers to crop species growing
amidst and with crop wild relatives—the latter’s wildness conferring valuable genetic
dynamism and resilience.
A deeper look at this reform—and its neoliberalizing context—are necessary, but beyond
the purview of this paper.
Of note, the US is not a signatory of the Treaty, as of January 2013—though its private
sector, government agencies, and civil society heavily influence the politics around and
in the Treaty. Halewood and Nnadozie (2008) explain how geopolitical tensions have
pervaded the Treaty’s negotiations, thus making the Treaty a global, contested attempt
at securing a commons of genetic resources for food and agriculture.
Such as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the
Christensen Fund.
In December 2011 and January 2012, I conducted focus groups with 12 of the Parque groups—
each of which took place at the Parque. I worked with two Quechua-Spanish translators.
Focus group with Papa Arawiwas, January 2012, Sacaca, Peru.
This information is drawn from participant observation and participant action research at
ANDES and the Parque in 2007 and 2008. I worked as a volunteer at ANDES in exchange
for the privilege of asking questions (in conversation and informal and formal interviews)
and taking notes and pictures of events and landscapes.
Focus group with Grupo Gastronomico, January 2012, Sacaca, Peru.
Focus group with Papas Arawiwas, January 2012, Sacaca, Peru.
Andean cultural tourism deserves more attention, but are beyond the purview of this
paper (see Carnaffan 2010).
The income is composed of monthly payments to Parque group participants. The income
comes from pooled revenue from each group’s goods and services, supplemented by
grants and funds garnered through ANDES.
Focus group with Gastronomy Group, January 2012, Sacaca, Peru.
Focus groups with Gastronomy Group and Sipa Swarmi, January 2012, Sacaca, Peru.
Pacha: “adj: Itself, The very. n: Place, Time, Era, Earth, World” (Hornberger and Hornberger
2008:68) and “tiempo, espacio” [time, space] and “tejido” [textile] (Taylor 2006:71).
The Parque communities’ commitment to egalitarian customary governance and collective
land tenure deserves more analysis, but is beyond the purview of this paper.
Of note, the pivotal yet nebulous character of the CBD’s Article 8(j) is due to the contested
nature of its inclusion in the CBD (McAfee 1999). This was hailed as a victory by advocates
of TEK and has since led to the formation of the “Ad Hoc Open-Ended Intersessional
Working Group on Article 8(j)” which meets regularly to work through the language
on protection of TEK.
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Situating In Situ
25
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