The Dematerialization of Plant Genetic Resources 

A Peasant’s Perspective

Over the last twenty years, new techniques have allowed public and private actors to sequence genomes of living organisms at an increasingly faster pace, to amass peasants’ knowledge on their traits, and then to digitalize and store this ‘information’ in huge electronic databases. This information is becoming ‘dematerialized’ as it is made accessible, and separated from the microorganisms, plants and animals that they stem from, and indeed they are further isolated away from the persons who provided all related knowledge. More recently, various Public-Private Partnerships (such as DivSeek) have stated that their aim is to connect and share existing databases.