Global Justice and the Shift in Property Rights for Plant Genetic Resources

Although new technologies in plant breeding have the potential to reduce poverty and improve global food security, a shift in property regime for plant genetic resources (PGRs) prevents this potential from being realised. As the emergence of biotechnology has increased the value of PGRs, rents-seeking behaviour by the plant breeding industry spurred the emergence of intellectual property rights (IPRs) for improved plant varieties. Whereas this system is globally implemented through the TRIPS agreement, biodiversity-rich developing countries increasingly use the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to protect their PGRs through state sovereignty. By using an economic perspective, this article aims to explain the appropriation of PGRs and the efficiency rationale that is used for its justification. However, as this perspective disregards the alarming consequences for smallholder farmers in developing countries, a global justice perspective is used to explore these effects. Focusing on distributional justice and the provision of the right to food, this article will demonstrate that the property regime shift for PGRs leads to decreased availability of, and access to, crops that are used by resource-poor farmers. Instead of promoting organic agricultural practices, based on the diversity of traditional seed systems and minimal external inputs, this regime merely stimulates the growth of an unsustainable and highly concentrated seed industry. The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) seem to be most promising in challenging the shift in property regime for PGRs and the global justice concerns this shift entails

Cybersecurity, bureaucratic vitalism and European emergency

Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vitalist concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic manoeuvres that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivities, producing agencies, and staging exercises