Re-imagining (Re)production in Intellectual Property Law: Proprietary Fruit and the Making of Botanical Kinds

Abstract

Over the past several decades, many fruit breeding programs have begun to commercialize new varieties via the strategic use to two legal techniques: the use of plant variety protection—coupled with contracts to create small “clubs” of select growers—and the use of branding to foster ready consumer demand for the protected fruit that the club would produce. In these highly proprietary supply chains, the production of new varieties is inextricably tied to the seasonal production of brand-compliant fruit.

This talk explores the work that is required to make an already-existing variety grow into its varietal image year after year. In doing so, it invites reflection on the distinction between creative production and mundane reproduction that permeate many accounts of plant breeding by exploring the work of “making” that comes after the “creation” of new botanical kinds. Implied in the internal infrastructure through which intellectual property law identifies its object is the idea that crop varieties are produced (bred or “created”), after which they are classified and named. Once bred and authored into the world, the variety is effectively reproduced (cultivated), unless and until it is “bred” into something different. Such a distinction maps onto wider genealogical models of reproduction-as-generation. Cultivation here is generally not envisaged as a creative act, but a reproductive—or copying—one. Rather, it is only in certain instances of plant reproduction, where there is a biological shift in the progeny that is deemed sufficient to create a break in botanical kind, that the copying reproduction of cultivation is reclassified as a creative, productive act of breeding.

In following the creative work of growing brand-compliant crop varieties, this talk shows how emerging intellectual property arrangements are reworking, in some ways, the very distinctions between reproduction and production upon which they depend. Such re-imagining opens up space to consider, however narrowly, the ways in which plant reproduction—and reproduction more broadly—is always enmeshed in wider social, ecological, and technoscientific relations.

About the Speaker

Susannah Chapman is a Lecturer in Sociocultural Anthropology at University College Cork. Trained as an environmental and legal anthropologist, she has a keen interest in plant-human relations, food systems, and environmental governance. Her work asks questions about the signification and care of plants but also the coloniality, biopolitics, and translational practices of contemporary efforts to regulate, conserve, and transform plant life, including trees. Her interest in these questions is rooted in her prior experience working on many different kinds of farms, from diverse polycultures to simplified monocultures, across the United States and a general love of plants. She has written on the loss and recuperation of apple tree diversity in the United States, the propertization of horticultural supply chains in Australia, and the regulation of plant life in The Gambia since the late nineteenth century.

Timezones

Cork, Ireland       Tuesday 28 October 7am

Brisbane              Tuesday 28 October 5pm

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