Sustainability Science Graduate Program, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico
The present transdisciplinary research project is motivated by the need to revert the accelerated loss of agrobiodiversity in the last century, and to generate well adapted varieties to farmers´ needs, and local environmental conditions in the context of climate change. This project’s main purpose is to carry out a plant participatory breeding (PPB) experience, aiming to strengthen small farmers´ capacities to create new varieties and knowledge, that enable them to better meet their needs. I also propose to develop PPB researchers´ abilities to communicate and collaborate with different social actors in PPB and the wider sustainability science community.
This project consists of a three-year PPB exploratory study of native bean Phaseolus coccineus L., in the State of Mexico, Mexico, in order to monitor its performance under natural and artificial selection according to participatory breeding objectives and indicators. This proposal addresses the epistemological aspects of collaboration, aiming to implement an intercultural approach across all the projects´ components and activities, and to help build bridges of collaboration between producers´ and scientists’ knowledge systems, and their plant breeding research, monitoring and validation methods.
This project has a strong social ecological component which seeks to investigate the effects that PPB can have in generating collective agreements with regards to seeds and knowledge generated during the PPB experience. The project considers local seed regimes and their associated knowledge systems as common pool resources. Therefore, it aims to analyze the current context of public policies that favor agroindustrial agriculture as a means of enclosure of peasant agriculture, under Ostrom´s social ecological framework. The project seeks to identify opportunities to strengthen local governance and agency on crop breeding practices, in order to keep native agrobiodiversity in small farmers’ hands.
At the end of the project, a collective evaluation, acknowledgements and a report on learning outcomes shall be shared amongst all participants. Possible beneficiaries include local bean and native crop small producers, the scientific PPB and sustainability science communities, and all stakeholders interested in PPB as a means to generate more resilient crops and sustainable social ecological breeding commons.
Key words: seed regimes, common pool resources, transdisciplinary research, plant participatory breeding, knowledge systems, Phaseolus vulgaris L.
