Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Global Challenges for Food Security and Governance - Session 4 & Conclusion: Social challenges of data linkage

14:00

Introduction by organisers

14:05

Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis

Courtney Fullilove (Wesleyan University) & Abdallah Alimari (National Agricultural Research Centre, Jenin, West Bank, Palestine; ICARDA)

This paper seeks to understand how participatory plant breeding initiatives, heritage narratives, and international agricultural research motivated by climate change each fix the population as a target of research and development. It further considers the implications of such a focus for organizing the preservation and production of seeds at community, regional, national, and international levels. Drawing on quantitative research on farmer participation in informal seed production for wheat in Palestine, site study of a Palestinian NGO administered seed bank in Hebron, and oral histories of farmers in the West Bank, this paper analyzes the relation between community seed banks and national/international agricultural research infrastructures of data and collection and considers the extent to which farmer knowledge can be represented in formalized preservation projects. For even as international agricultural researchers have endeavoured to include farmer knowledge in data infrastructures and plant breeding projects, agrarian knowledge remains the source and the target of their innovations. Preservation in the West Bank takes shape against the backdrop of Israeli occupation, which hobbles commercial agricultural development and intensifies dependence on Israeli imports of seeds and finished agricultural products. Informal seed production offers a strategy to reduce dependence on Israeli imports, shore up land claims, and resist the archiving of Palestinian flora within an Israeli national project. Projects cross formal and informal domains: CGIAR-funded agricultural research promoted by the Ministry of Agriculture, Palestinian NGO-directed community seed banks supported by international aid, and volunteer-based community organizations oriented toward Palestinian heritage and sovereignty. In each domain, collectors seek local varieties, drawing on the knowledge of local farmers to identify baladi seeds (literally “my country,” and connoting local and traditional production). In a biological context, “baladi” refers generally to a population comprised of numerous heterogeneous lines with their own individual characteristics: resistance to drought, pests, and rusts, as well as traits related to texture, taste, and yield. Even as it shelters generalizes enormous diversity, the population remains the the object of preservation and the principal unit of analysis. Collectors render baladi populations legible for archiving through morphological analysis, physical multiplication, and multiple documentation processes. These overlapping documentary practices, and their viability as representations of agrarian knowledge, are the subject of this paper.

14:30

The Research Data Alliance Interest Group on Agricultural Data: Supporting a Global Community of Practice

Patricia Rocha Bello Bertin (Embrapa), Cynthia Parr (USDA-ARS) & Debora Drucker (Embrapa)

Efforts to address equity and inclusion in agricultural data infrastructures face numerous challenges. People and networks are widely distributed geographically. This means some solutions to data problems may arise regionally and independently, yet many people are not easily able to engage with their distant colleagues to learn about them or collaborate. In general constraints on funding for such projects are often national rather than international, and travel funding is not equally distributed. Finally, the breadth of activity means interdisciplinary communication is important but difficult and hard to sustain. Addressing these challenges, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) has been a home for the Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) since 2013. The convening power of RDA provides many advantages, such as the ability to sustain multiple threads of interdisciplinary work, and worldwide networking. IGAD regularly convenes some meetings outside the RDA Plenaries to allow for participation from practitioners with fewer resources. Several important working groups have been supported by IGAD such an emerging crop data interoperability working group. FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) has been a frequent topic of discussion. In recent years, virtual sessions have expanded the conversations even more to enable global participation. IGAD will become the first example of a new type of RDA group – a community of practice. A future goal is to use this community of practice to put good regional or national work into practice via inclusive collaborations. For example, in the US several workshops have addressed the need for progress on issues relating to farmer data ownership and privacy; these are informed by work happening in Europe but ideas will need to be regrounded and modified to cultural and legal practices elsewhere. For plant data in particular, ideas about land races and nomenclature from the Taxonomic Databases Working Group could be combined with the work of the CGIAR institutes to provide more seamless access to indigenous knowledge. In Brazil, several efforts to support data driven decision making in the field could serve as models for other IGAD members. For instance, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) has implemented data services through APIs that provide real-time data on climate, productivity and most favourable days for planting different crops. Diverse agrifood products traditionally grown by local populations are also getting more emphasis in Brazil and agrobiodiversity data standards are being improved by collaborative work from several organizations. Collaboration is also the motivation behind the creation of a national GO-FAIR implementation network focused on agriculture in Brazil. All of this work will benefit if the IGAD community of practice can include new voices from the fields.

14:55

Ethical and Legal Considerations in Smart Farming: A Farmer’s Perspective

Foteini Zampati (GODAN; KTBL), Eliane Ubalijoro (GODAN) & Suchith Anand (GODAN)

Lack of transparency around issues of data ownership, better control of access to and use of data, data rights, privacy, security and whether farm data should be considered ‘personal’ or not, are some of the data challenges faced by all agricultural stakeholders, particularly farmers. Moreover, data transactions are currently governed by contracts and licensing agreements, in which the terms and agreements are complex. This leaves smallholder farmers with very little negotiating power and it is obvious that a lack of trust dominates these relationships.

Until today, ethical considerations were often side-lined because gathering more data was seen as necessary, and concerns about how data might be abused or misused were only subsequently considered. However, with the increase of big data in smart farming, it is more essential than ever to focus on the ethical aspects of data governance (access, control, consent) and practices. This will provide valuable insights into how data is being collected and used, and for what purposes, how to bridge the digital divide, and how to create transparency in order to build trust between takeholders.

15.20

Responsibility Beyond Ethics and Infrastructures: Conceptual and Normative Considerations for Plant Data Linkage and Agriculture

Hugh Williamson & Sabina Leonelli

As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, there have been significant advances in the development of infrastructures and standards for data linkage in the plant and agricultural sciences. Alongside this, there is increasing recognition of ethical issues in data sharing (including surveillance and privacy, the rights of communities and other stakeholders, benefit sharing mechanisms, and so on) and development of procedures and tools to address these. These efforts are valuable and necessary, yet the scope of responsibility in plant data linkage for food and agricultural purposes is wide, given the highly diverse range of stakeholders who are dependent on flows of plant and agricultural data and the massive scale yet great local variability of global challenges such as food security and climate change. In light of this heterogeneity and the challenges it poses to plant and agricultural science for the common good, we contend that infrastructural and ethical advances in data linkage need to be complemented by attention to the conceptual and normative underpinnings of plant breeding and agriculture that structure—and constrain—the uses of plant data, their paths of travel, and the participants in data collection, circulation and use. We illustrate this in reference to current efforts to accelerate rates of genetic gain in plant breeding and the corresponding reorganisation of international plant breeding networks and seed systems.

15:45

Concluding discussion