International Food Policy Research Institute
Fourth Floor Conference Facility
10 October 2006
Collective action aims at the joint management of common pool resources. Agrobiodiversity at the community level is conceptualized as a collective resource requiring the management of varieties, species and their interrelations within a farming system. In the rice dominated agriculture in the uplands of Kerala, India, few community groups continue maintaining and thus conserving their high diversity in landraces. Faced with the challenges of devastating prices for rice, their traditional system of collective action to exchange seed material and knowledge is endangered. A new institutional mechanism to manage biodiversity is the People’s Biodiversity Register, a mandatory documentation procedure to enable cost and benefit sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Based on 2005 empirical data, the paper analyzes the tribal community of Kurichyas and the People’s Biodiversity Register with special emphasis on gender and the core elements of trust, reciprocity and reputation that make collective action possible. While the Kurichyas are able to control, but not restrict, the viable flow of genetic material, the institutional set up is not positioned to recover the costs of such maintenance. In the case of the Register, the separation of the knowledge from the (female) holder and the lack of conservation efforts of the actual plants and seeds continue to present an institutional challenge.