The United States is sequencing its national seed bank without sharing the data
The US Department of Agriculture has just announced that it is releasing $180 million to sequence its national seed bank. It states that the digital sequencing information (DSI) generated will be “United States intellectual property” and that international benefit-sharing mechanisms do not extend to this DSI. Whilst this issue of sharing is still being debated internationally, this project illustrates the US’s logic of appropriation and economic exploitation. Yet this DSI is derived from biodiversity that farmers and communities have developed, selected, preserved and renewed over millennia.
