With hybrid seed, farmers could choose more productive varieties that required less labour. A decreased demand for labour facilitated urbanisation throughout the 20^th century, which also meant a general loss of knowledge of how to farm, as people moved out of rural areas. Access to hybrid seed as well as declining numbers of farmers also led to a loss of seed saving expertise, and since the green revolution 75% of agricultural biodiversity on earth has been lost. Reclaiming biodiversity is thus a critical goal of the seed sovereignty movement.

Perhaps we should use the plural and speak of a murder of knowledges, for epistemicide erases the plurality of ways in which human experiences can be interpreted: traditions, philosophies, values and beliefs, rituals, recipes, languages and songs, and all the other multifarious forms taken by the vehicles and prisms of vernacular knowledge. It is a kind of ontological mountaintop removal: when that summit, those foothills, that high pass through which you might have found your way home, have been dynamited out of the air, the views of the universe that could be seen from those places will never be perceived again. It is, Santos lamented, ‘a massive waste of social experience’.

A typical response from the dominant worldview might be: Heritage seeds and old ways have been superseded by something better, more efficient and more marketable. It is sentimental nostalgia to seek to preserve them in aspic. Times change and one must change with them, or die. But – to reply on that utilitarian field of play – what if heirloom seeds actually offer routes to survival?

The new paradigm considers epistemicide as one of the great crimes against humanity.

2) The conquest of America and the killing of the Amerindians

3) The enslavement of Africans

4) Women (witchcraft)

In this sense, all genocide implies epistemicide. But confiscated knowledge is not, strictly speaking, destroyed, but rather displaced, reused and interpreted (even if it can sometimes be destroyed by omission or lack of mastery of know-how).

In this respect, the history of knowledge of medicinal plants is particularly eloquent.

See, for example, Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation du Savoir : Une histoire des plantes médicinales du « Nouveau Monde » (1492-1750), Vaulx-en-Velin, Les éditions des mondes à faire, 2019.

In line with the issues related to herbalism, there is the issue of medicine and its practices and the various opposing thoughts, between prevention, healing, care etc.

We can think of the supremacy of the agroindustry supported by governments, which prevents, for example, farmers from resowing their own crops or prohibits the cultivation of certain fruits and vegetables, just as it imposes the administration of antibiotics on livestock. (See the manifesto of the 1052 outlawed farmers).

These various confiscations give rise to clandestine, outlaw practices.

School textbooks and, more generally, the pedagogies used across the world speak for themselves. For example, parts of history that are not taught or outright denied, organs that are not represented (see the example of the rehabilitation of the representation of the clitoris), authors who are censored etc. We are thinking here in particular of women who are hidden, unmentioned or simply dispossessed of their own discoveries or inventions in the history of art, science and politics.

More generally, we will think of censorship which, at times, has resulted in the real loss of knowledge when the hidden works and documents have not been preserved.

These resilient strains are Ba’al varieties – the reference to the pre-Abrahamic Canaanite fertility deity hints at how far back their provenance might stretch. Summer Ba’al varieties, including tomatoes, can thrive on little more than morning dew. Winter Ba’al, including spinach, rocket and onions, are rain-fed only.