Becoming a Market Society America’s founding fathers, whose wisdom transcended time. Seeds are
part of nature. Nature determines survival. Whoever controls the seeds
holds the power to control life. Such power is now concentrated in the
hands of three corporations.
It is worth remembering that public resistance to patenting seeds
for food lasted 80 years. The promise of new inventions was not enough.
In order for market conditions to change and society to go along,
the government had to enforce who could and could not have access
to seeds.
Governments have been playing this role of access for a long, long
time. In medieval Britain, for example, a hierarchy—from the king
to lords, then to tenants and finally peasants—jointly shared the En-
glish countryside. While each had certain dominion over how land
was used, none had absolute control over the entirety of land use. In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when England’s aristocrats
colluded to seize outright control, their first step was to abolish the age-
old hierarchical and communal arrangement. How? By erecting hedges
to kept animals in and people out—and then requiring the government
to enforce access.
From this precedent emerged modern property ownership. While
the rich benefited, tenant farmers were locked out. No longer able to
work the land that had sustained them for generations, farmers and
their families starved and watched helplessly as sheep grazed or land
was converted into houses and factories. The uprooting of millions of
people became known as the enclosure movement, or “the revolution of
the rich against the poor.”
At about the same time, in the wake of its own revolution, the
United States faced a related dilemma about land access. The newly
independent country had plentiful land but little cash. President
Washington’s secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, valued land
for the revenue it could provide. He proposed that large parcels be sold
to wealthy individuals who could fill the Treasury’s coffers.
However, the secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, along with James
Madison, “the Father of the Constitution,” viewed Hamilton’s plan as
a return to aristocratic control. To avoid empowering a class of wealthy
landholders who would rise up and control government, they argued
that small parcels of land should be dispersed to individual farmers.