CULTURALLY-INFORMED COMMUNITY SEED (CICS) PLEDGE
“I respect the natural rights of seeds and their people by producing CICS-Pledged seeds under the pledge’s culturally-informed practices and code of ethics. I am including this Pledge with any transfer of seeds or their derivatives to ask others to continue following these guidelines.”
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WHO CAN SIGN THE CICS PLEDGE?
The pledge is available for small-scale seed companies, seed industry stakeholders, nonprofit organizations, farmers and community plant breeders that focus on seed work to sign to adopt changes to their practices and to maintain ethical seed industry standards.
PURPOSE
CICS Pledge provides an evaluation metric for small seed industry accountability and a market enhancement measure to help consumers identify companies, seed growers and/or farmers committed to equity and increased cultural competency in their seed work.
We think that a Culturally-Informed Community Seed Code of Ethics is necessary to ensure protections for communities of origin, minoritized seed keepers, and culturally-meaningful seeds.
Examples of settings for its intended use include:
- commercial and non-commercial settings, specifically for work related to plant breeding conducted by for profit and/or nonprofit organizations;
- circulation of seeds via seed swaps at seed conferences, seed libraries, online seed exchanges and other venues, or seed share programs;
- and/or importing/collecting seeds of other cultures for commercial production either via germplasm collections, international expeditions or other ways.
We don’t claim that it is the ultimate solution as an accountability metric; however, we hope that it is a helpful contribution to ongoing efforts toward an equitable and just seed system.
The CICSP/COE is intended to be a living pledge open to revisions as understandings of what it takes to build such a system continue to evolve.
Culturally-Informed Community Seed
Code of Ethics
