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Introduction: There is a cynical (if nonetheless valid) journalist's proverb that says, "Freedom of the press belongs only to those who own the presses." By the same token, the freedom to breed new strains of ricesay, to combat the rise of new pests or adapt to climatic shiftsrests in the hands of those who control the old rice varieties, the raw parent material for new generations of crops. In Asia, that freedom is enjoyed mostly by national, international, and commercial crop research centers that hold in cold storage thousands of varieties of rice seed no longer found in farmers' fields. While the ongoing removal of rice farmers from the process of varietal development (and their conversion to passive recipients of technology and seeds produced by scientists) has had profound cultural and economic effects throughout Asia, the effects of this new genetic regime on rice biodiversity have been no less profound. tens of thousands of species previously grown in farmers' fields became a few thousand, then a few hundred. The very idea of <i>farmer</i> maintenance of rice genetic diversity has been dismissedat least by many professional participants in the crop-development industryas unworkable, improbable, and ultimately virtually <i>unthinkable</i>. However, many farmersincluding members of a group in the Philippines known as MASIPAG, described below in a brief case studyare unwilling to give up their age-old participation in the production of new and better varieties of rice (see n. 14). More to the point, they are unwilling simply to accept scientific rice-growing technologies that are unprofitable and disadvantageous for themselves and their communities. The dichotomy between cold storage of rice genetic material in the laboratory and living conservation of genes in the field reflects not simply an esthetic difficultynor even a scientific onebut involves larger questions of farmer rights, ownership of genetic materials, colonialism, racism, and finally <i>scientism</i> (the unwarranted privileging of one particular form of scientific discourse over other ways of knowing). The struggle to control rice germplasm in Asia is thus indicative of a larger struggle by farmers to find a (social, political, economic, and cultural) place for themselves in a rapidly changing world order.
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