Seed Sense: I See Vanished Vegetables
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA on 07.20.07
Photo credit: Peter Prehn
It'd be easier for Judy Steele to grow cannabis in her garden in Warwickshire, England, than it'd be to plant Carruther's Purple Podded peas, Auntie Madge's tomato, or Mr. Stiff's bunching onion. In fact, it's illegal to buy seeds of this old variety. But Steele, who is growing a row of those peas anyway, is hardly a criminal or some kind of botanical terrorist—the self-described "foster mother for orphaned pea varieties" is one of 300 seed guardians for Garden Organic, formerly known as the Henry Doubleday Research Association, based at Ryton, near Coventry.
Garden Organic's extensive seed library contains 800 traditional vegetable varieties once grown in Britain but are now outlawed by European legislation. How did society reach the point that growing food became a criminal move? Or an act of subversion?
"During Victorian times, seeds were available from local growers, and gardeners knew who to complain to if they didn't grow, but gradually seed companies got bigger and more remote," Sandra Slack, head of Garden Organic's seed library, tells The Guardian. "Plant breeders' rights began in the 1920s. To protect customers and to standardize the seed business across borders, the EU intervened in the 1970s, making sure that seed varieties were properly tested. Unfortunately, testing is expensive and those varieties not tested were dropped. If a variety has been dropped from the approved common catalog, then its seeds cannot be bought or sold."
Concerned that these old varieties would go extinct unless they were in circulation, Garden Organic set up its Heritage Seed Library to lawfully preserve these vegetables. (A scheme was established where gardeners have to pay to become members of the library; each year, they are given a selection of six of the hundreds of varieties to grow.)
In the past 100 years, 90 percent of UK's vegetable varieties have been lost, with the same happening in much of the industrialized world. Frighteningly, only three corporations now control an entire quarter of the world's seed markets. In developing countries, saving food-plant seed—a traditional practice as old as plant domestication—is against the law because of global politics through issues such as intellectual property rights. "Suicide" varieties by companies such as Monsanto are genetically engineered so that the plants never reproduce—think of it as built-in obsolescence, if you will. We prefer to call it perversity.
The Guardian puts it very poignantly: "Whoever controls the seeds controls a people's ability to feed themselves." :: The Guardian
See also: :: Monsanto’s Monopoly Challenged in Munich, :: Norway to Build Doomsday Seed Vault, :: Doomsday Seed Vault, Part 2
Now this is utter insanity if I've ever read it. Non-reproducing seeds? GEEZ!
A good documentary on the business of seeds and genetic engineering is: "The Future of Food". You can get it on Netflix. Will open your eyes and either make you angry or scared or both.
Chris,
The world of industrial agriculture is incredibly insane with the tyrant chemical companies manipulating the livelihood's and just plain lives of people.
Those 'suicide' varieties are also called terminator technoloogy and have been banned from commercialization. But the EU has been trying to go around the ban by funding research on a new variety: zombie crops.
Read the article from The Independent: http://environment.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/article2666422.ece.
These seeds would be rendered sterile until a chemical (bought from one of the tyrant companies) revives the seed. And so the vicious cycle would continue...
As previously stated ... a documentary called "The Future of Food" is awesome. MUST SEE for anyone who even slightly cares about life on this planet.
I would be interested in knowing which developing countries have outlawed the practice of saving seeds.
This copyright and GMO business is going to backfire on them -- on us all. Unfortunately the ones to suffer will not be the companies.
...and before we know it, Soylent Green will be made of people...
"I would be interested in knowing which developing countries have outlawed the practice of saving seeds."
I know that Iraq is one of them. It is the home of most of the world's wheat varieties too, and the war has already destroyed the most important seed bank there - though some of these seeds were held elsewhere too.
more here: http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050209202055239
It seems ulikely that these kinds of patents on traditional seeds would hold up to legal challenges. A patent must possess three things: novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. If an invention is well known prior to the filing of the relevant patent application, the patent is denied due to its lack of novelty. I think this would pertain to seeds and plants as well!
Most developing countries have not outlawed seed- saving - if they did, most of Africa would starve (even more than they suffer now). It is the seed companies who have effectivley outlawed it.
We have just published a whole magazine about different seed-saving practices - 95% of seed in Africa is stil home saved. This represents a huge potential market for companies, hence the bully-boy tactics.
Read some articles at http://www.leisa.info/index.php?url=magazine-details.tpl&p[readOnly]=0&p[_id]=113332
Another good site covering the politics of seed is
http://www.grain.org/front/
Vandana Shiva has written about these issues in a number of her books--check out "Earth Democracy" and "Biopiracy." They are both quick and informative reads.
"It seems ulikely that these kinds of patents on traditional seeds would hold up to legal challenges. A patent must possess three things: novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. If an invention is well known prior to the filing of the relevant patent application, the patent is denied due to its lack of novelty. I think this would pertain to seeds and plants as well!"
Nice thought but it doesn't pan out this way in the real world. Patents have been granted on thousands of ridiculous things that are not novel because our patent system is quite simply broken. It becomes a financial battle and the people who own the patents (like Monsanto) have huge financial muscle to stop smaller companies from competing - and they do this routinely. Everyone simply thinks patents are there to protect us and this could not be further from the truth.
Our future depends on people becoming educated about things like patents and putting as much pressure as possible on our government representatives to fix this enormous problem.
that's pretty odd.
I'm glad to see my photo used this way. Indeed, everyone must see "The Future of Our Food" to understand just how far from agricultural armageddon we may be.