The Seeds Are Ours! A Rant
There are lots of good practical reasons for amateur gardeners to save seeds and breed local plant varieties, but there is also a political side to it which I shall briefly outline here if you'll excuse the rant!
The vegetable seeds we sow have come down to us through the efforts of countless unknown ancestors who collected the seeds of wild plants, worked with them, and over time produced the food crops that we now depend on. When it comes down to it, all human life depends upon plant seeds and if we want to be sure that we hand a healthy, robust and diverse seed bank on to our descendents then the more of us that get involved in this process the better.
Nowadays, relatively few home gardeners save seeds or try to breed their own plant varieties. And there is increasing corporate control of the genetic material underlying our food crops. The introduction of F1 varieties has meant that home gardeners have begun to lose even the possibility of saving good seed themselves. This isn’t necessarily intrinsically sinister. Often, especially with outbreeding plants, F1s outperform heirloom open-pollinated varieties. And if someone has gone to the trouble of breeding a decent new variety, it seems fair enough that they should be able to earn some honest coin from it, rather than allowing everyone else to free-ride on their hard work just by saving the seed. But F1s are the thin end of a wedge that is increasingly dividing people from access to the underlying genetic diversity of the food crops bequeathed by our ancestors.
In recent years, that wedge has been growing thicker very rapidly. In the EU, the International Convention for the Protection of Plant Varieties means that it’s illegal to sell any seed that isn’t on the National List – and you have to pay a small fortune to register a seed on it. Again, there may be honest intentions here in ensuring that plant breeders are rewarded for their work and in preventing consumers being ripped off by dodgy plant varieties. The result, however, has been a huge reduction in the diversity of seeds available to growers and this increases the dangers of our agriculture succumbing to pest and disease problems. No doubt a lot of that former diversity is still around in laboratories and seed banks. In my judgment, that makes it a lot more vulnerable than if it was out doing the rounds in people’s back gardens.
The wedge has grown thicker still with global developments such as the Green Revolution. The ‘high-yielding’ varieties it produced may be better described as ‘high-responsive’ varieties that produce more food energy when dosed with higher levels of industrial inputs such as chemical fertiliser. And the wedge has grown yet thicker with GM technology. I won’t dwell on this, but developments like the possibility of engineering infertility into seeds further act to alienate ordinary people from the seed bank that is their birthright. In the long-term, the engineering of pest toxins and herbicide resistance into cultivated crops may well exacerbate the problems it was supposed to tackle, making farming an ever more perilous undertaking.
As Evan Eisenberg notes in his book The Ecology of Eden, it’s not the failures of biotechnology that we most have to fear, but its successes. The strategy of mainstream agribusiness is increasingly a strategy of monoculture, which attempts to engineer natural threats out of the system with high tech ‘magic bullets’. But everything we've learned about farming to date tells us that in the long term the threats always remain. Are we better off putting all our eggs in one basket and trusting in a single variety of expensive and highly engineered seed, or in the multitudinous efforts of local breeders and seed-savers to augment the diversity of our food crops so that we have a wide resource base to meet future eventualities?
We needn’t believe that professional plant scientists are conspiring to prevent us from having access to plant biodiversity (though there are plenty of incentives for corporate biotech companies to attempt to prevent just that). It’s just that there simply aren’t enough professional plant scientists around to cover every base and breed the plants that work best for us locally (especially when the money is in generic, commercially-oriented varieties that perform well over a wide range of microclimates and that often crop uniformly at a given time for mechanical harvest). It seems to me that even if we still want to rely on the professionals to provide us with the majority of our seeds, society as a whole has nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain from supporting amateur seed-savers and plant-breeders in their efforts.
Chris Smaje
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