Seed Commons

Example

For an example, see the Bionatur campaign in Brazil

History

The Seed Diversity Protection Movement

Frances Moore Lappe:

"Just as dramatic is the struggle for the seed. More than 1,000 independent seed companies were swallowed up by multinationals in the past four decades, so today just three—Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta—control about half the proprietary seed market worldwide.

Fueling the consolidation were three Supreme Court rulings since 1980—including one in 2002, with an opinion written by former Monsanto attorney Clarence Thomas—making it possible to patent life forms, including seeds. And in 1992 the Food and Drug Administration released its policy on genetically modified organisms, claiming that “the agency is not aware of any information showing that [GMO] foods…differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way.”

The government’s green light fueled the rapid spread of GMOs and monopolies—so now most US corn and soybeans are GMO, with genes patented largely by one company: Monsanto. The FDA position helped make GMOs’ spread so invisible that most Americans still don’t believe they’ve ever eaten them—even though the grocery industry says they could be in 75 percent of processed food.

Even fewer Americans are aware that in 1999 attorney Steven Druker reported that in 40,000 pages of FDA files secured via a lawsuit, he found “memorandum after memorandum contain[ing] warnings about the unique hazards of genetically engineered food,” including the possibility that they could contain “unexpected toxins, carcinogens or allergens.”

Yet at the same time, public education campaigns have succeeded in confining almost 80 percent of GMO planting to just three countries: the United States, Brazil and Argentina. In more than two dozen countries and in the European Union they’ve helped pass mandatory GMO labeling. Even China requires it.

In Europe, the anti-GMO tipping point came in 1999. Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, expects that the same shift will happen here, as more Americans than ever actively oppose GMOs. This year the “non-GMO” label is the third-fastest-growing new health claim on food packaging. Smith is also encouraged that milk products produced with the genetically modified drug rBGH “have been kicked out of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Yoplait, Dannon, and most American dairies.”

Around the world, millions are saying no to seed patenting as well. In homes and village seed banks, small farmers and gardeners are saving, sharing and protecting tens of thousands of seed varieties.

In the United States, the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, estimates that since 1975 members have shared roughly a million samples of rare garden seeds.

In the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh—known as the pesticide capital of the world—a women-led village movement, the Deccan Development Society, puts seed-saving at the heart of its work. After the crushing failure of GMO cotton and ill health linked to pesticides, the movement has helped 125 villages convert to more nutritious, traditional crop mixes, feeding 50,000 people.

On a larger scale, Vandana Shiva’s organization, Navdanya, has helped to free 500,000 farmers from chemical dependency and to save indigenous seeds—the group’s learning and research center protects 3,000 varieties of rice, plus other crops." (http://www.thenation.com/article/163403/food-movement-its-power-and-possibilities?)

2.

"Why in the world would seeds be part of this discussion, you might ask? Seeds became ‘intellectual property’ under WTO provisions that allow the patenting of life forms. Villagers may be required to pay to plant the seeds and grains which they have grown and shared from time immemorial, or to use animal products which they have always employed as medicine. Resourceful profiteers have slapped down patents on everything from ancient Indian Basmati rice to Mexican yellow beans. (The latter case is the epitome of bio-piracy: Larry Proctor, the president of a Colorado-based seed company, bought some dried yellow beans in Sonora, Mexico, in 1994. Proctor applied for, and was granted, a U.S. patent and a U.S. Plant Variety Protection certificate on the bean, which he renamed Enola. The patent made it illegal for unlicensed sources in the U.S. to grow, sell, import, or use the Enola bean. Proctor then sued 16 Colorado-based farmers and small seed companies for illegally growing and selling 'his' bean. Some years later, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office revoked the patent.)

Farmers and gardeners the world over are protecting and sharing their common inheritance. They are growing seed libraries (“We refuse to call them ‘banks',” one Native farmer told us) to save and share native and heirloom seeds with all who want to grow them. Most international gatherings of peasants and small producers involve elaborate seed ceremonies, where people from one region give their native varieties to others: sweet tamarind seed from Thailand, for example, or dinorado rice from the Philippines. Sometimes they create a little piece of the commons on the spot, planting a garden together with those repositories of life from their collective homelands.

One seed-protecting initiative is the Bija Satyagraha movement in India. Bija means 'seed', and satyagraha refers to non-violent resistance, a term made popular by Gandhi during the Indian freedom struggle. This movement is shielding farmers’ traditional seed rights from genetically modified seeds and private patents. Beyond the aforementioned seed libraries and exchange programs, the movement also organizes seed fairs to share information and strategies. In the spirit of the 1930 Salt Satyagraha, or salt march, when thousands of Indians walked 240 miles to the sea to collect salt and thus defy the British salt tax, Seed Satyagraha also calls on farmers to boldly declare non-cooperation with Indian seed patent laws. Five million peasants have done so. Furthermore, Bija Satyagraha sponsors tribunals against WTO-model copyright policies and laws which deny farmers their seed rights; in these, farmers and researchers present testimony on the damning impacts of these laws on their livelihood.

In order to further preserve a seed commons, the U.S.-based Organic Consumers Association has organized a Millions against Monsanto campaign. They have launched legal and policy challenges to the agribusiness giant that now holds almost 650 seed patents. Each patent means that farmers are no longer legally entitled to plant and save that seed variety, but instead must buy it anew each year from Monsanto. While the fight against the corporate super-power is an entrenched one, the activists have scored some victories, such as the 2007 revocation by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of four Monsanto patents on genetically modified seeds. (The reason is that Monsanto had used those patents to intimidate, sue, and in some cases bankrupt, farmers for the crime of saving seeds from a crop to plant the following year, a practice that goes back to the beginning of agriculture.) In 2007, the European Patent Office revoked Monsanto’s species-wide patent on all genetically modified soybeans, after a legal challenge filed by Greenpeace and others." (http://otherworldsarepossible.org/defending-global-commons)

Discussion

James K. Boyce:

"Crop genetic diversity as the common heritage of humankind

As a final example of how we can apply the common heritage principle to real-world challenges, I want to talk about seeds – specifically about rice, wheat, maize and the other crops on which we depend for our survival. These crops originated through what Charles Darwin called “artificial selection,” whereby the earliest farmers saved and replanted seeds of those plants over successive generations that did best at providing palatable and nutritious food. In this way, ultimately they bred new species that would never have come into existence without the guiding hand of human intervention.

This is perhaps the greatest example in history of what economists sometimes call “investment in natural capital”: human actions that positively enhance the ability of the environment to sustain our well-being in the long term.

Over the millennia since their ancestors first domesticated plants, generations of farmers have bred hundreds of thousands of diverse crop varieties. This diversity is what enables plant breeders today to respond to outbreaks of new insect pests and crop diseases by finding resistant varieties.

Crop diversity is sustained in the field largely by small farmers, most of them in the global South – maize farmers in southern and central Mexico; rice farmers in India, Bangladesh and southeast Asia; potato farmers in the Andes; and so on. In so doing, these farmers provide an enormously valuable service to humankind, a service for which they currently receive no compensation.

In this case, the fair sharing of our common heritage does not only mean protecting crop diversity from a genetic version of the enclosure movement that privatized common agricultural lands in 18th century Britain. It also means devising ways to reward small farmers, above all in the historic centers of crop genetic diversity in Latin America, Asia and Africa, for their vital contributions to long-term human food security.

There is much in common between small-farmer movements around the world, many of which have banded together under the umbrella of the international alliance known as Via Campesina, and the movement for environmental justice and efforts to forge a fair climate policy here in the United States.

In these and other diverse arenas, these new environmentalists are upholding the moral principle that the environment, as our common heritage, should be shared fairly within the present generation and cared for responsibly on behalf of future generations." (http://bollier.org/environment-our-common-heritage)