Posted on 01/26/2009 8:10:34 AM PST by TenthAmendmentChampion
A Northern Arizona University political science professor is working with Southern African farmers studying their agricultural expertise and exposing trade agreements that could threaten the world's food supply.
For more than 30 years, Carol Thompson has been consulting on international agriculture trade issues, spending months or years at a time living in Southern African countries studying agricultural expertise and working to "expose constraining trade agreements imposed upon African farmers."
Her recent book, Biopiracy of Biodiversity - Global Exchange as Enclosure, analyzes current international agricultural trade policies, explains how they originated, and how they are impacting the world and indigenous cultures.
"The future of the planet depends not so much on military power nor on capital speculation but on each one of us making daily food choices that affect global exchange or enclosure of biodiversity—our collective nourishment, our wealth," Thompson explains.
Cowritten with Andrew Mushita, director of the Community Technology Development Trust in Zimbabwe, the book analyzes international policies for sustainable farming, the successes and failures of industrial agriculture, and the need to preserve biodiversity as a policy for future food security.
"Today only 12 plants provide 75 percent of the food in industrialized countries, making us all vulnerable," Thompson says. "Africans still rely on 2,000 plants for their food biodiversity."
The book tackles complex issues such as the World Trade Organization's patenting strategies that are "exploiting natural resources," she says.
"Biopiracy may be a new word, but the act is old," remarks Thompson, who often dresses in colorful African fabric dyed by some of the plants she is hoping will be protected. "Biopiracy is the taking of organisms, such as plants or seeds, from communities where they are shared by all, and their patenting by corporations, which privatize a living organism for profitable gain."
The problem is that although it is traditional for farmers in Southern African countries to share seeds and their knowledge about them, it also is becoming common practice for other countries to profit from the seeds and their healing benefits without compensating the original farmers.
"Pharmaceutical corporations are privatizing and patenting the genes of plants to sell for profit," she continues. "It is actually the stealing of plants that were once shared and given as gifts from indigenous farmers throughout 7,000 years of agriculture."
Thompson says the corporate pillaging of seeds is destroying the world's biodiversity, and the book stresses the need for policy alternatives.
"With trade policies as open as they are, fields and species are often destroyed or polluted by newer genetically modified organisms," Thompson notes. "The healing properties of indigenous plants also define local communities, which are becoming powerless as corporations get stronger."
Thompson cites the plant hoodia, nurtured by the San peoples in Southern Africa, as an example of trade agreements gone wrong. When nomadic hunters and gatherers pointed out its characteristics as a hunger-suppressing plant, corporations quickly produced a diet pill, making millions in profit, but only .0001 percent of the profit goes back to the San.
"I am a political economist who is seeing that if you only spend time taking local initiatives, you can be crushed by international laws and control," she says.
Thompson's current work with Southern African farmers includes working on policies to protect their knowledge about adapting crops for the implications of climate change.
She has served as a consultant for various international organizations, including the Southern African Development Community, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and UNICEF. Her primary research focus is on the impact of international finance and trade on food security.
Hmmm... adding to the list. I followed your advice on checking out Nichols in Oregon, just received the catalogue. Going to place a small order this week... They don't have as much heirloom as I thought they might.
http://www.countrysidemag.com/issues/90/90-2/Jerri_Cook.html
The gardening game
Do you know where your seeds come from?
You may be surprised...
By Jerri Cook
Wisconsin
Somehow I always thought the seeds, bulbs, and roots I purchased from mail order companies came from a quaint American farm, somewhere in the heartland, with burgeoning rows of high quality vegetables and flowers. I was as wrong as a two-headed frog.
It all started last August when I used a coupon from Gurney’s to order asparagus roots. By the third week of September my order hadn’t arrived. I decided something was amiss and called the company.
The customer service representative I spoke with assured me my order would arrive at the proper planting time for my zone, sometime near the beginning of December.
I was confused, how was I supposed to plant anything in zone 3b in December?
The cheery voice told me to put the crowns straight in the ground and mulch over them. They would be fine.
I expressed my doubts. I already checked with my local extension agent, the president of the local Master Gardener association, and a knowledgeable neighbor before calling. No one thought planting asparagus after October in our area was a good idea. I would just take a refund.
The less-than-knowledgeable representative asked me to hold while she checked with someone. Silence. A few minutes later a chipper voice came on the line and said, “Spring Hill Nurseries.”
Huh? I explained that I was holding for someone at Gurney’s. “No problem,” the jaunty voice assured me, “I’ll transfer you.”
More silence and another voice came on the line, “Henry Fields.”
What?
“I’m holding for Gurney’s. What’s going on?”
Not to worry, she could transfer me. I hoped so, this wasn’t a toll free number and I was racking up the minutes running around in this long distance circle.
More silence and then-click. They hung up on me.
But who had hung up, Gurney’s, Spring Hill Nurseries, or Henry Fields? And why was I transferred from one to the other?
The name game
I decided to take a closer look at Gurney’s. I remembered hearing something about them going out of business a few years ago. The large mail order company Foster and Gallagher, who owned Gurney’s and many other seed companies, filed for bankruptcy in Indiana, putting hundreds of people out of work.
Like most gardeners, the logistics of the seed industry were of little interest to me. I simply shrugged the whole thing off and went on my merry way.
Now I found myself staring at the FAQs page on Gurney’s website, where it says the company was bought at a bankruptcy hearing a couple of years ago by a group of “lifelong mail order gardeners.”
After scrolling to the bottom of the page I noticed the copyright for the website is held by Scarlet Tanager, LLC doing business as Gurney’s. This must be the group of lifelong mail order gardeners that bought the company.
Anyone can find information on a company (or corporation) by contacting the Secretary of State in the state where the company is located. Since Gurney’s is located in Indiana, I decided to pop over to the Indiana Secretary of State’s website to see if Scarlet Tanager, LLC is listed in their corporate database.
Sure enough there it was. It is an umbrella corporation for The Garden Store, The Michigan Bulb Company, Gurney’s, and Henry Field’s. For a mere $1 fee to the fine state of Indiana I was able to find the owner of Scarlet Tanager, LLC, Niles Kinerk. A couple of peripheral searches turned up more information on Mr. Kinerk. He also owns Spring Hill Nurseries, Breck’s Bulbs, Audubon Workshop, Flower of the Month Club, and Gardens Alive. Wow, Niles has a lot of companies under his umbrella.
It turns out he’s not alone. Totally Tomatoes, R.H. Shumway, The Vermont Bean Seed Company, Seeds for the World, Seymour’s Selected Seeds, HPS, Roots and Rhizomes, and McClure and Zimmerman Quality Bulb Brokers are all standing shoulder to shoulder under the J.W. Jung Seed Company’s umbrella.
Under Park Seed Company’s canopy you’ll find Wayside Gardens, Park Bulbs, and Park’s Countryside Garden.
The list goes on.
No matter which catalog you order from, the chances are pretty good you are getting the exact same seed as everyone else. Virtually every large mail-order garden company in the United States uses a seed broker to supply them with stock. The broker’s job is to find tons of seed at a low price. They contract with competing umbrella corporations, selling the same seed to everyone.
As if the waters weren’t muddy enough, each mail-order seed company can resell the same seed using different names for it. For example, you see a wonderful red lettuce named Sheep’s Tongue in catalog A and place your order. A couple of days later you see another red lettuce named Camel’s Tongue in catalog B. You really like red lettuce so you order some from the other catalog too. A few weeks after planting you notice they look and taste exactly alike. What’s going on?
Well, the patent on the lettuce known as Sheep’s Tongue has expired, or it is an heirloom and never had a patent. If there is no patent anyone can grow and sell it. However, if the company that owns catalog A has a trademark on the name Sheep’s Tongue, other re-sellers will have to call it something else. This is true for plants, roots, bulbs, and trees.
At first glance this just seems like good old American business forging ahead. But there is something unsettling about this whole arrangement. How are we supposed to know who we are dealing with when we buy seed? And where does all this seed come from?
Trying to find out is like playing pin the tail on the donkey, the only way to know for sure is to take off the blindfold.
King of the hill
The American nursery trade is a 39.6 billion dollar a year industry. With the purchase of Seminis in January of 2005, Monsanto is now estimated to control between 85 and 90 percent of the U.S. nursery market. This includes the pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer markets. By merging with or buying up the competition, dominating genetic technology, and lobbying the government to make saving seeds illegal, this monolith has positioned itself as the largest player in the gardening game.
Monsanto holds over eleven thousand U.S. seed patents. When Americans buy garden seed and supplies, most of the time they are buying from Monsanto regardless of who the retailer is.
Most home gardeners started noticing the initials PVP appearing next to selections in the mail order garden catalogs a few years ago. This stands for Plant Variety Protection. It means the seed or plant carries a U.S. patent. It is illegal to save seed from or otherwise propagate PVP varieties. Consumers will have to buy more each year if they wish to grow a PVP variety.
Greenpeace chides, “Monsanto-no food shall be grown that we don’t own.”
They could be right.
Terminator Technology promises to be a big money maker for Monsanto and its subsidiaries. Plants are genetically modified so they won’t produce seed, or if seed is produced, it is sterile. With this maneuver they are guaranteed a continuing market for vegetable, fruit, and flower seed.
Consider the newest Frankenstein called Traitor technology. This charming little piece of genetic engineering will help Monsanto’s chemical division rake in billions of dollars a year from across the globe. It allows growers to control the genetic traits of plants by applying an array of chemicals, all owned by Monsanto. Do your genetically modified watermelons have blight? No problem, for a price you can buy the chemical that will turn on the plant’s blight fighting gene. No kidding. It is estimated Traitor technology could dominate world seed supply with an astonishing 80 percent of the market by 2010.
Six companies Du Pont, Mitsui, Monsanto, Syngent, Aventis and Dow control 98 percent of the world’s seeds. These companies are opening research facilities and acquiring local seed companies and farmland on every continent, and they can’t do it fast enough.
Imports of seed and stock from Pakistan, India, Mexico,Thailand and of course China, are on the rise. Countries like Thailand boast of seed exports rising at 12 percent per year from 1998-2001. American seed exports fell at twice that rate for the same time period.
As biotechnology forges on, something is lost. At first it is barely noticeable, just a sense that something is different.
Ashes, ashes, all fall down
Before it was acquired by Monsanto, Seminis eliminated 2,000 varieties of seed from its inventory. The first things to go were the older open-pollinated varieties; vining petunias, butterfly weed, butter beans, German green tomatoes, and other heirlooms grown by gardeners for generations, replaced by genetically engineered varieties.
High-tech patented hybrid varieties are far more profitable for transnational seed companies to produce and sell. These new frankenseeds are bred to perform adequately over a wide geographical area, giving the patent holder a much larger market.
As consumers are losing the freedom to choose what they will buy and grow, thousands of varieties of garden seed are walking the plank, straight into the abyss of extinction. Consider this, in 1981 there were approximately 5,000 vegetable seed varieties available in U.S. catalogs. Today there are less than 500, a 90 percent reduction.
Seeds removed from commercial production are left in private corporate seed banks. Open pollinated seed will not store indefinitely, it must be propagated to ensure its survival. This is an expensive proposal, one not likely to happen in the world of capital consolidation and wide profit margins.
The more likely scenario is the “unprofitable” heirloom seeds will be allowed to expire and patented hybrids will take their place. Seed biodiversity will be compromised globally, while the corporate stranglehold tightens around the throat of the consumer.
Kent Whealey, co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange, says “Few gardeners comprehend the true scope of their garden heritage or how much is in immediate danger of being lost forever.”
Taking the ball and going home
Like the glaciers that rolled across North America, heaving and prying the earth into new forms, giant transnational seed companies are changing the face of gardening as it once was. What’s left behind is the product of a destructive force to be sure, but something beautiful and promising also remains.
Across the globe people are growing and saving heirloom seeds, ensuring the promise of diversity and heritage for future generations. Groups like Seed Savers Exchange are blooming in the remains of corporate devastation. Some of these organizations are large, offering seeds from across the globe. Others are neighborhood and regional groups saving and trading local favorites. Whatever their size, they are dedicated to preserving the earth’s biodiversity.
All it takes to form a seed saving club is for one neighbor to pick up the phone and say to another, “Do you want to trade some seeds this year?” There you have it, a seed saving club.
Imagine if one neighbor called another neighbor and that neighbor called yet another, and so on. The next thing you know black gardeners and white gardeners, southern growers and northern growers, farmers and city folk, church goers and non-church goers, would be united in an effort to prevent the extermination of thousands of varieties of seed. What a beautiful thing it would be.
Before you could shake a dollar at it, the landscape of the nursery trade would change. It’s the age old law of supply and demand, if no one wants patented hybrids, then they become unprofitable in short order. The reigning corporate kings of the gardening game would be forced to take their ball and go home, leaving consumers free to choose a more sustainable pastime.
It could happen.
Ollie ollie oxen free
My asparagus roots showed up two days before Thanksgiving. Several inches of snow blanketed the ground and the temperature hadn’t risen above the single digits for days. I decided against planting them directly in the ground and mulching over the top as instructed by the Gurney’s representative. I didn’t feel like shoveling all that snow. Instead I tossed them in the back of the refrigerator to wait for spring.
While winter wore on I visited the Seed Savers Exchange website (www.seedsavers.org), several times. I filled out the catalog request and spent time checking out the site. It is chock full of information and inspiration. There’s an online catalog bursting with heirlooms I’ve never heard of. I’m not sure what lazy housewife beans are, but you can be sure I’m going to get some.
I asked my neighbors to save seeds this year. We’ll get together in the fall for a harvest celebration and share our gardening glories and stories. You can bet there’ll be a tale behind every seed saved. I hope I hear them all.
Transnational corporations can’t build communities, they can’t celebrate identity. Only we can do that, and we can do it with every seed we plant.
While heirloom tomatoes taste wonderful, they are unsuited for my microclimate (North-facing valley at 44 degrees N). I have planted them. They have low germination rates. They take too long to mature. They are blight-prone. They are poor keepers. They are not cold hardy. They are mediocre producers in my garden. I can buy them from local gardeners when I so desire. They are far from threatened or extinct.
Various seeds companies spent a lot of time, effort and money developing hardy tomatoes that are cold or heat tolerant, will mature quickly, are multi-disease resistant, will tolerate drought or even too much rain, are very productive and are good keepers, as well.
In addition, I have better germination rates with my commercial seeds and I have access to varieties developed specifically for various end uses, like Big Mama Romas. I also do not have to go thru a fermentation or stratification period with commercial seeds.
There is no shortage of heirloom seeds. Burpee, for example, sells almost all of the various Crimean, pink, Amish tomato seeds, as well as Mortgage Lifter (which the original grower developed from at least two other varieties, using hand pollination methods to modify the genome). They are inexpensive. The hybrids I buy as plants are also inexpensive, as are the seeds. In a bad growing season, can anyone guarantee there will be plentiful fertile seeds available inexpensively for the next year? No.
For how long can you save seeds and under what conditions to guarantee germination? I have used 2 and even 3-yr-old commercial hybrid seeds with an equal germination rate to heirlooms.
This entire argument/thesis is flawed, IMO. It is really just another way to reduce ag yields and limit who can grow what and where. I do not want yet another successful capitalistic and scientific endeavor demonized by idiots with an agenda (nothing personal meant to you or the previous posters). Much of the original development of cold tolerant, early tomatoes and other plants was done in Manitoba by a US Ag Department research station, IIRC. An example, IMO, of my tax dollars being used for my benefit. I highly doubt that all the seeds stored cryogenically in Norway (IIRC)are heirlooms. If Earth is really entering an ice age, do we want so-called heirloom seeds that developed in warmer periods or do we want seeds that were engineered to withstand climactic extremes? Hybrids will nourish just as well as traditional varieties.
Anyone can buy, trade and save seeds, providing someone can successfully grow the original plant. No one is stopping this from occurring. Hybrid seeds are a commercial enterprise and no one is forced to buy them or grow them. People do so because of all the reasons I listed above.
GMO are not poison. They do not harm the environment. When wheat skyrocketed in price last year, the EU suddenly became interested in GMO plants. Heirlooms are not automatically better or the best available. I have spoken with my Amish neighbors and they (gasp) _buy_ their hybrid, named, patented seeds from Walmart. As an aside, we have an *activist* locally who goes around lecturing the Amish on why they should not buy anything from Walmart. Being polite people, they listen quietly and ignore her.
I really have doubts that Monsanto or any other seed company is out there terrorizing innocent farmers who are saving seed. If this is actually occurring and is prevalent, are there links to the court cases brought by the terrorized farmers? Why are these cases not in court and if they are, what were the verdicts? Sounds like a good candidate for a civil case.
Years ago, I did some Internet research on this entire anti-GMO hoo haw. At base, you have Europeans, mainly, who are ostensibly concerned with depletion of their natural essence (whatever that means). They are, upon further investigation, being used or are willing pawns of EU ag policy, which protects EU farmers at the expense of anyone else, anywhere else.
What happened to freedom? You can take my hybrid, patented, named, inexpensive and reliable seeds from my cold dead hands and that is exactly what could ensue.
The US and the EU subsidize and engage in protectionism when it comes to our domestic agricultural industry. That does put farmers in Africa at a competitive disadvantage.
Please don’t use gutter language on FR.
They’re at a competitive disadvantage because they don’t use mechanization to increase productivity in agriculture; also, exporting food is very nearly the same as exporting water. Many (most? all?) African gov’ts have programs to buy entire national crops and sell them into the world market in order to raise money, which is then used for various corruptions as well as to “develop” the countries (which in this context, means creating and supporting a do-nothing class of bureaucrats and other parasitic growth). That’s what I was talking about. :’)
It sounds like an opportunity for you to develop your own heirloom seed company.
I suggest that you may wish to look into the capital required to do so. It’s a high bar, BTW.
I have nothing against hybrids, I grow plenty of them. I actually can see both sides of this issue, and see the truth of both as well.
One of my husband’s absolute favorite chile pepper is a hybrid, and I can’t tell you how it pains me to have to buy the plants each and every year, but I do it because the seeds will not germinate and the peppers have become a mainstay in our household.
Considering the price of both in the supermarket, at least in my area, I would say you are way ahead of the game!!!!
As to the cloning, it never even crossed my mind. I have an absolute black thumb when it comes to plants indoors. I'm OK with starting seedlings, but then they must go out in the garden, or they die on me.
Other than those peppers, I hardly ever buy plants anymore because of the numbers I grow. Talk about cost prohibitive! I have to do seeds.
I think you have written that you do a market garden, so it is understandable. I only do about 20+ tomato plants and maybe 6 peppers, plus 6 short rows of sweet corn.
I had a black thumb with sweet corn last year. I have to make sure we burn off the garden before planting this year. I had smut, due to a very wet year. The same weather blighted all my beefsteak tomatoes for the second year in a row, so I am not planting those this year.
Actually, I am not sure I believe in green or black thumbs. It is about taking pains and being very observant. That said, my work is intermittent due to economy and when I have orders, I tend to ignore my plants, indoors and out. Sometimes, that is ok, in a good year. In bad weather or indoors when it so cold and dry, it can be death for the plants.
I just keep repeating that it is a learning experience. Now I am reading about increased lettuce prices, so I am hoping my lessons have taken and I can keep it growing all year. Not easy in summer, when it can get to 90 degrees, but last summer, I kept it on a 3-season porch and made sure to put the ceiling fan in the hottest part of the day. We have overhanging eaves on that room, so there is light, but little direct sun, so it worked.
At least my failures don’t really effect our income. But I do hope to reduce our outlay.
Then don't post garbage. The green weanies have been trying to sell this conspiracy since the first genetically modified plant was developed many years ago. It was BS back then, and it's BS now.
I know patent law reasonably well, and, having grown up on a farm, I know a bit about plant genetic engineering, hybridization, and the original Monsanto "Roundup" controversy. The flat fact is that NOBODY can patent an unmodified plant/seed/or whatever. And anybody who claims otherwise is either gullible, or a liar.
“Today only 12 plants provide 75 percent of the food in industrialized countries ...Africans still rely on 2,000 plants for their food biodiversity.”
With math skills like this, I think Thompson must be AlGore’s long-lost sister.
One very entertaining silver lining of the Obama regime will be that looney toons will be more comfortable speaking their (tiny) minds. Western civilization may come crashing down if these whackos get to influence policy, but we will get some laughs before the light is extinguished.
At this point, I believe they’re only patenting their modified seeds. It still kind of creeps me out that they can sue people for harvesting seeds from plants grown with their seeds. I suppose it makes sense if the company spent a lot of money developing the seeds, they don’t want others to grow and sell the resulting seeds. If they’re just saving the seeds for their own use, I don’t see it as such a big deal. If I remember correctly, in one of the cases, they tested the seeds a farmer saved to see if it was genetically related to their seed. It was, and they sued him. I wonder what would happen if the genetically modified seeds cross pollinated with a farmer’s heirloom seed. Would the resulting seed be considered patented or would the farmer be entitled to use it? If not, that’s scary. I don’t have much understanding of the law in this area.
I have been saving my own seeds from heirloom veggies I grow for the last couple years. I like to think I have the ability to be self reliant should the seed supply ever dwindle or become unavailable. It is a fascinating process, and really a lot of fun. Also, you can save dry seeds in your freezer for years to preserve their viability longer.
I really like Bakers Creek Heirloom Seeds and Sand Hill Preservation. I haven’t actually purchased anything from Seed Savers, but I plan to check it out this year.
I would like it a lot better if what you’re saying is true. I hope you are right. If so, it’s one thing I can rest easier about. Thanks.
Where did you come up with that?
Of course the farmers can grow them, they just have to pay the owner.
“It turns out he’s not alone. Totally Tomatoes, R.H. Shumway, The Vermont Bean Seed Company, Seeds for the World, Seymour’s Selected Seeds, HPS, Roots and Rhizomes, and McClure and Zimmerman Quality Bulb Brokers are all standing shoulder to shoulder under the J.W. Jung Seed Company’s umbrella.”
I work for Jung’s; I manage their largest (of 5) Garden Centers. I’m very proud of the fact that our privately held company could afford to buy and save companies that were going under due to mis-management. We also own Edmund’s Roses, not listed in the article. :)
Would you like to see my chart of who owns what as far as ‘organic’ food companies go? Hold on to your socks!
Here it is:
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/features/009/009buyingorganic.html
As long as the patent is in force, it is illegal to "save seeds" from the modified plants. It is only legal to use seed from the patent holder. But what you absolutely MUST remember is that a patent (unlike copyright*) is NOT "forever". A US Patent only gives monopoly rights for 25 years, after which anybody can produce identical products, or save seeds, or whatever they like.
*And yes, I know that copyright also isn't "really" forever, but the term is so long that it might as well be (author's life plus 75 years---which is ridiculous).
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