Seeds of Hope

Many people know that the world's rainforests are being cut down at an alarming rate, coral reefs are dying from ocean acidification and warming, and the sea is being overfished to the point of exhaustion. We are in the midst of an unprecedented collapse of biodiversity, the largest extinction event since the dinosaurs disappeared from the earth 65 million years ago. But fewer people have heard about another ongoing mass extinction that involves the foods that we eat. More than 75 percent of the fruit and vegetable varieties that humans once consumed have already gone extinct, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. And half of all domesticated animal breeds have been lost in roughly the past century. Nowadays, with government effectively out of the research business, there is little effort to develop locally adapted crop varieties, whose sale would be too modest to interest big agriculture. In fact, for many of the fruits and vegetables that we depend on, there is virtually no research at all. "The private sector is focused on a handful of major seed crops [soy, wheat and corn]," the Svalbard Global Seed Vault founder Cary Fowler said. "So they are not putting major efforts into quote unquote 'minor crops,' which may be minor for them economically, but major crops for the rest of us nutritionally."

A third of the world's land area is dedicated to agriculture. Farmers' fields and pastures comprise (after the oceans) the second largest ecosystem on the planet. This vast tract has been largely transformed into sterile monoculture deserts in which all other organisms are suppressed with agrochemicals, and only the cash crop is allowed to thrive. Whether it is soy in the Brazilian Amazon, wheat on the Ukrainian steppes or corn in Iowa, a single high-yield variety typically dominates the landscape. It is a system that has proven to be fabulously efficient and productive. But this productivity has come at a cost: Once rich soils are quickly being "burned" by the continual application of petroleum-based fertilizers; fresh water aquifers are pumped dangerously low for irrigation; streams are poisoned with herbicides and pesticides and vast dead zones fan out from river deltas like the Mississippi, which drain toxic agricultural residues far out into the sea.

Of the 20,000 named apple varieties that have been cultivated in North America, only 4,000 remain. Thousands of varieties of rice once flourished in the Philippines. Today, less than 100 varieties survive. And similar numbers could be cited for virtually all of our food crops. This massive loss of diversity is the result of the rapid spread of industrial agriculture and the increasing standardization of the food industry, where unconventional varieties have been squeezed off of supermarket shelves.

Some agronomists question the wisdom of planting only one crop. If the single seed variety that everyone is sowing turns out to be unsuited to future climactic conditions, or lacks resistance to insect and crop diseases which are going to be increasingly on the move into new areas as climate change advances, then we will be out of luck. We won't have the genetic diversity on hand to breed new, resilient varieties that can withstand the rigors of a climate-changed world.

John Torgrimson, the executive director of the Seed Savers Exchange, the largest US organization dedicated to preserving heirloom seeds. "While not every traditional variety tastes great or looks great, its genetics may be invaluable 50 or 100 years from now when the climate is different," Torgrimson told Truthout. "There are qualities in varieties that we don't even know about. It might be resistant to a particular disease; it may grow well in a particular region; it may have certain traits that will allow us to deal with climactic conditions going forward. Diversity is an insurance policy."

In earlier times, farmers saved their own seeds in the fall for replanting in the spring. In the 1930s, a scant 0.5 percent of farmers planted store-bought hybrid seeds. Today, that number has soared to over 90 percent. "Big companies, like Monsanto, Dow and DuPont, are pretty much driving what farmers are growing," he said. In some cases, farmers are actually forbidden by contract to collect the "patented seeds" from their own harvest for replanting next year. Technology has largely transformed modern farming into an assembly line operation, in which farmers have left decisions about which seeds to plant and what pesticides and fertilizers to apply to the big agricultural corporations that supply them.

One organization that is working regionally to preserve the United States' agricultural legacy is Native Seeds Search, based in Tucson, Arizona, which collects traditional drought-tolerant varieties of corn, wheat, beans and squash for use in arid areas around the world. they are also gathering tribal stories about how to grow them, when to plant, how to tend the plants and how to store the harvest. "There are fields where Hopi blue corn has been grown successfully every year for the past 60 years, with no external inputs, no fertilizer; they never watered it; that's what they have learned to do over a thousand years, so for us just to take a few of those kernels and say, there are some genes in there that we can use, misses the point."

Monsanto approached Native Seeds Search to buy rare teocinte seeds, the wild ancestor from which our present-day corn was bred. Modern plant breeders are keen to acquire the hardy forebears of crops, which contain genes that are suited to harsh conditions in the wild. By crossbreeding these resilient weeds with their far less hardy domesticated cousins, breeders hope to produce new varieties that will be suited for survival in a tougher future. Native Seeds Search "politely turned Monsanto down," said McDorman, fearing perhaps that the agricultural giant might attempt to patent the teocinte and claim it as its own exclusive "intellectual property." The group stamps the words, "These seeds are not to be used for commercial development with a patent outcome," on all of the packets that they sell.

The rice seed bank in the Philippines was recently destroyed by fire. Afghanistan's gene bank, which contained hundreds of unique breeds of apricot, almond, melons and plums, was ransacked during the fall of the Taliban. Iraq's seed facility located in the town of Abu Ghraib was looted and destroyed during the insurgency against US forces. Last April, the seed bank in the ruined city of Aleppo, Syria - the very region where agriculture is believed to have started 10,000 years ago - shipped its entire collection of barley, fava bean and lentil seeds, along with ancient races of durum and bread wheat, to Norway for safekeeping.

The real seed of hope for farmers and the world is socialism. Such projects as seed banks are perhaps the kernal within the seed that socialism will sprout and grow from. 

Full unabridged article here