Since the dawn of time, humans have saved and replanted seeds in order to sustain crops for our global population. However, with new developments in crop technology, this right is in danger. Since the 1900s, approximately 75% of agricultural plant genetic diversity (types of plants) has been lost as farmers worldwide have ditched their diverse, local varieties for genetically altered, uniform, high-yielding varieties. This introduction of genetically modified seeds has resulted in over 90% of crop variety disappearance from farmers’ fields. Increased globalization and pressures from wealthy multinational seed corporations are endangering the human right to a sustainable, nutrient rich future. The Seed Sovereignty movement works to fight this trend and save growers’ rights to freedom in their fields.
What are the origins of the Seed Sovereignty Movement?
In the 1980s, activists Pat Mooney and Cary Fowler popularized the seed sovereignty movement. It centers rights of production and sources of production by signaling a transformation from farmers rights to plant breeders rights. The movement was pushed further in the 1990s and 2000s with the transnational agrarian movement and an emphasis on peasant rights as traditional seed holders.
Why does seed sovereignty matter?
Seed sovereignty as a movement is especially important due to the fact that enhanced crop technology has reduced the varieties of available seeds on the market. Adoption of seed production by corporations has caused a large decrease in biodiversity. These decreases are intended to streamline agriculture to make a profit, with companies focusing on few seed strands and few breeds of seeds. Hired scientists took over the role of seed breeding and altered seeds for optimal efficiency, making them widely available in local and global markets, and seemingly more productive than other varieties. This transformation of seed networks to the corporate realm has in turn altered social, traditional, and economic systems by enforcing reliance on a select few, corporate patented strains of seeds.
Seed Sovereignty restores and saves human heritage in the face of mass seed streamlining. During this unprecedented time in which 94% of the seed varieties listed in the 1903 USDA catalog are no longer available from the most common commercial sources, the Seed Sovereignty movement works against this era of corporate domination and monopolization of seeds.
What prompted the movement?
The Seed Sovereignty movement responds to growing corporate interest in ownership of seeds and modifications to seeds. In response to WWII technologies and the Green Revolution (introduction of industrial agriculture), traditional agriculture changed from open-pollination to hybridized seeds as newly developed agri-biotechnology was deployed. In the U.S., this evolution of seed production to GMO seeds prompted the beginnings of the seed activism community. This change in seed production alters the ability for farmers to save seeds, reproduce seeds, breed seeds, and gain access to seeds as traditional networks have been dismantled and corporate contracts prevent seed saving or replanting.
The Seed Sovereignty movement is battling for the right of farmers, peasants, and Indigenous seed owners to produce individually or collectively in support of the democratization of seeds and in support of human heritage through seeds. The right to seeds and seed sovereignty is highly important to secure the autonomy of communities, their rights to culturally appropriate food production, and self reliance.
Why Modified Seeds Mean Bad News for Farmers Across the Globe.
These new GM seeds can be formulated to be sterile using “Terminator Technology,” which prevents re-planting of seeds. Farmers enter exploitative contracts with GM seed producers which prevent them from replanting or hybridizing seeds. These contractual obligations trap farmers into a vicious cycle of dependency on modified seeds from corporations as they must repeatedly buy new seeds to replant and must also buy the required inputs for these GM plants such as pesticides like the notoriously carcinogenic ‘Round – Up’, herbicides, and other plant supplements.
How does the movement fight for Seed Sovereignty?
The cultivation of the Seed Sovereignty movement counters the market based ethos of seed production with one that is based in community production. Rather than domination by the few, Seed Sovereignty works to establish seed-trading networks, exchanges, coalitions, and alliances that encourage local ownership, local variety, sharing of seeds, and biodiversity. The Seed Sovereignty movement promotes the continuous recombination of genetic material, the creation of resilient crops from farmer-developed crop varieties and landraces, and honors the historic creation and recreation of crop diversity from indigenous communities.
In effect, the Seed Sovereignty movement (and seeds as a symbolic extension) are challenging the restructurings of social and natural worlds of seed economies, food systems, and ownership of human heritage by subverting the global neoliberal project that privileges and empowers wealthy, multinational corporate interests.
The 411 on Seed Banks
Seed banks are often funded by government, corporate, or university interests for the purposes of developing ‘optimal’ varieties of select seeds. Seed banks work to preserve varieties of seeds and may experiment to create new strains.
Indigenous activists within the Seed Sovereignty movement are distrustful of these players in the seed world. This is due to Seed Banks’ roots in colonial powers which have historically and continuously harmed indigenous peoples through erasure, genocide, and colonialism. Indigenous activists have serious ethical concerns about seed banks since the fundamental nature of the seed is as a container of life, as a living being with connections and relationships to those past, present, and future. Indigenous actors contend that it is morally indefensible to defy the nature of the seed as a living being by housing it artificially, and separately from connection, in the cold chambers of seed bank labs.
Industrial agriculture and GM seeds then, could serve as an example of colonial forces’ attempts to claim ownership and mastery over agriculture and plant knowledge to erase Indigenous knowledge. Currently, seed production, storage and economy is unidirectional, individualist, and assumes that nature is property. We must shift our understanding so that we see seeds as reciprocal, collectivist, and based on tradition.
In an interview with Indigenous People’s Major Group for Sustainable Development, Rowen White, a Mohawk seed keeper and founder of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, reiterates the idea that keeping seeds within communities that have historically protected and saved them “honors the grand lineage of ancestors who kept these seeds alive despite adversity and challenges,” and their reciprocal use by later generations demonstrates “a renewed commitment to make sure that younger generations have them for generations to come.”
Image Citation:
Wolterink, Maarten. “Customer Loyalty by Monsanto – Bayer.” Cartoon Movement, 30 May 2018, cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/customer-loyalty-monsanto-bayer.