Book Review
Introduction
In Part 7 of Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed we learn that: “We hope this manifesto can serve to further strengthen and accelerate the movement toward sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, biodiversity, and agricultural diversity; help defend the rights of farmers to save, share, use, and improve seeds; and enhance our collective capacity to adapt to the hazards and uncertainties of environmental and economic change.” “We urge people and communities to use it as appropriate to their needs and as a tool to unify and strengthen the call to counter the threat to seed and biodiversity imposed by industrial agriculture and multinational corporate interests.” “Today the diversity and future of seed is under threat. Of 80,000 edible plants used for food, only about 150 are being cultivated, and just 8 are traded globally. This implies the irreversible disappearance of seed and crop diversity.” “The erosion of diversity has been propelled by industrial agricultures’ drive for homogenisation. The freedom of seed and the freedom of farmers are threatened by new property rights and new technologies that are transforming seed from a commons shared by farmers to a commodity monopolized by corporations.” “
MANIFESTOS ON THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND SEED
EDITED BY VANDANA SHIVA
SOUTH END PRESS 2007
PART VII
THE MANIFESTOS
Chapter 6: Manifesto on the Future of Seed
- In 2003 the International Commission on the Future of Food published and disseminated the manifesto on the Future of Food.
- With the continued support and active participation of the government of the Region of Tuscany, the International Commission on the Future of Food, through a global stakeholder consultation at Terra Madre 2006 in Turin, has prepared the present manifesto on the Future of Seed.
- We hope this manifesto can serve to further strengthen and accelerate the movement toward sustainable agriculture, food sovereignty, biodiversity, and agricultural diversity; help defend the rights of farmers to save, share, use, and improve seeds; and enhance our collective capacity to adapt to the hazards and uncertainties of environmental and economic change.
- We urge people and communities to use it as appropriate to their needs and as a tool to unify and strengthen the call to counter the threat to seed and biodiversity imposed by industrial agriculture and multinational corporate interests.
PART ONE
DIVERSITY OF LIFE AND CULTURES UNDER THREAT
Seeds are a gift of nature, past generations, and diverse cultures. It is our inherent duty and responsibility to protect and to pass seeds on to future generations. Seeds are the first link in the food chain, the embodiment of biological and cultural diversity, and the repository of life’s future evolution.
Since the offset of the Neolithic revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve agricultural yield, taste, and nutritional value. They have expanded and passed on knowledge about the health impacts and healing properties of plants as well as about their peculiar growing habits and their interaction with other plants, animals, soil, and water. Rare initial events of hybridisation have resulted in larger-scale cultivation of certain crops in their centers of origin (such as wheat in Mesopotamia, rice in Indochina and India, and maize and potato in Central America), which have since spread around the globe.
Throughout this period the free exchange of seed among farmers has been the basis of maintaining biodiversity as well as food security. This exchange is based on cooperation and reciprocity, in which farmers generally exchange equal quantities of seed. And the exchange goes beyond the actual seed: it extends to the sharing and exchange of ideas and knowledge, of culture and heritage. It is an accumulation of tradition, of knowledge of how to work the seed gained by farmers actually watching the seed grow in each other’s fields. The cultural and religious significance of the plant, its gastronomic value, its drought and disease resistance, its pest resistance, its ability to be saved, and other characteristics shape the community’s knowledge of the seed and the plant it produces.
Today the diversity and future of seed is under threat. Of 80,000 edible plants used for food, only about 150 are being cultivated, and just 8 are traded globally. This implies the irreversible disappearance of seed and crop diversity.
The erosion of diversity has been propelled by industrial agricultures’ drive for homogenisation. The freedom of seed and the freedom of farmers are threatened by new property rights and new technologies that are transforming seed from a commons shared by farmers to a commodity monopolized by corporations.
Similarly, the rapid extinction of diverse crops and crop varieties and the development of non-renewable seeds, such as property hybrids and sterile seeds based on the “terminator technology,” threatens the very future of seed, and with it the future of farmers and food security.
EROSION & EXTINCTION OF BIODIVERSITY
The acceleration of technological revolutions in all fields and the growing concentration of economic power in the hands of a small number of people and organizations have produced an increasing homogenisation of production strategies and of human cultures in our world. As a result, the genetic variability of domesticated and wild plants and animals and the diversity of languages and cultures are being destroyed at an unprecedented level.
At the same time, industrial production strategies have unleashed unexpected long-term effects on the climate and on the whole network of life systems. This process of ecological destruction and genetic erosion has been accelerating over the past decades. As a consequence of this human activity, abrupt and profound eco-systematic planetary changes within the present century can be foreseen.
Furthermore, industrial production has not only made abrupt and profound change an impending certainty, but it is also destroying the very diversity that is the only proven strategy of living beings to cope with such change. While plants, animals and microorganisms make use of their genetic variability, humans depend on their cultural variability and their inventive capacity to adapt to changes in the environment around them in order to survive.
These destructive industrial agricultural practices, as well as wars and expulsion, are reducing seed diversity more dramatically than ever before. The biased usage of unexpected advances and successes in biology, particularly in genetic and modular biology, has played a significant role in this decimation. Technologies such as chemical fertilizers and genetically engineered crops derived from now obsolete interpretations of biological concepts have been developed and advertised as the only way to overcome worldwide problems like famine and illness and are used as tools for economic and political control. The disappearance of local seeds has gone hand in hand with the disappearance of small farmers and local food cultures. And with them, local knowledge about the use of cultivated and wild plant varieties in their different ecological and cultural habitats has likewise been lost. With the extinction and reduction of languages and cultures the indigenous names for and distinctions among thousands of plants have been lost, as have the experiences and traditions of their cultivation.
Civilizations rose with new agricultural technologies. The ability to produce more food than needed by those working in the fields was key to the development of progressively more sophisticated divisions of labor. Traditionally, in most rural communities, the selection, preservation, and maintenance, the wise development and passing on of seed stock has been – and still is today – the domain of women. Preserving seed for the next season has been a fundamental rule of survival in human history.
Systems of rights and responsibilities must be evolved that both recognize the collective rights of local communities and the seed sovereignty of farmers, as well as the mutual interdependence among diverse cultures and countries.
THE BIAS OF INDUSTRIAL AGRICULTURE & SEED BREEDING
Industrial agriculture has seriously eroded the biological diversity of seeds, crops, and breeds of livestock. The spread of modern commercial agriculture and the replacement of local varieties has been identified as the chief contemporary cause of the loss of genetic diversity and the most important cause of genetic erosion.
Industrial agriculture, for which the lion’s share of commercially traded seeds is produced, relies on a production process that conflicts with basic rules of seed production and reproduction. The goal of ever-increasing yields of individual commodities comes at reduction of overall output and erosion of biodiversity. It is driven by short-term managerial concerns and profit margins and by its very nature sacrifices consideration of the public good, such as the long-term sustainability of soil, ecosystems, and farming communities.
This market-driven approach is often reflected at the government level. Rather than acting in the interest of the public good, governments further distort market prices by granting subsidies to domestic companies, giving them a competitive advantage and thereby reducing prices. These artificially low prices are pushing both biodiversity and small farmers to extinction.
It is obvious and generally accepted that such industrial agriculture and commodity market policies further deplete our already limited natural resources, increase energy and toxic inputs at the expense of labor, and lead to rural despair and hunger in the world. This despite the fact that more agricultural products are produced than are needed to feed all 6.5 billion citizens of this planet – and, if wisely distributed, enough is already produced to feed the additional 2.5 billion people expected to swell the global population in the next 40 to 50 years. The inadequacy of the current model of food production is evident from the fact that while more than a billion people are hungry and suffer from malnutrition due to being underfed another 2 billion suffer malnutrition due to being overfed with unhealthy food. For the first time, the number of children suffering from obesity is about to outnumber those children suffering from hunger.
One characteristic of this “mechanistic utopia,” which reduces living systems to machines whose output can be maximized and strives for “the best” of all crops and varieties, is the attempt to adapt environmental conditions to the production system rather than adapting production to different ecosytems and cultural traditions. Such attempts have a devastating effect on the environment, natural resources, and on the rural communities subjected to them. The “Green Revolution,” which was probably the single most dramatic boost in caloric yields per acre in recent history, is the iconic example of what can go wrong with such apparently successful linear and productionistic improvements. Today it is apparent that the nutritional impact, especially on rural populations and the poor in those regions that were to benefit most from the Green Revolution, has in fact been largely negative.