Book Review
MANIFESTOS ON THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND SEED
EDITED BY VANDANA SHIVA
SOUTH END PRESS 2007
PART IX
THE MANIFESTOS
PART TWO
A NEW PARADIGM FOR SEED
A post-industrial concept of seed and food production must take into account the failures, limitations, and vulnerability of industrial agriculture and corporate monopolies. It must be based on holistic, long-term considerations – ones that industrial agricultural systems producing for a global market, by their very nature, cannot address.
Seed diversity can be maintained only if the livelihoods of small farmers who save and use biodiversity are protected. Biodiversity-based farming systems generate more employment, produce more nutrition and better quality food, and provide higher incomes to farming families. The goal of agriculture must no longer be to produce quantities of nutritionally unbalanced food, but rather to produce nutritionally balanced food in a sustainable way, one that preserves natural resources and the communities’ social and cultural systems, which allow for the appropriate distribution of food, and one that provides the possibility of a decent livelihood in rural areas.
The one-dimensional focus on yield has led to a serious decline in systems productivity, food quality, and nutrition. Quantity must give way to quality. Seed production by food communities is based on a holistic concept of food quality that considers taste, compatibilities with human physiological and cultural conditions, all aspects of nutrition, the degree of biodiversity, and the environmental impact of production, as well as the working conditions, processes of participation, and value of contribution of producers. This holistic concept should be the basis for reinforcing or creating quality seed and food systems.
Any future concept of agricultural production must anticipate and take into account the change in climatic conditions and urgently introduce stringent measures to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
The monoculture paradigm must give way to a flourishing biodiversity paradigm. In addition, we must address the rapidly expanding water crisis, which may be dramatically exacerbated by climate change. Drinking water is already scarce in many regions of the world, and we must make sustainable freshwater management a priority. A sustainable water-management plan must also stop the ongoing soil erosion to preserve the basis of agricultural production and must phase out the alarming input of toxic substances into vital ecosystems as well as the human food chain.
Reducing the waste of energy and natural resources due to irrational, counterproductive, unhealthy systems of processing, storage, transport, and consumption must become an integral part of future plans for sustainable food production and consumption policies.
Finally, plans for sustainable agricultural production must aim at reducing and ideally stopping the present unsustainable rate of urbanization and development of megacities. They are devastatingly destructive to the ecology and create high-risk hot spots prone to the destructive power of turbulent climate change.
International agreements such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and the Convention on Biological Diversity – which recognize the need to conserve biodiversity and defend farmer’s rights, as well as national and subnational laws that have upheld the rights of farmers to save, use, exchange, improve, and develop seeds – need to be upheld and strengthened and made effective instruments to counter the growing corporate monopoly over seeds.
It is at the local level that the new seed paradigm is taking shape. Communities are creating movements to save and share seeds and create alternatives to unsustainable agriculture based on monocultures and monopolistic “intellectual property rights.”
PART THREE
THE LAW OF SEED
Diversity, freedom, and ensuring the potential of future evolution of agriculture and humanity are core principles of law and seed.
Diversity
Diversity is our highest form of security. Diversification has been the most successful and widespread strategy of agricultural innovation and survival over the past 10,000 years. It increases the array of options and the chances of adapting successfully to changing environmental conditions and human needs. For these reasons and others, and in contrast to the present trend toward monocultures and genetic erosion, diversity must once again become the overarching development strategy in the following ways:
Diversity of seed
There is an urgent need to maintain seed diversity, to expand the number of plants used for human nutrition, and to expand the varieties cultivated within a given plant species. Reversing the trend toward monoculture is one of the most urgent tasks we face if we want to preserve our chances of adapting and surviving changing conditions in the years and millennia ahead.
Diversity of agricultural systems
Agricultural policies aimed at promoting and implementing global diversity of seed cultivars must support the development and spread of holistic agricultural systems, in which human, crop, animal, and microbial biodiversity are employed as indispensable tools to reduce external inputs, to increase productivity efficiency, and to achieve sustainability.
Two main categories have to be considered:
v Traditional low-external-input agricultural systems, in which crop biodiversity (poly-cultures) and seed mixtures (consociations) help to fulfil farmer’s needs at different levels of production
v Ecological agricultural systems, in which seed diversity is used to maintain planted biodiversity (crop rotation) and associated biodiversity (soil, plants and fauna)
Diversity of producer-consumer relationships
Agricultural biodiversity is best conserved when farmers are able to earn a decent income. The consolidation of the production and distribution system of food depletes biodiversity. Food systems in which producers have direct contact with consumers enrich biodiversity. Diversity of producer-consumer relationship is key to food democracy and protection of biodiversity.
Diversity of cultures
Biodiversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand. Preserving, maintaining, and expanding the remaining agricultural traditions and cultures of production is an immediate and urgent task if we are to prevent the further erosion of biodiversity. Such work entails respect and appreciation of the different traditions and ways that humans perceive nature and food cultures.
Diversity of innovation
Hundreds of thousands of communities and farmer cooperatives, millions of family and subsistence farms, and gardeners around the world form the basis not only for conservation and propagation of farmers’ varieties but also of further development of seed. The addition of scientists and professional plant breeders to the art of participatory plant breeding would make an even more formidable force for innovation. Finding fair and equitable ways for these different groups to cooperate and integrating their diverse levels of knowledge and experience would give enormous impetus and strength to our ability to meet future challenges.
Freedom of seed
Seeds are a gift of nature and diverse cultures, not a corporate invention. Passing on this ancient heritage from generation to generation is a human duty and responsibility. Seeds are common property, to be shared for the well-being of all and saved for the well-being of future generations and hence cannot be owned and patented. Seed saving and sharing is an ethical duty that should not be interfered with by national or international laws which try to make seed saving and seed sharing a crime.
The “law of the seed” must protect the freedom of seed and the freedom of farmers, based on the following principles:
Freedom of farmers to save seeds
The first duty of farmers is to protect and rejuvenate biodiversity. The conservation of biodiversity requires the saving of seed. Laws of compulsory registration and policies for “seed replacement” undermine the freedom of farmers to save seeds.
Intellectual property laws, patent laws, and breeders’ rights laws violate the law of the seed by making it illegal to save seeds.
Freedom of farmers to breed new varieties
Farmers’ rights derive from their intellectual contributions to the breeding of seeds and plant genetic resources. Though their breeding objectives and methods might differ from the objectives and methods of the seed industry, farmers are breeders. Farmers breed for diversity while the seed industry breeds for uniformity. The recognition of farmers’ breeding strategies is necessary to stop the practice of using farmers’ seeds as “raw material” with no compensation for the intellectual contribution of farming communities and to ensure the ability of farmers to further develop new varieties. Farmers have the right to freely develop new varieties of seeds.
Freedom from privatisation and biopiracy
Farmers’ innovation in plant breeding takes place collectively and cumulatively. Therefore farmers’ rights arising from their role as conservers and breeders have to be vested in farming communities, not in individual farmers.
The recognition of farmers’ collective rights is necessary to protect seeds and biodiversity as a commons. It is also necessary in order to stop the seed industry’s practice of using farmers’ varieties as “raw material” and then claiming patents and intellectual property rights on the basis of invention of the traits derived from them, a phenomena referred to as biopiracy. The global seed industry misuses the concept of the “common heritage of mankind” to freely appropriate farmers’ varieties, convert them into proprietary commodities, and then sell them back to the same farming communities at high cost and with heavy royalties. Such privatisation through patents and intellectual property law violates the rights of farming communities and leads to the indebtedness, impoverishment, and dispossession of small farmers.
Farmers’ and food communities’ access to seeds and plant genetic resources must not be restricted by private property claims and patent laws. Farmers should have access to their seeds in gene banks across the world. This freedom is the basis of farmers’ seed sovereignty.
Freedom of farmers to exchange and trade seeds
Since seeds are a commons, freedom to exchange seeds among farming communities must be an inalienable part of the law of the seed. This also includes the right to sell and to share seeds on a nonexclusive basis. Any price paid for seeds should be calculated as a fraction of the value of the products they yield.
Freedom to have access to “open source” seed
“Open Source” seeds are open pollinated varieties, which can be reproduced from year to year, and from generation to generation, and can be saved and replanted. The knowledge about the information embedded in seeds and germ plasm is, by its nature, not an invention but the result of cumulative collective discovery, a common effort upon which future discoveries may be based. This knowledge should be freely available and made accessible to all farmers. Seed systems that cannot be reproduced by farmers should not be developed. On the contrary, research and development should concentrate on seeds that can be freely reproduced. Public investment should go exclusively into seed systems that contain the full genetic information necessary for their reproduction. Farmers should have access to parent lines used for crossing and the creation of hybrids. Corporate control of hybrid parental lines leads to homogenisation and monopoly ownership.
Freedom from genetic contamination and GMOs
Farmers freedom includes freedom from genetic contamination and biopollution. The introduction of new varieties and plants must take into account the potential environmental risks as well as other potentially detrimental agricultural effects.
Freedom of seed to reproduce
Terminator technology to produce sterile and suicide seed violates the freedom of seed to reproduce. The production of seed that cannot reproduce is an assault to the fundamental nature of seed as the source of reproduction of life and to the fundamental freedom of farmers. The introduction of such traits is designed to create a monopoly on the seed and food of the world. It must be banned on a global level.