The War on Seeds
From the genesis of farming, seeds have always been in the hands of farmers.
No farmer growing food or propagating seeds regarded any seed as their own. The practice of collecting, exchanging, and sharing seeds has been crucial to biodiversity, stewardship, and sustaining indigenous food systems.
Sesame Seeds
The biological ownership of seed has changed this.
How can anyone own seed, when all humans have to eat?
Intellectual property rights (IPR) extending to seeds, allows individuals and corporations to have ownership over the biological and technological processes to breeding and innovating seeds. Intellectual property rights on seeds include protection over trade secrets, plant variety protection act, plant patents so that only the breeder has control over that variety for a number of years, utility patents which also protects the plant genes, and of course, trademarks for breeders to claim it as theirs.
Seeds have always belonged in the public domain, they are yours, mine, and ours. They have always freely belonged to all, the humans, the animals, and the environment. However, they have moved from the public domain away from the farmer who can actually feed people to the private domain of corporations and researchers who work with science, technology, and the legal system to feed investor pockets.
Farmers have always saved and bred seeds, but it happened on their farms, and they knew that pollination took place in open fields. Farmers who were breeding knew that they could not completely control nature’s way of disseminating seeds.
Seeds are not created, and plants are not invented, as seeds have pre-existed human existence. Any plant seed contains the DNA of the plant in it, it contains the information of where the plant can grow, which environmental conditions are best for it, and all the future generation of the plant in the seed. One single apple seed has an entire orchard in it. It has the root, the stem, the bark, the branches, the leaves, and the fruits, all in a seed yet to be plants.
Plants are bred from seed. The process of breeding does not produce plants but rather creates the conditions for plants to reproduce themselves.
Scientists involved in genetic plant innovation take seeds from nature, they take the information, and knowledge about a plant from existing agricultural resources, farmer’s expertise, and any previous data relating to a plant. Then they proceed to experiment with this plant to attain the required result, for instance, they may take the gene from a fish in the coldest part of the ocean and insert it in a tomato seed, so that particular variety of tomato can withstand colder conditions.
Funding, and research are poured into plant breeding innovations. And through the legal system, a scientist can say that because they had the idea and they put in the work to innovate a pre-existing seed that farmers were already planting and feeding people, that they should have the sole authority and control over the plant, as well as who uses it, how it’s used, and where it’s used.
The site of seed saving shifted from the farmers’ fields to the scientist laboratory, from the public realm to private property, from those who feed the world to pocket seed money.
Intellectual property rights can extend to include the protection of the plant gene, and even enables the breeder to protect the use of the genetic material of a number of plants, and to protect for multiple uses such as pharmaceutical, pest protection, and herbicide resistance.
The breeding of some crops have been removed entirely from the hands of farmers, they have gone from the plant being able to reproduce, to now being in production. Production in the sense that farmers are unable to reuse hybrid seeds, but would have to continue returning to the producer to repeatedly purchase the same seeds. One of the main arguments is that the farmers can get more yield from hybrid seeds.
Bito seeds, from Upper East Region, Ghana
On the other hand, in a field, a farmer can also observe which plant naturally produces more food, the best tasting food, and then proceed to save seeds on that plant, and propagate them for the next season. This was what farmers were doing.
Now, farmers who thus practice seed saving on particular crops are considered a threat to plant breeders. A farmer can save seed from their own crop, but they may not be able to commercially grow plants from a seed that has been patented.
Intellectual Property rights now have protection in the World Trade Organization (WTO). And now, all member countries of WTO are essentially obliged to extend property rights to plant varieties. WTO’s agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property rights (TRIPS) forces signatory countries to accept this, which opens the opportunity for monopoly over commercial distribution of genetically engineered seeds in signatory countries.
Ghana, for instance, as a member of WTO will have to grapple with the implications for a plant breeders bill. Food Sovereignty Ghana and the Peasant Association of Ghana have been resisting and protesting against the acceptance of a plant breeders bill in parliament.
We are gradually shifting towards a monopoly in our seeds systems. The variety and natural genes in our seeds are eroding through this laboratory practice of plant breeding. We are shifting toward a uniformity of similar or singular seeds that perform the exact same way. The extinction of a variety of seeds means that its genes are also lost along the way with necessary environmental information, beneficial traits, and human nutrition stored in the food.
Similarity in crop genetics means they can react to drought, diseases, and other factors in the same way. Most of these engineered seeds also come with their own pesticides and weedicide that can only work alongside the engineered seeds. What does it mean for the soil to plant an engineered seed, followed by its own agrochemical?
The increase in intellectual property rights over seeds is leading to the restriction on access to genetic resources, an economic concentration of wealth in a few hands in the seed industry, higher seed costs, the disintegration of small farms, and food security is left in the hands of laboratories instead of farmers.
There is a silent war on seeds, a war on farmers, a war on our food systems, a war on nutrition, a war on indigenous people, and a war on life.
