Who invented seeds?
Certainly no human mind.
Every seed is a tiny parcel of DNA, complete with initial
energy source, protective packaging, encoded plan for growth.
I helped a friend and her kids plant their first garden this
year: clearing stones and weeds, loosening the soil, reading instructions on
depth and spacing, planting peas, beans, lettuce. It was fun to share their
excitement at the first green shoots leaping up, savoring the miracle and
mystery of seed: we plant, water, wait. As Wendell Berry says in a lovely short
poem:
“The seed is in the ground.
Now may we rest in hope
While darkness does its work.
For most of human history, humans have played at the edges
of this mystery: looking for the sweetest fruit, the sturdiest vine, then
saving seed to try again the next season.
In the mid nineteenth century, an Augustinian monk from Silesia , Gregor Mendel,
spent years observing peas, painting pollen back and forth from green peas to
yellow, studying traits, wondering. He’s considered the grandfather of
hybridization, the first to find a way to selectively cross-pollinate in
pursuit of specific traits.
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| Andean Potatoes, Marcello Marengo, Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity |
But he wasn’t the first to selectively breed plants or
animals with valuable traits. The earth is full of plants and creatures bred to
suit specific places and tasks. Persian Greyhounds and New Guinea Singing Dogs
have been bred for thousands of years, as have Arabian horses, Icelandic sheep,
Dorking chickens, Ibérico pigs.
Indigenous growers in the Andes
mountains created over a thousand varieties of potatoes, each suited to an
optimum altitude and microclimate. Sri Lanka at one time was said to
have two thousand varieties of rice, adapted to different elevations, soils,
varying water conditions. A search for heritage apples in the US has so far
yielded 950 varieties – bred by farmers, orchardists, , families.
Historians say a century ago there were 16,000 named varieties: Albany Beauty, Allen’s
Everlasting, Arkansas Black, Smokehouse, Sops in Wine. They were bred for
specific growing conditions, specific purposes, or for the beauty of their
skin, the color of their stripes, an unexpected flavor perfect for pie,
applesauce, or snacking a brisk fall day.
But somewhere along the way, the bounty of natural
hybridization was deemed not enough, and technology took over. In the years
following World War II, Norman Borlaug, a plant pathologist and agronomist,
turned to something called “mutation breeding” – the use of radiation or
chemicals to force mutations in a population of seeds. The resultant plants
were examined for traits that would expand yield and reduce susceptibility to
wheat rust. The resultant high-yield disease-resistant dwarf wheat dramatically
increased wheat yield in countries like Mexico and India, so much so that
Borlaug was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970; the selection committee said
of him: “More than any other single person of this age, he has helped
provide bread for a hungry world. We have made this choice in the hope that
providing bread will also give the world peace.”
Borlaug’s wheat seeds were called “miracle seeds,” and the
changes in farming practices promoted along with his seed spurred what has been
called “the Green Revolution.”
Advocates of industrial agriculture still sing the praises
of Borlaug and the Green Revolution, with supporting statistics: increases in
productivity, acres planted in Borlaug’s hybrid wheat and subsequent high yield
rice.
Other voices are not so congratulatory. The statistics also document
the billions of pounds of pesticide and nitrogen dumped on fields, the acres of
bio-diverse food systems plowed under.
And questions have been raised about ways of measuring
yield. If an acre of land once supported maize, millet, peas, beans, squash, oil
seeds, sorghum, and interplanted herbs, is an increase in one of those crops a
benefit if all the rest are lost?
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| Spraying Pesticide in India, Mark Edwards, Still Pictures |
And then there’s the subtext of profit and expense. The Green Revolution promoted ever higher expense in inputs: tractors, chemicals,
expensive seed. Global companies profited. Small farmers went deeper into debt.
It all comes back to seed.
Borlaug’s experiments with chemical and radioactive
mutagenesis gave way to genetic modification: removing genes from one species
to insert into another. In one version of this, genetic strands from an
agricultural virus (Cauliflower Mosaic Virus) are inserted into genetic sequences of various crops
(corn, soy, sugar beets, cotton, canola) to create disease resistant varieties.
While billions have been spent creating and marketing these seeds, very little has been spent investigating their long-term impacts on human and environmental health. Market introduction follows a voluntaryconsultation between seed-designers and regulatory agencies, with applicants providing results from their own 90 day investigation to a panel often composed of industry consultants. Independent research is often stifled.
Growing coalitions of doctors, scientists, and farmers have asked for better regulation of these “miracle” seeds and more extensive research regarding their impact on both environment and human-health.
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| Monoculture Pesticides,The Permaculture Research Institute |
But even if the miracle seeds of high-yield wheat, Round-up
Ready corn, virus-resistant soy are perfectly safe, the context of their growth
is without doubt harmful. These miracle seeds were made to be grown in monocultures
dependent on petrochemical intervention: huge fields of depleted soil drenched
in nitrogen fertilizers, sprayed with herbicides, toxic to pollinators,
song-birds, farmers.
The pesticides inserted in the miracle seeds’ DNA, or used
to coat the seed itself, or sprayed across the growing plants, linger in thesoil, run off in our water, aggregate in the animals fed pesticide-laden feed, cross through placentas to
the blood of unborn babies.
Last winter I heard a speaker from the National Institute of Environmental Health Services share his agency’s concern about “chronic,
complex exposures.” Safety tests for pesticides and genetically modified crops
are rarely longer than ninety days, and test only one new substance at a time.
What happens, he asked quietly, when we eat those substances day after day, for
years at a time? What happens when they mix in ways we can’t predict? He showed
a series of charts documenting illnesses that have increased exponentially in
the last twenty years, charts that mirror the exponential rise in pesticide
use, and the spread of genetically modified seed.
These miracle seeds have become for me both sign and symbol
of an industrial model that believes more is always better, technology holds
the cure, and any problems caused by human interference can be solved with ever
more interference.
Around the globe, consumers and farmers are asking that
genetically modified foods be labeled, that patents on seed be banned, that
huge seed monopolies be slowed in their relentless quest to swallow smaller
seed suppliers.
What happens when the source of food is gathered into ever tighter corporate control?
And what responsibility rests with me, in this global dialogue
about seed, health, profit?
No one invented seed.
The word sings out in every tongue:
Samen, semente, sēklas, siol.
The gift of life itself is passed
From hand to hand, sacco to sac,
Promise of harvests yet to come.
No one invented seed.
God’s own earth-magic, ancient miracle,
Hope wrapped in fibers paper thin,
In small round pellets, green, or brown,
In precious flecks, in salt-sized dots,
In shells, in pods, in kernels, grains.
No one invented seed,
Yet countless farmers, peasants, monks
In gardens, fields around the globe,
Waited for the greener pea,
The sweeter corn, the stronger vine.
Saved seed, then handed on the fruit.
No one invented seed,
Yet someone, seeing green in green,
Pushed patents, lawyers,
Drove from field to field,
Grabbing up time-tested treasure,
Narrowing the flow of seed into one strong hand.
“No one invented seed!”
Cry cotton farmers, in their dying fields,
Cry Haitian peasants, on their rubbled hills.
Cry campesinos: “No Monsanto maize!”
Around the globe, small growers stand to say:
“No to your GMOs, your patents and your seed!
No to your theft of ancient wisdom.
No to your Roundup and your greed.”
As millions march, they chant this truth:
“Seeds are life!
No one invented seed.”
(C. Kuniholm, 2012)
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| Who Owns the Seed? Seed Freedom |
God's Green Equity: August 4, 2013
Seed Parables: August 11, 2013
