Family seed business takes on Goliath of genetic modification

[ensho]

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=1be275ca-cd91-4bfc-96a6-f311f7514bb4


Control of world's food supply at stake, Montreal growers argue


Heather Meek leafs through the seed catalogue she wrote on the family computer, on winter nights after the kids went to bed.

There are Kahnawake Mohawk beans and Painted Mountain corn; Tante Alice cucumber and 40 varieties of heritage tomatoes.

Selling seeds is more than just an extra source of income on this organic farm an hour northwest of Montreal.

For Meek and partner Frederic Sauriol, propagating local varieties is part of a David and Goliath struggle by small farmers against big seed companies.

At stake, they believe, is no less than control of the world's food supply.

Since the dawn of civilization, farmers have saved seeds from the harvest and replanted them the following year.

-snip-

But makers of genetically modified (GM) seeds -- introduced in 1996 and now grown by some 70,000 Canadian farmers, according to Monsanto, the world's largest seed company -- have been putting a stop to that practice.

The 12 million farmers worldwide who will plant GM seeds this year sign contracts agreeing not to save or replant seeds. That means they must buy new seeds every year.

-snip-

This week, Alexander Muller, assistant director of Food and Agriculture Organization, warned that loss of agricultural biodiversity threatens the world's ability to survive climate change.

"The erosion of biodiversity for food and agriculture severely compromises global food security," said Muller, who heads FAO's Natural Resources Management and Environment Department.

Muller's words resonate with farmers Meek and Sauriol, whose four daughters help with the painstaking work of cleaning seeds over the winter.

"Growing seed is a big job," says Meek.

"But if you don't grow your seed, you lose your power."
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and that says it all

good luck and hope, for all our sakes, you win

[eleny]

1. k&r

[LaurenG]

2. I'm on board with this family

K and R. :kick:

[On the Road]

3. I Have a Hard Time Understanding How Monsanto

has been able to enforce their "no seed corn" policies. Do they have a monopoly on seed? Is it that much more profitable than normal seed?

More power to the Canadians. Hope they take enough market share from Monsanto to make them change their policies.

[NickB79]

4. It would be foolish to replant the saved corn seeds even without the legal threats

Virtually all corn grown in Canada and the US today for agricultural production comes from hybridized seed. Even GM corn is also hybridized corn. The seeds are viable, but the offspring of hybrids are notoriously variable in almost every way. One stalk might be 7' tall and have 4 cobs, the next one 4' tall and have only 1 cob. Some may have the gene to survive herbicide, while others will die when you spray your field.

The consistency from stalk to stalk is vital to obtain high yields per acre, so it is far more profitable to buy new seed every year than save questionable seed from your previous harvest. This applies to all corn varieties from all major seed companies, not just Monsanto or GM strains.

[enki23]

8. farmers, of course, realize that already

it's the soybean issue that rankles some. we always saved seed soybeans, when i was a kid. though that was before roundup-ready days. we did it with the old kids-with-melanomas method. walking with a hoe, or riding with a sprayer. i shudder to think about just how much sun i got as a youth. and of course, that is failing to mention going over the entire damned field several extra times a year with a cultivator, and all the extra diesel we burned (and strained necks gained) doing it.

monsanto may not be wonderful, but it isn't satan either.

[On the Road]

11. Did Not Know About the Hybridization

Makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation.

Although I have heard that enough farmers try to beat the Monsanto policy to warrant an enforcement team.

[NickB79]

5. Planted most of the garden in with heirlooms this spring

Johnny's Select and Territorial Seed are two other good sources for quality non-GM, non-hybridized seed.

If things keep going the way they are, we're gonna have to start relying more and more on "victory gardens" and homegrown foods, and I don't want to be caught behind the curve :-)

[bvar22]

6. e are now almost exclusively heirloom.

By next year, we will be 100% heirloom, and will be saving seeds.
If we buy seed, it will be from a local/regional seed saver company.

[enki23]

7. to play devil's advocate here... this article is basically a giant non-sequitur

those agreements with monsanto are only necessary in order to grow very few, very specific monsanto varieties of (so far as i'm aware) corn and soybeans only. this article is talking about growing *leeks*. now, i like leeks. i'd rather eat one that a hand of soybeans any day (unless i were starving, i suppose). but leeks aren't the point here. neither, really, are corn and soybeans. monsanto only controls their seeds because they have a product people want. it isn't that they're particularly productive, on their own anyway. it's that they are pesticide resistant and so allow a major reduction in labor and/or fuel, equipment, etc. necessary to grow a crop. there are still many, many seed varieties still available that don't fall under monsanto's agreements.

that isn't to say there aren't arguments against monsanto's business practices. you can make an ethical argument that it is wrong, period, to restrict someone's ability to save and reuse seed from a crop they grew themselves. i can see both sides of that argument, really. you could also argue that no one should be allowed to patent (or otherwise hold any sort of exclusive rights to) a life form, genetically modified or not. again, i'm not so certain of that one either. if any sort of public funding is funneled into seed research that ends up as a monsanto patent, that's yet another issue. finally, you can make an ethical argument that it's somehow wrong to genetically modify the seed in the first place. though you'd find me among the very large number of people who think your ethics are pretty damned faulty, if not outright ignorant bordering on luddite, if you do.

you can also make other arguments, though most of them aren't really ethical arguments. most of them not really arguments against monsanto, and companies like it, at all. you can argue against over-reliance on particular varieties of corn and soybeans, and even arguments against over-reliance on corn and soybeans of *all* varieties. but none of that would require any sort of new restrictions on monsanto and its business practices.

in any case, these people growing up leek and cucumber seed stocks are a red herring. monsanto doesn't have any GM cucumbers, that i'm aware of, that require licensing agreements. if they develop them, there is noting to stop people from continuing to grow all the same varieties they are growing today.

[jpljr77]

9. OK, that's a good Devil's Advocate argument for NOW

But what if these folks are looking to the future? Monsanto will be moving forward with the terminator gene for non-food crops (cotton, etc.)(http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/montreal060222.cfm). Who's to say those genes won't creep into the food supply crops in 10-15 years?

Maybe these folks are looking to the not-so-distant future when agreements not to save seeds from Monsanto crops are moot.

[enki23]

10. monsanto doesn't have the power to control any seed but monsanto's seed

and there is really no reason to believe the "terminator" gene will find its way into other plant populations. plants do sometimes transfer genes between species, though it's much more rare than it is in bacteria. but there is no reason whatsoever to assume that even if the terminator were to find its way into another plant in another location that that plant would be naturally selected for. talk about a deleterious mutation! that's just a non-starter. that's orders of magnitude less likely than the spread of natural pathogen that has a far greater effect. hell, other similarly deleterious mutations happen without any help of ours, but they're self-limiting. we don't have wild mule populations out west for a reason.

the terminator gene isn't a virus. this simply isn't something that will propagate itself in the environment at large. the only worry about horozontal gene transfer of this "terminator" sterility trait would be for crops that could be cross-pollinated by a crop with this trait nearby. (technically, that wouldn't even be horozontal gene transfer, but anyway...) functionally, that means the same species almost exclusively for any sort of widespread effect. that could conceivably be an issue in the short term, for the person whose crop was contaminated, depending on the crop and the degree of contamination. but that wouldn't bring it any closer to being the sort of environmental problem i think you envision.

this technology simply doesn't represent a significant environmental concern in its own right. it might be an ethical concern, and even (in cases of actual cross-pollination of some crops) a commercial or localized subsistence issue. but it isn't even remotely likely to be an environmental concern. we already have plenty of those. the fact of our near-monoculture itself is far more of a concern than this technology will ever be. we have plenty of other very real agricultural (and related) problems to deal with that aren't bordering on science-fiction. plant pathogens, droughts, floods, insects, climate change, salinization, groundwater depletion, soil erosion, ground and surface water contamination, habitat destruction, and let's not forget the problem of expensive petroleum affecting the cost of agriculture at every single step of the process... compared to any single one of these, this little gene of monsanto's really is a non-issue. environmentally, anyway.