HWP 373
Amy Lanou
August 28th 2008
How Can We Save Our Seeds?
The threat of the GM and Hybrid Monoculture
Next time you're walking around campus and pass someone you know, I urge you to stop and ask them this question: "Where does your food come from?" If they answer "the supermarket," flick them on the forehead and be on your way. If they answer "farms," give them 10 points and a pat on the back. But if they answer "seeds," shake their hand vigorously and tell them they are a true gentle-person and scholar.
How can we so easily forget something so elemental? What happened in these last two generations that led us so far from the genesis of our food? What divorced us from the miracle of the lettuce seed, as small as this comma, though in fact a living (even breathing!) child waiting to be born? Anyone who has grown a plant from seed must at some point scratch their head and say, "How'd it do that?" The intuitive alchemy this intelligent mote of life orchestrates with so little help from us is dumbfounding - if only child-rearing were so easy!
So what happened to our mothering relationship with the Seed? When did we leave them at the bus stop to be whisked away by the yellow combine of industrial agriculture? How and when did six companies gain control of 98% of the total food and flower seed produced in the world? (Kingsolver 51) And why did we wave goodbye so happily?
Perhaps it's that growing food can be hard work. For what amounts to a blip in human history, a vast majority of people in America now do not grow their own food, and they don't even know how. History tells us that sometime, long ago, we discovered bronze, and that metal elevated us out of the Agricultural Age. How does this make sense? Although we've stopped casting bronze shields and swords, even iron and steel ones, we've never stopped growing food. We've passed through the Industrial Age, even the Post-Modern and Post-Post-Modern Age, but each spring, someone still must plough the field, plant the seed, and pay attention to it.
Growing food is hard work, and elevating one's self from subsistence farming has long been seen as the first step up from extreme poverty. But at what cost? What kind of intelligence, what kind of biodiversity do we lose as more and more people continually leave their farms for the city, leave their farms in the hands of million-acre agribusinessmen whose only concern is their yield?
Would you leave your children with a rapist? Would you leave your seeds to someone who has no respect for the land? This is the hidden crisis, looming as large as global warming, but it's still under the radar, and could very well remain there until it's far too late.
Diversity is the key to plant success in nature. Too many of one cultivar invites opportunistic disease and pestilence. The decline of home-gardener, and small-farmer seed saving and the rise of industrial agriculture brought the number of available non-hybrid vegetable seeds down from 5,000 in 1981 to 600 in 1998 (52). What is perhaps more disturbing is that "Agribusinessmen can patent plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production" (52). First of all, where did we get the idea that seeds are as much our creation as lightbulbs? Secondly, how can someone make growing a food plant illegal? This is what unbridled capitalism creates: laws that suit its own purpose, people in power that perpetuate them, and a world without a longview. As the geneticist Jack Harlan wrote, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine.... The line between abundance and disaster is getting thinner and thinner" (52). Life is not a commodity, to be bought and sold - it is something that, though resilient, must be cared for, and cannot be so easily squeezed onto the assembly line.
Humans cannot replicate the innate intelligence of nature in the laboratory, and although genetically modified crops might prove to be safe for human consumption, how can we tell until it is too late if they are safe for the world? There are simply too many contingencies to consider, too many possibilities for things to go wrong. GM technology exists only because we've been doing things the wrong way. We're fixing a problem that wouldn't exist if we simply went about growing and distributing food a different way. Leaving our seed supply in the hands of so few (and those whose goal is to make money, not food) is foolish and threat to the survival of the human race. The only way we can undo the damage done is to preserve the long-cultivated heirloom varieties by supporting farms who grow them, or planting them in our own backyards (53).
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