The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (4 page)

BOOK: The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
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Hybrids are designed to be successful in a wide range of climates and growing conditions. They are broadly adapted, as opposed to the more localized open-pollinated varieties—allowing a national and international seed trade to function. Before long, American cornfields transacted almost exclusively in hybrid varieties. To grow them was to enter the milieu of progress.

Nobody faults the farmers, who were acting in their financial best interests and did not know they were joining a system that was already cracked and would be soon broken. Hybridization itself is not really even the issue. As plant pathologist Albert Culbreath told me, “Hybrids have a place and are of use. But they should not be used exclusively and they should be of diverse parentage as well.” The real issue is what hybridization represents—including the loss of an extensive seed heritage and agroecological diversity. The problem is the
industrialization
of hybridization.

Suddenly we had a countryside full of farmers who no longer had to worry about leaky barn roofs and varmints in their seed corn. Seed companies worried about that. But the farmers still had to worry. They had to worry about autonomy. They had to worry about parity (as opposed to
disparity
, inequality, or farmers receiving prices for crops that did not reflect the cost of inputs to the farmers). They had to worry about the bank. In giving up seed saving, they became prisoners to Big Ag.

It is important to note that other methods of speeding up traditional plant breeding have come into popularity, including the use of mutagens (agents) to cause mutations in plants. Mutagens include chemicals and radiation (X-, gamma, electromagnetic, ultraviolet). Essentially, seeds are treated with a mutagen and then planted. The offspring are combed for mutations deemed beneficial. These methods roam far from the spontaneous mutations on which ancestral breeding relied.

Genetically Modified Organisms

In the late 1990s came another swing in agriculture, the second speeding bullet striking the very heart of a secure food supply.

Based on the recombinant DNA research of the 1970s, genetically modified (GM) seeds were first planted experimentally in the late 1980s and introduced to American markets in 1996. GM organisms are engineered through their DNA to take on new characteristics. Scientists may turn off active genes, turn on inactive genes, replace one gene with another, or splice in snippets of DNA from entirely different kingdoms of life. Organisms can be genetically engineered for pretty much anything. Whatever the scientist can imagine, she can more or less produce. Bt cotton, for example, contains a bacterium that is shuffled into the chromosome of cotton (there are also Bt corn and potato varieties). Bt,
Bacillus thuringiensis
, is a natural insecticide—a bacteria that produces a spore that proves toxic when ingested by insects. Once Bt is genetically encoded in the cotton, the cotton manufactures its own toxin to kill insect pests. Now we have a plant that not only produces cotton for our T-shirts and jeans, but a bacterium to defy bollworms and perhaps other cotton pests.

Other popular early GM organisms featured a resistance to the herbicide Roundup, the major trade name of glyphosate. They were developed by Monsanto, the company that initially patented and sold Roundup. Farmers would spray their fields with Roundup before planting to kill weeds, because Roundup eventually annihilates every broad-leafed plant it touches. Once the crop had germinated, Roundup was off limits. Now, with the introduction of Roundup-Ready crops—corn, soybean, canola, and alfalfa—farmers can spray anytime, whether the crop is in the field or not. Roundup-Ready plants are in effect wearing raincoats that protect them from the deluge of this chemical. As Kansas corn and soybean farmer Luke Ulrich told National Public Radio reporter Frank Morris in 2010, “There’s nothing like Roundup. A monkey could farm with it.”

In 2009, a GM corn called SmartStax entered the marketplace. Developed by Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences, this seed reputedly offers eight GM traits stacked in one seed. SmartStax corn produces six insecticidal toxins (to corn borer and corn rootworm) and tolerates two herbicides, glyphosate and glufosinate. These independent traits were not created by repeated genetic blasting, which requires the insertion of DNA sequences, but by crossing existing transgenic corn lines.

Again, farmers embraced GM corn in the same fashion they had taken to hybrid corn. In just over a decade, over half of all corn grown in the United States was GM. You may be wondering what’s so wrong with this. If science can work to our advantage, let it. If wonderseeds can feed the world, let them. But there’s plenty wrong.

First, the genetic insertions are “cheater” genes—a farmer can’t see them, can’t prepare for them, and can’t protect a farm from them. Second, why would it be important for a chemical company to develop a product such as Roundup-Ready soybeans? To minister to the hungry? To protect our environment? To serve human civilization? Or to sell more chemicals?

Second, for the first time in the long and marvelous history of humankind, genomes can be owned. Companies now patent varieties of plants, especially the new scientifically produced, advanced cultivars. The genomes of wild rice, the only grain indigenous to North America and a vital staple for the Ojibwe people, were patented by a California company in the late 1990s. Subsequent genetic tinkering by scientists at the University of Minnesota that produced several new strains outraged author and indigenous activist Winona LaDuke. “We have a 2,000-year-old relationship with wild rice,” she said. “Conceptually, it seems almost impossible to patent something called
wild
.”

Read closely here.

Some things are inherent to the earth and thus belong democratically to all its inhabitants. Air and water, for example, are part of the public domain and should be forbidden in the marketplace. Seeds—always part of the great commons of human history—can no more be owned than fire. Or the ocean. And yet, the biotechnology industry has steadily made its way through courts and legislative halls like an evil maggot, claiming what does not belong to it, saying life can be owned. And it can’t, Monsanto. It can’t, Syngenta.

A seed recipe is not real property, of course, but intellectual property—a legal invention, meaning an idea accepted or designed by courts and then used to uphold certain interests. The idea of intellectual property rights is a legal invention because life belongs to all of us.

In addition, seeds not already registered as a known variety may be snatched up and patented as intellectual property by anyone. The multinationals are particularly effective at this. For example, Monsanto patented an Indian wheat used for chapati for eons. In another ludicrous case, a Colorado man patented a variety of yellow bean that was ancient in Mexico, then demanded royalties from Mexican peasants.

Another major concern with genetically engineered organisms is that vectors are necessary to insert chosen genetic qualities into plants, and viruses and bacteria—including some proven harmful to humans, such as
E. coli
—are used for these vectors. Genetic tinkering is not something you can see. An ear of GM corn looks about the same as an ear of non-GM corn. You can’t see that it contains a virus. Because most GM products are released in the United States without independent environmental or health testing, nobody knows exactly what effects these organisms will have on humans. The approval and release of GM foods into the United States is a huge, unplanned, untested, unpredictable experiment—and we eaters are the lab mice.

The most egregious part of the story is that corporations own the playing field. They control the government regulators, or more aptly, they
are
the government regulators in a revolving-door parade between the multinationals and government. We could call it cross-pollination, but I won’t use a metaphor of life for such a destructive practice. Tom Vilsack, to name one of dozens of examples, was a Monsanto executive before he became the secretary of agriculture. Genetic engineering is not evolution sped up; it is evolution in the hands of multinationals. Thanks to hybridization, genetic modification, and seed patents, and with government as the enforcer, a handful of individuals have control over what we eat.

Loss of Biodiversity

In both hybridization and genetic engineering, farmers lose control of the ability to save seeds year after year and to breed plant varieties ideally suited to a place. To hell with natural selection. Gene flow be damned.

Genetic freedom allows crops to adapt and evolve—to disease, to a transforming earth, and to macro- and micro-climates. These adaptations often prove useful and profitable. A landrace of alfalfa, for example, discovered in 1940 in Iran, proved resistant to stem nematodes, and this landrace parented a strain of alfalfa that greatly improved production.
Biotechnology subverts natural adaptation and destroys diversity.

In the United States, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), this is gone: 95 percent of vintage cabbage varieties, 96 percent of field corns, 94 percent of peas, and 81 percent of tomatoes. In the century between 1804 and 1904, over seven thousand varieties of apples were grown in the United States (including Roxbury Russet, Black Gillifeather, and Greening)—and 86 percent have been lost. Sure, we’ve kept lots of varieties and we’ve gained new varieties, but 86 percent have disappeared.

Ever fewer commercial varieties in chemical systems replace local varieties employed in traditional farming systems. In 1949 China, ten thousand distinct wheat varieties could be found growing. By the 1970s, those varieties had been laid to waste—one thousand were in use. Likewise, in Korea, by 1993 only 26 percent of those garden crops growing in 1985 were still being grown, a loss of three-fourths in eight years.

Loss of Landedness

Pull one thread on a problem, like that of the loss of food diversity, and you’ll find one issue connected to everything else. Part of our loss is that we’ve not stayed in one place. For the past century, rural places have steadily bled people. The sons and daughters of farmers were lured to cities, resulting in the largest diaspora in American history, one that spanned many generations and continues to this day.

In 1900, 41 percent of Americans farmed for a living. Now less than 2 percent earn their livelihood farming, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. During this era, many folk traditions went underground—not just seed saving, but customs like buckdancing, clogging, fiddling, tatting, and quilting.

The falling apart of rural communities began in the late 1800s with the advent of railroads that made travel easier and brought a keen dissatisfaction with rural isolation and lack of society. The bleeding of rural people intensified during World War II when, to rebuild our war-broken country, the US government launched an advertising campaign to entice people away from farms to cities. Industrial capitalism needed a workforce, and what it promised in return was certain prosperity. Jobs were plentiful in the city, factory labor easier than hardscrabble farm life. To leave the farm was an act of patriotism (albeit a misguided one).

The ad campaign worked. There ensued a mass exodus of rural people. Between 1915 and 1960 about 9 million rural Southerners, to name one region, were displaced to cities; another 9 million—approximately half white, half black—were gone from the South entirely. (We must also recognize that to leave could also be an act of self-preservation. In the case of the South, millions of blacks fled rural lands to escape Jim Crow laws and search for higher paying jobs and freedom from cultural oppression.)

Young people would graduate from schools in little towns like Ideal, Georgia; Liberty, Mississippi; Enterprise, West Virginia; Faith, South Dakota; and Hope, Arkansas—and they would go away to university and never come back. They would have internalized what we told them, as the late thinker Paul Gruchow explored in his book
Grass Roots: The Universe of Home
, that if they wanted to amount to anything they’d better leave home: “We raise our most capable rural children from the beginning to expect that as soon as possible they will leave and that if they are at all successful, they will never return. We impose upon them, in effect, a kind of homelessness.” If they were any good they wouldn’t be in the country—they’d be somewhere else. They would want to pursue learned professions. They wouldn’t want to tackle illiteracy, religious fundamentalism, poverty, joblessness, racism, rural homophobia. People speak of having “escaped.” “I would die if I had to go back there,” I’ve heard said. “I couldn’t wait to leave. Nothing’s there.” Once uprooted, folks tend to continue peregrinating, moving about for careers, for education, for marriage, for lifestyle.

Four-fifths of people in the United States now live in urban areas. Across the country you see evidence of this “hollowing out” of rural America—abandoned small farms, ghost towns, country stores with dark windows—and its attendant suffering. Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists—those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.

Our seeds are disappearing.

When seed varieties vanish from the marketplace, they evaporate not only from collective memory but also from the evolutionary story of the earth. Seeds are more like Bengal tigers than vinyl records, which can simply be remanufactured. Once gone, seeds cannot be resurrected.

Goodbye, cool seeds. Goodbye, history of civilization. Goodbye, food.

A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener.

It needs you.

BOOK: The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food
7.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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