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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] With veg species nearly extinct, rare seeds are a gift to humanity
  • Date: Mon, 18 Oct 2004 09:21:11 -0600

Editor's Note: Biodiversity is being lost at a very rapid pace in our
industrial food and seed society. Seed savers keep diversity alive and may
hold the key to the future if the limited food varieties controlled by a few
large corporations prove unable to adapt to changing environmental conditions.

Printed from NOW Magazine Online Edition
http://www.nowtoronto.com

The vanishing
With veg species nearly extinct, rare seeds are a gift to humanity
By WAYNE ROBERTS

When most of us think about bio-diversity - not that many of us think about
it very often or for very long - we think of koala bears, whooping cranes and
right whales facing extinction. The creatures that come to mind are wild,
free and noble, and something about them speaks to us. In wilderness-saving
circles they're known as "charismatic megafauna." But on this World Food Day
(Saturday, October 16), many are worrying about the tame and domesticated
side of the biodiversity coin, where the rate of extinction is multiples
higher and faster than anything happening in the wild.

The UN's food and agriculture organization estimates that three-quarters of
genetic diversity in agriculture was lost over the last century. What's
happening in the wild is a blip on the screen.

The world's food supply eggs are in very few baskets. Nine crops account for
three-quarters of the plants consumed by humans. About 75 varieties of
vegetables dominate the marketplace, a mere 3 per cent of what was available
in veggies a century ago.

Seven thousand varieties of apples and 2,500 kinds of pears have been lost
across North America since 1900. Six types of corn are now grown across most
of North America, and 96 per cent of older breeds have been lost. We rely on
four of the approximately 5,000 kinds of potatoes nourished by Peru's native
settlers several thousand years ago.

Enter the seed savers, the on-the-land heroes dedicated to collecting and
cataloguing the fruits of human agricultural history. When I met Dan Jason
this summer, I had no idea that his tiny seed company on hippie-dippie Salt
Spring Island was linked to a cause that's been picked up this year by the
UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, which has designated biodiversity the
theme of World Food Day.

Jason dropped by for an inspection at Stowell Lake Farm, which grew several
rare varieties of beans and tomatoes for his seed company, halfway through my
first day on the job. I was crawling through a patch of beans, so we agreed
to meet and talk later.

When I dropped by his place nestled in a valley bottom on the grounds of a
yoga centre, the lean and muscular Jason was stooped over a 5-gallon pail
pouring a stinky slime of fermented tomatoes. If you let the slushy part of
the tomato with seeds in it ferment for a few days, the seeds sink to the
bottom, and the fermentation protects them from diseases, he tells me.

Later that day, Jason will let those seeds air on a horizontal window screen
placed above a drying table, then place 30 of each seed type in a packet that
will be sold for $3 to one of the Salt Spring Seed Company's list of 6,000
avid gardeners across North America.

A former bartender, Jason is well trained in swapping stories. The Celina
wide green bean was a gift from a Portuguese immigrant to Vancouver Island,
and Baba Franchuk garlic was a gift that came from Winnipeg, he says. Many of
the 1,000 breeds of plants he grows on his land come with a story about a
gift.

This crawling, stooping, packaging, storied, freely shared kind of
peasant-style seed saving is what has produced thousands and tens of
thousands of varieties of fruits, vegetables and grains since the dawn of
agriculture some 10,000 years ago. These ancient methods might sound far
removed from the patented science and space-age technology behind corporate
seed labs, but they're how nearly all the foods people eat today came into
being.

For all the scientific innovation claimed by modern seed corporations often
linked to oil, chemical and pharmaceutical giants, they haven't developed
many new, non-peasant food products besides canola and kiwi, Jason likes to
say. To the contrary, the corporate seed sellers of today distribute a tiny
fraction of the diverse agricultural seeds and plants commonly available just
100 years ago.

The disappeared breeds were deemed unfit for commercial food production.
Their seed, fruit or root was too fragile to be harvested by machinery,
didn't withstand long-haul transit and storage or didn't look the way
magazine ads showed they were supposed to look.

In the unnatural selection process that dominated food industry thinking,
science and regulation, no one had the out-of-the-box smarts to ask if these
terminated varieties had specific flavours, contained particular nutrients,
were adapted to unusual climates or able to ward off certain diseases.

And now it's too late to ask. With the same humility and sense of historical
time that let the computer industry get away without programming for Y2K, the
seed industry got away without programming for an era of global warming and
global disease vectors. Oops.

For all its popularity, the tomato is one of the most endangered of all the
world's crops, says Jason. Some 80 per cent of varieties have been lost in
the last 100 years.

The banana tells the cautionary tale of what happens when unregulated
industrial standards overlook the fact that variety is the spice of life.
It's expected that bananas will vanish from shelves within a decade, courtesy
of a strategy of grafting seedless bananas onto banana stalks.

The über-banana - so uniformly pretty, predictably tasty and so cloned as to
be incapable of adapting or mixing it up with traits from hardier bananas -
has become such easy prey for so many pests that neither bananas nor
plantation workers can bear up under the torrent of pesticides. And all the
world's banana republic horses and men cannot put the banana together again.

Heading off that assault on diversity is "the most radical idea germinating
today," says Jason. In their own backyards, people can grow food from
heritage seeds and swap these seeds with their neighbours until governments
and seed companies come to their senses.

"I have faith that people can change," he tells me as he fondles the pods of
some Black Jet soybeans, the very beans that government farm agents told him
20 years ago could not be grown on Salt Spring Island.


NOW Magazine Online Edition, VOL. 24 NO. 7
Oct 14 - 20, 2004
Copyright © 2004 NOW Communications Inc.
story link: news_story2.php



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  • [Livingontheland] With veg species nearly extinct, rare seeds are a gift to humanity, Tradingpost, 10/18/2004

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