Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Seeds of the world
http://www.journeytoforever.org/seeds.html

"The earth was not given to us by our parents, it was loaned to us by our
children." -- Kenyan proverb

Traditional varieties of vegetables and grains are a vital heritage: they
could be the key to our food security in the future. But, where hundreds of
varieties of a crop were once grown, now there may be only two or three, or
the crop itself may have been abandoned.

Plant Patenting Laws have made seeds big business, largely controlled by a
handful of big companies. (The top 10 seed companies control about 33% of
the US$24.4 billion global seed trade, with the top three companies
controlling 20%.) Varieties that do not have a world market lose their
place and may no longer be sold. Soon they vanish, forever.

Yet the lack of genetic diversity in food crops greatly increases their
vulnerability to pests and disease -- while breeding new resistant
varieties requires the germ-plasm of the old varieties which are being
lost.

And at a time when the global climate is changing in unpredictable ways,
nobody knows what sort of crops may be needed in the future -- the meagre
number of commercial varieties available could prove useless in the new
conditions.


Green Revolution high-yielding hybrid rice

The brave new seeds of the "Green Revolution" are hybrids -- so-called
HYVs, high-yielding varieties that will not breed true and must be bought
anew from the seed companies each year.

Others have renamed them HRVs -- high-response varieties, increasingly bred
to respond to high levels of chemical fertilizers and for resistance to
toxic pesticides. Seldom are the high yields reported in the test fields
reproduced on actual farms, less still on the small farms most Third World
people depend on for their food supply. And the new seeds lack the
nutritional content of the traditional varieties.


High-yelding hybrid corn -- about as nutritious as tissue paper

Other tests have shown that old varieties, grown with good soil management
and NO chemicals, can equal the yields of the hybrids and far surpass their
nutritional quality.

And, unlike the traditional varieties, the new hybrids do not last long --
even with high levels of chemical protection, they succumb to pest attack
after a few years and have to be replaced by another newly bred hybrid.

And here lies the problem: the germplasm for the new seeds comes from the
old varieties, but the new seeds displace the old -- often where once
scores or hundreds of old varieties were grown, now there's only one, the
same new variety that now needs replacing.

As one expert commented, it's a strange technology that destroys the very
foundation it depends on.

The development of GE (Genetically Engineered) seeds (also termed GMOs --
Genetically Modified Organisms) that contain genes from quite different
plants -- or from life-forms that are not plants at all -- has now taken
the erosion of sustainable crop varieties to a whole new level of risk.

In collaboration with food crop conservation organizations, Journey to
Forever will collect seeds of useful local varieties of food crops wherever
we go, saving them for the future as well as redistributing them to other
farmers further along our route. We will work with concerned NGOs to ensure
that peasant plant breeders' rights are protected.