Seed Keepers

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

Part of a New York Times blog article by science journalist Andrew Revkin,
available in it's entirety at:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/buried-seed-vault-opens-in-arctic/index.html?ref=science

Grain.org, a group based in Spain focused on strengthening regional
agriculture, was one of the few entities criticizing the focus on the
seed vault. The group worries that such moves take away intellectual
property rights to crop varieties from the farming communities that
developed them and provide a false sense of confidence that safe
storage, on its own, can sustain agricultural diversity.

As the group noted in a news release today (hat tip to Danny Bloom):

"Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been
rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and
countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been
genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened
throughout the ex situ system, not just in gene banks of developing
countries. So the issue is not about being for or against gene banks,
it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in
itself, has a lot of inherent problems.

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage,
that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally
unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the
farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected
and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic
is that as people’s traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones
from research labs -– seeds that are supposed to provide higher
yields to feed a growing population – the old ones have to be put
away as “raw material” for future plant breeding. This system forgets
that farmers are the world’s original, and ongoing, plant breeders."

It’s a noteworthy point. The groups funding the seed vault, including
the Gates Foundation, say they are also pouring money into creating
databases and other mechanisms for maintaining poor countries’ access
to the full array of crop strains. But what about the farmers in the
field?

In a world tending toward monoculture, how much of this
intergovernmental work helps sustain farming diversity, as opposed to
museum-style genetic diversity? Do farmers matter?