Seed Saving
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving
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- Note: As of Aug 2015: Monsanto-Syngenta "Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, is attempting to swallow up the chemical operations of Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of pesticides and other farm inputs"
- Mega-merger: Monsanto seeks takeover of Syngenta, world's largest crop chemical company
- Syngenta is the world's largest crop chemical producer and Monsanto, known for its genetically-modified (GM) seed regime, makes Roundup, the popular glyphosate-based herbicide. In March, glyphosate was classified as “probably” carcinogenic to humans by a branch of the World Health Organization.
- As the most powerful multinational biotech corporation today, Monsanto has drawn the ire of farmers and consumers for its firm grip on the global food chain. The company's control and advancement of GMO seeds is of prime concern, as they symbolize the company's consolidation of agricultural processes. This consolidation has been blamed by some for a sharp spike in suicide rates among Indian farmers, many of whom could not afford to continue buying Monsanto's Ready Roundup seeds used in tandem with the company's herbicide.
- Monsanto's track record has been scrutinized ever since it aided US warfare in Vietnam. Agent Orange was manufactured for the US Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation, the use of which is estimated to have killed and maimed around 400,000 while causing birth defects for 500,000 children.
- Scientific studies have linked the chemicals in Monsanto's biocides to Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and cancer.
- Biotech companies purport that GMOs are key to feeding the world's growing population, but this claim has been heavily contested. A recent report found that GMO "seed companies' investment in improving yields in already high-yielding areas does little to improve food security; it mainly helps line the pockets of seed and chemical companies, large-scale growers and producers of corn ethanol."
- GMO crops and ingredients have been consumed in the US for more than two decades. Large amounts of corn, soybeans, and canola produced in the US are genetically engineered. As much as 75 percent of processed food made in the US contains GMO ingredients.
- Monsanto first introduced glyphosate weed killers in 1974. GMO seeds have caused use of glyphosate to increase immensely since the 1990s, according to US Geological Survey data.
- The effects of biochemicals on wildlife, including pollinators such as honeybees and monarch butterflies, are also a point of concern. For instance, since 1990, about 970 million of the butterflies – 90 percent of the total population – have vanished across the United States, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. At least part of the blame rests on the boom in Roundup use. Roundup, the herbicide marketed to farmers and homeowners as an effective method for eliminating plants like milkweed, is widely blamed for decimating the butterflies’ only source of food in the Midwest.
- In the European Union, suspicions that neonicotinoids pesticides are responsible for mass deaths among honeybees have led to bans on such chemicals.
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As multinational corporatations have bought up seed companies in developed and developing countries, a pattern has emerged of exclusivity, where traditional seed stock is set aside and farmers are required to use company hybrid seeds and accompanying chemical inputs. Hybrid/patented seeds require intensive petrochemical/agribusiness inputs. The multiple costs of 'externalities' such as water pollution, soil depletion, pesticide impacts, economic dislocations, and non-sustainable production methods that damage local communities are now coming into view.) Alternatives such as open pollinated seeds and independent agricultural methods are being reconsidered as viable production methods without the external costs.
Multiple issues, political and business, are increasingly being debated re: production/yields/healthy products/soil depletion/acquifer/water depletion and longer term sustainability of agribusiness -- local and global agriculture is re-examining its production and future...
- See more: 'The Food Movement, Rising' -- http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/the-food-movement-rising
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March 2015 / Loss of Seed Diversity (documentary) - Need for "Open Source" Seeds http://modernfarmer.com/2015/03/new-film-explores-loss-of-seed-diversity/
Open Sesame, the Story of Seeds - http://www.opensesamemovie.com/
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http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669753/infographic-in-80-years-we-lost-93-of-variety-in-our-food-seeds
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/food-variety-graphic
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http://foodsecurity.uchicago.edu/research/preserving-seed-diversity/
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Industrial Agriculture -- Benefits and Consequences
Quick Review of "The Debate" -- Diversity v Monoculture, Seed Saving v Seed Patents, Productivity & Sustainability, a GMO/patented seed, high input, chemically intensive, pesticide/petrochemical regimen and/or...
http://www.ucsusa.org/our-work/food-agriculture/our-failing-food-system/industrial-agriculture
One of the issues rarely confronted when considering high intensive agricultural is the use of water in unsustainable irrigation. The draw down and depletion of aquifers is a rising cost and only recently, with the advent of earth observation and monitoring systems, are technologies becoming available to measure the extent of groundwater basins and recharging capabilities. The new satellite measurements of aquifers/ground water globally, as are now being reported with NASA GRACE satellites, comprise both a warning and a capability of needed sustainable environmental security. Water saving and water security are essential to a lasting agriculture policy. -- http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Aquifers -- http://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Category:Earth_Observations
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"Bitter Seeds" / 2012 - http://grist.org/industrial-agriculture/bitter-seeds-documentary-reveals-tragic-toll-of-gmos-in-india/
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UNCERTAIN PERIL: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings
http://www.beacon.org/Uncertain-Peril-P718.aspx
“A must-read for anyone concerned about plants and what the privatization and manipulation of seeds may mean for the future of food.” ~ Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma
"I hope everyone reads it!" ~ John Seabrook, Staff Writer, the New Yorker
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August 25, 2014
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt - By Michael Specter, Contributor to the New Yorker
"There are two trends,” [Vandana Shiva] told the crowd that had gathered in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, in Florence, for the seed fair. “One: a trend of diversity, democracy, freedom, joy, culture—people celebrating their lives... And the other: monocultures, deadness... We would have no hunger in the world if the seed was in the hands of the farmers and gardeners and the land was in the hands of the farmers..."
Shiva, along with a growing army of supporters, argues that the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth’s resources. She promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day. Shiva has particular contempt for farmers who plant monocultures—vast fields of a single crop. “They are ruining the planet,” she told me. “They are destroying this beautiful world.”
The global food supply is indeed in danger. Feeding the expanding population without further harming the Earth presents one of the greatest challenges of our time, perhaps of all time.
Few technologies, not the car, the phone, or even the computer, have been adopted as rapidly and as widely as the products of agricultural biotechnology. Between 1996, when genetically engineered crops were first planted, and last year, the area they cover has increased a hundredfold—from 1.7 million hectares to a hundred and seventy million. Nearly half of the world’s soybeans and a third of its corn are products of biotechnology... Between 1950 and the end of the twentieth century, the world’s grain production rose from seven hundred million tons to 1.9 billion, all on nearly the same amount of land...
The "Green Revolution" relied heavily on fertilizers and pesticides, but in the nineteen-sixties little thought was given to the environmental consequences...
To feed ten billion people, most of whom will live in the developing world, we will need what the Indian agricultural pioneer M. S. Swaminathan has called “an evergreen revolution,” one that combines the most advanced science with a clear focus on sustaining the environment. Until recently, these have seemed like separate goals...
Shiva and other opponents of agricultural biotechnology argue that the higher cost of patented seeds, produced by giant corporations, prevents poor farmers from sowing them in their fields...
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June 15, 2015
Vandana Shiva is a well known environmental activist, eco-feminist, and anti-GMO campaigner. Time Magazine in 2003 called her an environmental hero and one of Asia's most powerful communicators.
Shiva has her critics, however. A long article in the New Yorker by Michael Specter is a recent example of criticism of her work, although it also acknowledges contributions she has made to the environmental movement. A response to the article by Counter Punch by Louis Proyect calls the article a "hatchet job" but that seems overly harsh. Specter makes a number of valid criticisms of Shiva. I have always had doubts about Shiva even though I agree with many of her positions. For example, I oppose the patents on GMO and the restrictions on farmers reusing the seed. However, the problem of patents applies to many areas. Patent protection adds huge costs to health plans because many drugs are patented and companies can charge whatever the market will bear with no fear of competition...
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August 20, 2014
So Right and So Wrong
http://grist.org/food/vandana-shiva-so-right-and-yet-so-wrong/
Romantic environmentalists tend to get the big-picture problems right, while fudging the details. Rationalists nail the details, but sometimes become so immersed in the minutiae that they lose sight of the big picture.
Michael Specter’s New Yorker profile of Vandana Shiva, the environmentalist and crusader against globalization and Big Agriculture, is a portrait of someone who understands the big-picture concerns of green-inclined young people with great clarity...
There’s a real danger when a big-picture romantic fixates on one particular devil as the root of all problems. Among activists trying to raise awareness about a problem, fudging details is commonplace and, maybe, inevitable. But if you are proposing solutions, it’s important to get the facts right...
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EcoWatch
http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/25/vandana-shiva-earth-at-risk/
http://ecowatch.com/2015/02/16/vandana-shiva-life-depends-soil/
2015 is the year of soil. Bringing the soil to the center of our consciousness and our planning is vital for the life of the soil, but also for the future of our society. History provides ample evidence that civilizations which ignored the health and well-being of the soil, and exploited it without renewing its fertility, disappeared along with the soil.
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PR and "the Debate"
http://gawker.com/heres-how-conde-nast-and-mo-rocca-are-making-propaganda-1616500527
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References
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