Seed - The untold story
October 11, 2021
The film Seed: The Untold Story is as unsettling as Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth; its residual message is about as welcome as the plague and as devastating as nuclear bomb.
Surely, I can hear you say, the planting of seeds is an expression of joy, hope and fulfilment? Well, that was before the advent of patented seed and hybrids, and the transfer of seed ownership to corporations; the same companies that created the agents of death after the second world war.
So why do we depend so much on seeds and why is this film an “Untold Story” — that is, such a shock?
Probably because of our animal-centric rather than plant focus in science education. The first point to make is that the human imagination identifies with animals: living, moving and cuddly, such as koalas, rather than the plants they depend on.
Animals are actually just bit players in the story of evolution, evolving only after plants had created the soil for higher plants to establish, the oxygen for animals to breathe, and the plant food for them to eat.
In short, modern man mistakenly thinks he controls the universe.
Why seeds are so important
Monty Python summed it all up in their mischievous song ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’'...
When seeds evolved, they carried the genetic material of both parents, which, through sexual reproduction, created the genetic diversity that is our fail-safe mechanism to adapt to change.
Seeds can live for up to 2,000 years, as is the case with lotus seed when properly stored.
Each seed is a self-replicating time capsule, preserving the past but capable of adapting to change, unlike clonal non-sexual means, such as those seen in identical reproduction methods.
Will Bonsall, an avid American seed collector (pictured left), explains why he is “dazzled by diversity”. He doesn't care if “all men are straight, or all gay, or all Christian, let them all be there ...”
It is that diversity contained in the seeds propagated by sexual reproduction that helps us survive the next famine. In fact, it is those very seeds that ensure we survive.
“Seed saving is all about sex ... Humans are obsessed with sex ... It (seed saving) is right up there with making love to your spouse.”
Why is seed saving so important?
“Genetic diversity is the hedge between us and global famine. We (the US ) have lost 94% of the vegetable seed varieties in the 20th century,” says documentary maker Taggart Siegel.
“The US has lost 98% of asparagus, 96% of corn and celery, 90% of capsicums, 94% of onion, radish and cucumber, and 91% of watermelon varieties.
“Diversity in seed stocks is as endangered as a panda, an eagle or a polar bear!
“So seed is a living time capsule, preserving things from the past and into the future.”
So what went wrong?
While plant selection began 12,000 years ago, we all presumed ownership of seeds was a public right. For centuries improved varieties were freely exchanged, but that began to change in the 1890s.
The avaricious American seed trade reacted strongly when the US Department of Agriculture, which had a spectacularly successful seed improvement research programme, distributed one billion packets of improved seeds to farmers. The American seed trade responded by hiring the world's first lobbyist in Washington to oppose the giveaways.
Hybridisation was the next step towards seed control of public-domain seeds. By inflating the benefits of hybrid vigour, farmers were persuaded to give up collecting their traditional open-pollinated strains. Hybrids not only forced seed prices higher, but growers unknowingly gifted seed ownership to corporations.
Why? Because hybrid seeds are not true-to-type in the succeeding plantings so farmers, being unable to duplicate the hybrid parentage, are forced to return to seed companies year after year.
To Dr. Vandana Shiva, an outspoken anti-corporatist “this is the beginning of agricultural slavery.”
Explaining the green revolution
While we think of this as a plant breeding revolution (i.e. Green Revolution) by spreading improved, sic modern, varieties into peasant agriculture, the Green Revolution was really anti-Soviet, not pro-environment. For the US at that time it was vital to defeat communism.
So, for example, the peasant farmers of thousands of traditional rice varieties, preserved over centuries, were encouraged by Green Revolution lobbying to replace their heirlooms with modern, earlier-ripening strains.
But these modern strains needed large-scale machinery, agro-chemicals and, for the first time, dependence upon banks to move from a recycling, self-sufficient existence to commercial dependence.
In approving GM in 1982, the US court awarded plant patents for the first time in history. This gave corporations superior rights over non-GM varieties, i.e. ownership of selections by farmers and peasants over 12,000 years. In India, farmers replaced traditional cotton varieties with Monsanto's GM cotton, forcing them into debt. Having lost their original seed strains, they were unable to return to their proven agricultural systems and hundreds of thousands of farmers committed suicide.
Why do GM companies resist labelling of GM food?
64 countries around the world, including Australia, insist that GM seeds should be labelled, but labelling of GM food is not required in the US. Why?
State after US State has introduced GM labelling legislation only to be defeated as a consequence of the massive lobbying of multinational corporations. The corporations know that labelling will be the death of GM because fewer consumers would knowingly consume GM foods. So our seed inheritance, our biodiversity and our capacity to cope with accelerated climate change is at the mercy of powerful corporations, who manipulate our governments and so to thwart our democratic will.
Man is the only species to lose control of its food supply ... will we survive?
Hear more about these issues at the Botanic and Rare Plant Fair, Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, 21-22 October 2017.
The Diggers Club would like to thank the makers and distributors of this film and we encourage you to view it. It is available on iTunes, Amazon, GooglePlay, Vimeo and Vudu. Seedthemovie.com