Our food security hinges on the struggle now underway over who controls the earth’s seeds
Ten thousand years after humans became less nomadic and learned how to cultivate crops, veteran investigative journalist Mark Schapiro plunges into the struggle already underway for control of seeds, the ground-zero ingredient for our food. Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. In “Seeds of Resistance,” Schapiro takes us to the front lines of a struggle over the seeds that remain — a struggle that will determine the long-term security of our food supply in the face of unprecedented climate volatility.
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A Seed Chronicle Foretold
A seed story, like life, starts small and gets bigger.
In the mid-1990s, a letter arrived at a simple adobe-style office on a dusty lot on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. The site, headquarters of Native Seeds/SEARCH, an organization which saves seeds native to the southwest, is little more than a couple of garden plots and a refrigerator and freezer filled with indigenous seeds. Here you can find seeds that have inherited characteristics dating back as far as three-thousand years.
The letter came from a lawyer for the food company Frito Lay, known for its processed snack foods. It warned that one of Native Seeds/SEARCH’s best-selling products, Indian Parched Corn, was in violation of the Frito Lay trademark. Parched corn are chunky salted corn kernels that have been prepared for centuries by Hopi, Apache, and other tribes in Arizona and New Mexico. (A reminder to the non-botanical: kernels are in fact seeds, so when you eat corn you’re eating a corn seed.) The company lawyer demanded that Native Seeds/SEARCH immediately “cease and desist” using language equating the native corn with two words that had been trademarked by the company—Corn Nuts™.
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Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply
by Mark Schapiro
Seeds of Resistance is a wake-up call. With vivid and memorable stories, Mark Schapiro tells us how seeds are at the frontlines of our epic battle for healthy food.” —Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard
Sun. Soil. Water. Seed. These are the primordial ingredients for the most essential activity of all on earth: growing food. All of these elements are being changed dramatically under the pressures of corporate consolidation of the food chain, which has been accelerating just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. In the midst of this global crisis, the fate of our food has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies. Seeds of Resistance will bring home what this corporate stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply.
Seeds of Resistance will touch many nerves for readers, including concerns about climate change, chronic drought in essential farm states like California, the proliferation of GMOs, government interference (or purposeful ignorance), and the alarming domination of the seed market and our very life cycle by global giants like Monsanto.
But not all is bleak when it comes to the future of our food supply. Seeds of Resistance will also present hopeful stories about farmers, consumer groups, and government agencies around the world that are resisting the tightening corporate squeeze on our food chain.
“The latest science suggests that plants, including those of our major food crops, are engaged in a continuous interplay of responses with the environment in which they’re planted. That environment is changing; climatic disruptions are accelerating. The number of seed companies is declining, and the spectrum of seeds shrinking. The group of people involved in fighting for their seeds, and a more just and healthy food system, is expanding. Old assumptions of how we grow food are falling. New paradigms are emerging. It’s a time of profound vitality and volatility in the seed realm, with high stakes for all of us who care about our health, the planet’s health, and the food we eat. As powerful forces circle round the ground-zero ingredient of our food, one thing is becoming clear: a seed is never just a seed. Seeds are the canaries on our climate disrupted planet. They’re emitting strong signals. Let’s read them.”
