ReikiHands

This is part of a blog written by a guy in the UK. I thought it was very interesting but too long to post the whole thing. The full text can be read at: http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2008/03/war-for-seeds-military-agricultural.html

Saturday, March 01, 2008


Last week, in France, the independent seed-saving and selling Association Kokopelli were fined ?35,000 after being taken to court by corporate seed merchant Baumaux. Their crime was selling traditional and rare seed varieties which weren't on the official EU-approved list - and, therefore, illegal to sell - thus giving them an 'unfair trading advantage'. As the European Commission met this week to prepare new legislation for seed control, due in 2009, which will further restrict the geographic movement and range of crop varieties, this ruling will set a dangerous precedent.

Kokopelli, the non-profit French group set up in 1999 to safeguard endangered seed strains, may be driven out of existence by the fine. Their focus is biodiversity, food security, and the development of sustainable organic agriculture and seed networks in the 'global south'. They have created one of the largest independent collections in Europe - with over 2500 sorts of vegetable, flower and cereals.

Agilityscots

Oh my, this is frightening...

WI_HO_C

If the E.U. restrictions on all but "registered" varieties were the opening salvo against diversity, this is the first nuke.

I corresponded briefly with Dominique Guillet (who was then French Chairman of Kokopelli) in 2006, when they were touring the U.S. filming a documentary on U.S. seed saving. Kokopelli had just won a lawsuit against the French Department of Agriculture, and they were very upbeat. They were still facing a commercial lawsuit, perhaps the one they have now lost. I hope that Kokopelli has the means to appeal, or barring that, that it will still survive in some form outside France... perhaps here?

This should serve notice to the HDRA & other European seed saving organizations... the seed merchants have won the battle to control the commercial market, and are now making their move to control or extinguish all varieties save their own. Kokopelli was involved in seed sales, so they were an easy target. But against well-funded legal attacks, the loopholes used by other seed saving organizations may eventually fail to protect them as well. The weakness of grass-roots organizations is that they are easy to bankrupt; destroy the funding = destroy the organization.

SSE seems to have had some form of relationship with Kokopelli... are they affiliated? I hope that SSE has acquired (or will acquire) any unique varieties, should Kokopelli become insolvent. And I wonder:

Is there any way that SSE & its members can help them???

If this attack signifies the next step in Big Ag's conquest of our food supply, then SSE itself may soon find itself in the cross hairs.

Food for thought... if a seed saving organization places seeds in Svalbard, and is then sued to bankruptcy by a corporation, will custody of those seeds pass to the victor as part of the judgement? If so, just how safe are they really? Seeds require protection from not only war or disaster, but from politics and legal attacks. They should be placed in a protective trust, so that they can never be "owned".

cdntomato

Only one independent/NFP seed saving org is currently being included in the Norwegian project: SSE. That answers your last paragraph. And in the interest of continuity planning and conservation, I expect that SSE and other gov genebanks are not relying on this storage as the only mechanism for preservation beyond their own initiatives.

With all non-profits, national and international, much depends on their bylaws and structure. That said, HDRA is not in a very vulnerable position; Arche Noah in Austria, however??? The curious thing is that Graines Baumaux has been selling or has wanted to sell unregistered seed. I still cannot determine what benefits of the legal battle outweigh the losses for GB.

My understanding of the Kokopelli collections is that most of it originated in the USA/SSE and members than is unique to the EU. And a few SSE members are quite up close and personal with it. In any event folks in the EU have been sending vulnerable varieties to colleagues in the NH for some time as a precautionary measure. I know, being one den mother.

And don't let's get cocky over here about seed regs. The point of origin is the UN/FAO OECD Seed Schemes, to which our respective countries have already signed on to greater and lesser degrees. Grain and potato crops are the regulated biggies here, but that's changing. Sigh.

Jennifer

carolyn137

My understanding of the Kokopelli collections is that most of it originated in the USA/SSE and members than is unique to the EU. And a few SSE members are quite up close and personal with it. In any event folks in the EU have been sending vulnerable varieties to colleagues in the NH for some time as a precautionary measure. I know, being one den mother.

****

Jennifer, Kokopelli started in France as Terre de Semences and that's how I first knew them many years ago. At the time I had a good friend, Ulrike Paradine, who lived in England and was also a member of HDRA. Ulrike would get seeds from both St Marthe and Terre se Semences, we'd split the packs and each grow the varieties. And that worked very well since she knew French and I was only able to order menu items such as Pomme Frites and Omlette jambon, and avez vous un chambre pour une jeunne fille, when I was in France. LOL. Well, a bit more than that but you get the picture. There were a few US varieties at Terre de Semences but at that time most were of European origin.

Dominique saw what was coming and thus reorganized and changed the name to Kokopelli. In the past I've corresponded with him quite a bit b'c when he sent me a copy of his book when it was first translated to English I was very surprised to find he'd included quite a bit from my tomato book.

And he has spent quite a bit of time in the US, but I don't think there's any special relationship with SSE or any other organization, but of course that can be confirmed, or not.

Our mutual friend Raymond in Montreal knew him very well at one time and was constantly calling him on the phone.

I wonder how far this EU witch hunt will spread b'c we all know individuals in Europe who do sell seeds of a wide variety of OP's that for sure are not registered. I can't remember right now if Geza in Hungary sells, I think he does, but Manfred Hahm certainly does and there's a person named Bolle in Germany who also sells who also has a large inventory he maintains.

Perhaps some of you know others.

So while the seed saving organizations are being scrutinized by Graines Bameaux and perhaps others, I just don't know how far they'll go to try and shut down the private European sellers.

Someone I hope is following this b'c it might behove the private sellers to get their accessions out of Europe and send them elsewhere if that looks as though it's going to happen. And I have no idea if Dominique has already made contact with SSE or any other organization(s) so that he can facilitate moving his accessions elsewhere.

__________________
Carolyn

Atash

This is very bad news. I have been following the increased whitelist regulation of the seed business in the English-speaking countries, and now it looks like it has hit Europe. This was expected, actually, but now it's actually happening. I'm going to report this on my own website.

Peak oil (circa 2006 according to the Report to the Energy Watch Group, October 2007, EWG-Series No 3/2007--Google it) implies starvation. It takes more kilocalories to grow, process, and ship the food than you actually get from the food--we "eat" petroleum.

Grain prices are already soaring, in large part due to an ethanol scheme that burns up more energy than it produces. Both North America and the EU participated in this scheme on an international level, and it was enforced with incentives from participating governments.

Assuming our industrial base in the "western" countries is already mostly mostly dismantled, a reasonable strategy would be to decentralize food production--basically dismantle the plantation operations too and have a lot of people growing their own food (legally, though purchases of land). Soaring property taxes and games with credit expansions and contractions are, of course, the official counter-strategy.

I call seeds "green gold". Some crops are significantly less energy-intensive to raise than others--they can be raised with hand-labor, as the Amerindians, lacking draft livestock, actually did.

I got flamed the last time I brought this issue up. There is no agenda here other than surviving what I anticipate will be very hard times ahead.

Maybe we need bumperstickers that say "You can take away my seeds once you pry them out of my cold dead fingers". (American joke...)

orflo

Just a bit of round-up on the European situation: more and more seed companies begin to sell unregistered seed, Realseeds, Manfred Hahm, Gerhard Bohl( but that's more an exchange source), Arche Noah (Austria) is doing very well, the listed members are growing (I'm one of them), so is the Swiss pro species rara. If I take a look at the situation, I must say Kokopelli is the worst case (they already had to change their name , as mentioned before, because of problems with the gouvernement): the only reason Kokopelli is still alive is their seed sharing with third world countries, this is why the French gouvernement has to tolerate Kokopelli. Kokopelli has a very good resort of seed growers (you can adopt varieties and maintain them for a few years) ,but Baumaux just wants them out of their way, so they can sell their own registered and ,yes, unregistered seeds.Yes,crazy world...
Frank

keyto

Atash, you might be interested in this article:

"Doomsday Seed Vault" in the Arctic
Bill Gates, Rockefeller and the GMO giants know something we don?t
by F. William Engdahl
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=7529

Atash

Thanks, Keyto. I was aware of the article, but had already come to a similar conclusion years ago. One need simply connect the dots: worldwide regulation of crop seed just in time for peak oil sounded suspicious right off the bat. I was not aware of the abortion vaccine, but I looked it up and found some research papers on how it works, so it looks like what Engdahl claimed is on the up and up. One of my friends is already adamantly opposed to vaccines as it is. Personally I don't like the fact that we have no choice as to who supplies the vaccines (come to think of it, the Gateses are involved in vaccines too!! Particularly in Africa).

The Engdahl article mentions South Africa as the only participant in the African version of the Green Revolution at the moment...and I happen to know that South Africa also happens to rigorously enforce the White List.

Global monoculture is probably part of the scheme. You have a situation where most of the population worldwide are dependent on shipments of food from one part of the globe to another, because in any one farming area, only a few crops are grown. Any one part of the world goes rogue (like the Soviet Union did in 1924 when Lenin died and Stalin usurped power), then just cut off their supply of food and crop seed. If the crop seed happens to have suicide genes, then they can't try saving seed from their current crop.

keyto

DEVELOPMENT: NGOs Wary of Doomsday Seed Vault
By Keya Acharya





BANGALORE, Mar 4 (IPS) - Agricultural non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in India and elsewhere are criticising the newly-opened Global Seed Vault (GSV) at Svalbard in Norway as fundamentally unjust in its objectives.

The Barcelona-based agriculture lobby, GRAIN, with branches in major developing nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, says a serious deficiency of the seed vault is that it deals basically with state and private-body depositors to the bank, thereby excluding the rights of poor farmers who cannot access these seeds.

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41446

WI LO M

Duh! It's not supposed to be a distribution center!

cdntomato

Agreed, this vault and the contributing genebanks are not to be considered distribution centres. The problem lies with ag-corps having access to this germplasm for breeding purposes that are in their interest (the corps' interest) and usually in not the farmers' or eaters' best interests (eaters is Wendell Berry's term for non-farmers). It remains to be seen whether the regs to control access (depositor is sole withdrawer) will be respected. There are layers of issues here, all of which have the potential to be corrupted. The alternative ??? I don't know that there's a single or obvious solution, but I wish to remain optimistic.

Jennifer

scyther

I agree that peak oil does ultimately imply starvation, but I don't agree that municipalities are actively using property taxes as a "counter-strategy" to common folk growing their own food. Property taxes are driven by the need to provide services to populations, so clearly they are set by density, not ideology. Everyone has to pay taxes on the place where they live, so if one also grows food there then there is no additional burden. For larger-scale growers using properties strictly for food-production there are nearly always generous ag exemptions to reduce the property taxes, so it's in fact the opposite, the tax structure tends to encourage agriculture, at least in places where ag is a marginal industry.

cdntomato

And now a word from Pat Mooney via ETC:

http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials...tml?pub_id=674

There are too many inconsistencies and incorrect statements in the previous articles. I wanted a trusted source with international clout and intimate knowledge of both the players involved and the issues at stake.

Jennifer