Seed Sovereignty | Grassroots seed savers and libraries organize

Seed libraries are one strategy
to avoid the compression of seed

 biodiversity we have seen under the practices of commercial seed houses.

Seed Library Social Network calls
for discourse

BIOPIRACY AND GMO BIOSAFETY MUST BE
ADDRESSED

Devon G. Peña | Las Colonias de San
Pablo, CO | August 31, 2014

On August 5, I reported on the closing down of a seed library in Pennsylvania
by the state’s Department of Agriculture. 
A week later, August 13, I posted an
analysis and position paper on U.S. seed laws prepared by Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC).

Continuing with this series on Seed
Sovereignty in the U.S., I am posting this call for a discussion of a National
Seed Library Protocol prepared by Leslie Goldman affiliated with the Seed
Library Social Network (SLSN). The call was posted on August 27 on the SLSN
homepage. I have re-posted Leslie Goldman’s announcement and call for
discussion below (unedited). Goldman also reports on initial email
correspondence with state officials in Pennsylvania.

We should note that there is a National Seed Summit planned for
September 10 at the Sonoma Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, CA. This is being held in
conjunction with the annual National
Heirloom Expo. The homepage of the National Heirloom Exposition describes
itself as a not-for-profit event “centered around the pure food movement,
heirloom vegetables, and anti-GMO activism”. The first such expo was in 2013
and it “drew 18,000 people from around the country and beyond.” The Heirloom
Expo is being called the “World’s Fair of Pure Food”!

The development of a National Seed Library Protocol
is a significant initiative and organizing campaigns toward what is really a
Seed Common have been made several times before. Often overlooked in the
retelling are the indigenous and immigrant farmers who make up a significant
source of heirloom seed biodiversity. The Traditional Native American Farmers
(TNAF) and the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA) released their
“Declaration of Seed Sovereignty” in 2006; we posted this Declaration on June
6, 2010. That declaration makes clear that seed saving and exchange is an
indigenous practice that cannot be legislated away by advocates of modern agribusiness.

In our own acequiahood in southern Colorado’s San
Luis Valley, we maintain a Three Sisters Seed Library (TSSL). The library
support our cooperative plant breeding programs at The Acequia Institute involving
use of inbred and hybrid land race seed varieties shared among our local and
bioregional acequia farmers.

My colleague Beth Burrows, the retired President and
Director of the Edmonds Institute, recently reminded me that a similar effort
was conducted in 1996 to create a national seed library network and work toward
laws protecting individual and community-based seed saving and exchanging. The
effort failed in large measure because too many of the seed savers and seed
librarians had actually concealed their association with commercial seed companies
and there were some individuals that were eventually accused of biopiracy (see
Shiva 1998). This
unfortunate development cast an air of suspicion on the effort and led to the
inability to establish trust among members of the network and it dissipated.
Whatever work the seed librarians organize the mission of such a group must be
mindful and respectful of the ethical and political economic implications posed
by the reality of active, and often covert, seed piracy.

The issue of trust has never been more important when
it comes to matters of seed saving, exchanging, and the plant breeding that
occurs when people grow unique heirloom crop varieties in unique settings using
place-adapted practices and methods. 
Trust has also never been so problematic in an environment defined by
the advent of commercial agricultural biotechnology and the industry’s
nefarious patenting regime created in the aftermath of the 1980 Supreme Court
ruling in Chakrabarty v. Diamond (see
Krimsky 2003).
We are all well too familiar with Monsanto’s notorious attacks on farmers for
violating its seed patents, although frankly as a farmer I cannot even begin to
think why I would want ‘Franken-seed’ – but that is a matter left for future
discussions of seed autonomy and its fundamental value to food sovereignty.

To build trust in the process of defining a national
protocol for seed libraries and nurturing the other work of a seed library network,
there will have to be a way to control acts of biopiracy – the appropriation of
heirloom land race varieties for the purposes of commercializing and patenting
seed lines. This has also happened before as illustrated by the case of the
Enola Bean Patent (see Peña 2001)
when a Texas bio-prospector and plant breeder collected heirloom varieties of
the scarlet runner bean from indigenous Mexican farmers and then tried to
prevent exports to the U.S. to protect a patented variety he developed from the
indigenous seed collection he had acquired through informal means.

There are ways to address the issue of biopiracy and
I hope we can have a new discussion about that in the specific context of a
protocol for seed libraries. What we must never lose sight of is the sacred
mission of protecting our seeds from acts of appropriation for the sake of the
commercialization of heirloom varieties by anyone who happens to have, or will
in the future develop, a relationship with someone at Monsanto or the other
Gene Giants. There will be surely be plenty of selfish aspirants and defectors
among the complex circles of such networks.

Biopiracy remains a serious concern and has led many
of us in the Southwestern U.S. to withdraw from regional seed exchange networks
since it is too challenging a task to verify the background of some members,
and the effort to do so is also widely derided as too intrusive. But nothing
could be more intrusive and violent than for a seed library to inadvertently permit
acts of biopiracy by those who would exploit genuine and well-intended
community-based effort to encourage seed autonomy through local seed libraries.
We must find a way to create trust and secure our seed libraries from biopiracy
by those actors who are motivated by avarice and not food sovereignty.

The task of the continued sharing of heirloom and
regionally adaptive seed is too important to abandon community-based networking
because of the threat posed by corporate biopiracy. We must be smart, critical,
and pragmatic. This may sound trite, but knowing thy gardening neighbor is
perhaps the most important quality to assure integrity in seed saving and
exchanging networks. To move toward such a praxis requires community and the
Seed Library could organize events to encourage neighborliness. Like any common
property resource (CPR), a seed library will also need to define a set of
graduated sanctions for violation of anti-biopiracy provisions for membership
in the network.

Working
Toward a National Seed Library Protocol

ADDRESSING
THE NEED TO CHANGE SEED LAWS

Leslie
Goldman | Seed Library Social Network | August 27, 2014

The purpose of this Seed Library Social Network
Discussion is Working Toward a National Seed Library Protocol & Changing
the Seed Laws as Needed.  It is being set
up with the encouragement of Devon Grissim, who founded The Seed Library Social
Network site, and Rick Passo, a member of the Las Vegas Seed Library.  Both have been extremely inspiring to me in
recent weeks.  I began writing about the
Simpson Seed Library-Department of Ag Communications four days after the Draft
of proposed Protocols for running the Simpson Library and Seed Libraries in
Pennsylvania were accepted "as is" by the Simpson Seed Library,
August 1.

I went to a number of original sources including
Johnny Zook, Seed Program Supervisor, for the PA Department of Ag, and Jonelle
Darr, Cumberland County LIbrary Executive Director.  Both of them read over my primary story for
accuracy.

PLANTING CLARITY! SIMPSON SEED LIBRARY AND AG DEPT
WRAP UP: http://curezone.org/blogs/fm.asp?i=2196853.

My most recent Plant
Your Dream Blog compiles my latest research that has led me to see it would
be wise to come up with a mature well-rounded set of National Protocols in
support of Seed Libraries that also allows them to function within existing
Seed Laws. 

My strategy when I wrote this was that seed library
leaders could work toward a national protocol, building upon the protocols
accepted by the Simpson Seed Library. I realize that there are restrictive laws
in some states such as CA, that appear to block seed exchanges….the legal minds
truly need to be at work here. For the states that are more lenient, I feel the
Protocols need to be developed as well as looking toward changes where Seed
Laws are needed. August 25, 2014

SEED PROTOCOL DISCUSSION
GROUP NOTES: http://curezone.com/blogs/fm.asp?i=2197727.

COMMUNICATIONS WITH JOHNNY ZOOK, SEED PROGRAM
SUPERVISOR, PA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 

I have numbers of emails and phone conversations with
Johnny Zook. As of August 27, 2014, my assessment is: 
If Seed Laws in some states, such as California, were as lenient as Seed
Laws in Pennsylvania, we would have an easier time moving toward National
Protocols without the need to change Seed Laws. 
I have found Johnny Zook well meaning and accessible.  He has been forthcoming with ideas and
suggestions. In my most recent email of he said:

On Aug 26, 2014, at 5:27 AM, "Zook, Johnny"
wrote:

I am willing to take
suggestions, and if you know people [that] have ideas it would be good for me
to have them sooner than later.

Numbers of states are reaching out to Zook now and
they will be modeling their protocols on what the Simpson Library accepted. The
“soon the better” that we discuss here what we want to be accepted.