Carlos Vicente –

Gustavo Esteva – We also said goodbye this past week to the Mexican activist and organic intellectual Gustavo Esteva. The founder of Oaxaca’s Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth), Esteva dedicated his life to scholarship and solidarity with peasant and Indigenous peoples. He participated in the Zapatista uprising and became one of the movement’s key advisors and negotiators. He authored, co-authored, and edited more than 40 books and thousands of articles. He was an ardent critic of Western/Northern-led “development projects,” the ideologies of superiority that justify them, and the violence they inflict. Read an interview with Esteva at In Motion Magazine.

We offer our deepest condolences to Carlos’ and Gustavo’s families, friends, and colleagues.

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Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser spent decades maintaining and improving his canola crop as farmers have done for millennia — selecting the strongest plants, saving their seeds, and replanting them the following season. One August day in 1998, however, Schmeiser received a letter from Monsanto lawyers informing him he was being sued for patent violation: the company’s “Roundup Ready” canola, a genetically engineered canola that altered the plant’s genes to make it resistant to Roundup herbicide, had been found in Percy’s fields.

As the farm advocacy organization GRAIN explains, “Canadian farmers have a long and strong tradition of seed saving, especially in the western prairies where Schmeiser is from. Canola, the crop Schmeiser grew, is itself a product of farmer seed saving, farmer selection, and publicly funded research. It’s an example of what plant breeding can accomplish without patents. It’s also an example of why co-existence between GM (genetically modified) and non-GM crops is impossible. Today, all of the canola acreage in Western Canada is contaminated with Monsanto’s patented ‘Roundup-Ready’ gene.”

What ensued was an epic David vs. Goliath battle that pit the rights of farmers to save and replant seeds against agribusiness attempts to make it ever-more difficult for farmers to plant anything but their patented varieties. Percy did not set out to be an anti-biotech activist. But the pollen from genetically engineered crops blown onto his farm — and Monsanto’s legal intimidation — sealed his fate as a globally recognized seed and farm justice leader.

The stakes were, and still are, high. It’s a struggle to protect the world’s Native, farmer-bred, and publicly-funded plant varieties—the foundation of global food security and climate resilience—from obliteration by privately-controlled GE crops. It’s a struggle to hold those agribusiness corporations accountable for their technologies instead of criminalizing hapless farmers who, as Percy always maintained, never wanted or benefitted from GE seeds.

Percy ultimately lost that court battle — but he grew the movement. In 2018, looking back on his 20-year fight against Monsanto, he commented: “In the end it turned out good and we brought the world’s attention to what GMOs do and what it could do to farmers… We always felt if you grow a product or a seed on your land you should have the right to reseed it and that right should not be taken away.”

Percy Schmeiser passed away last week at 89 years old, just as a major motion picture about his life, starring Christopher Walken, is being released (view the “Percy” trailer on YouTube).

Meanwhile, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and other agribusiness giants aggressively pursue the monopolization of seed markets, the rewriting of seed and patent laws in their favor, and the criminalization of farmers’ seed saving practices.

Around the world — and in the Global South especially, where most of the world’s seed diversity is managed for local food security — small farmers and their allies continue to fight for the right to save and share seeds. For the international peasant farmer confederation La Vía Campesina, “seed sovereignty” is a cornerstone of agroecology and food sovereignty. Now more than ever, Indigenous seed keeping knowledge and practices are recognized as critical to our collective response to the climate crisis. And of course, anyone can save seeds and be part of the global seed sovereignty movement.

Rest in Power, Percy Schmeiser. And long live the seed keepers.

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In the beginning—1926—Agribusiness created corn, or so it proclaimed. It hadn’t, of course: 7,000 years earlier, the Mesoamerican gods had beaten them to it. What Agribusiness actually created thousands of years later was hybrid corn, and it declared that hybrid corn was the only corn that mattered. And Agribusiness saw that it produced a lot and, most important, farmers had to buy it every year. And it was good, for Agribusiness.

On the second day, Agribusiness separated the land from the water, expanding drainage tiles under millions of acres of farm-belt swampland. And the land was good, especially for long straight rows of hybrid corn.

On the third day, with way too much corn, Agribusiness created pigs and commercial feed made up of corn and soybeans. Agribusiness saw that more corn and soybeans were good, and that meat was even better, because it took five (or even ten) pounds of grain to create a pound of meat. 

On the fourth day, Agribusiness created animal prisons, which it called hog farms even though they were factories. It moved the animals into the factories. The new feed companies could buy all the cheap corn and soybeans, and the factories could buy the feed, creating two commercial transactions where before there had been none. And they would spread far and wide, and so would the millions of gallons of their concentrated manure. And Agribusiness held its nose at the putrid odor and said it was good, proclaiming its own genius for creating such a costly commercial nutrient cycle from the natural one it had destroyed by moving animals off the farms.

On the fifth day, Agribusiness created an army of lobbyists, and it would be called the “farm lobby” even though it lobbied for corporations. This army persuaded the US Congress to outlaw government measures to ensure fair prices for farmers, decent prices for consumers, and controls on production so supply would not exceed demand and agricultural land would not be farmed to exhaustion. And it was good, for Agribusiness: the high production was good for seed, chemical, and other input-suppliers; the low prices were good for animal factories and other processors.

On the sixth day, laden with way too much corn fetching rock-bottom prices, Agribusiness created ethanol to power our cars. And it commanded that the fuel be made from corn, even though corn was the least efficient crop to make it from. And it was good, for Agribusiness.

On the seventh day, with corn prices at record highs and wreaking havoc with poor people overseas, and with every inch of even marginally farmable Iowa land brought into production, Agribusiness rested. Agribusiness surveyed its good works and ordained that a temple should be anointed to honor its wisdom and good fortune. And so the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates was transformed into that temple, with offerings from the faithful. Forevermore, they would gather, on World Food Day even though they no longer produced food, for an annual ritual of worship and adoration.

Now, so deep into such a profound devolution, it was difficult to say which part of that genesis story was the real problem. For many Iowans, the immediate problem was their polluted drinking water. To defend themselves from the toxic effluents of Agribusiness’s creations, they created the world’s largest de-nitrification plant to protect Des Moines’ drinking water from the nitrates, E. coli, and potassium-laden sediment that flowed downstream. These flowed all the way down the Mississippi to a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in which all the sea life created on the Hebrew God’s fifth day had been asphyxiated.

This piece is an abridged excerpt from the book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food by Timothy A. Wise (The New Press 2019), our July selection in the Real Food Reads book club. Listen to our interview with Tim on the Real Food Reads podcast. 

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Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what to grow and how. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims of the climate crisis, but rather protagonists whose solutions can show us the way forward.

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Three-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 had become extinct by 2015. In Seeds of Resistance, Schapiro takes us onto the frontlines of a struggle over the seeds that remain.

Schapiro reveals how more than half of all commercially-traded seeds have fallen under the control of just three multinational agri-chemical companies, and unravels the myths that lie behind their genetically engineered and crack-baby seeds, addicted to pesticides from the day they are planted. He dives deep into the heroic and increasingly powerful movement in the United States and around the world that is defying those trends, and embarks on a search for the seeds that offer our best and healthiest options for resisting the rush of climatic changes.

Schapiro applies his investigative and storytelling skills to this riveting narrative, from the environmentally stressed fields of the American Midwest to the war-torn fields of Syria, from Native American communities that have been cultivating crops in extreme conditions for centuries to the financial markets that have been turning patented seeds into one of the planet’s most valuable commodities. Seeds of Resistance lifts the lid on the struggle over seeds as conditions on the earth shift above our heads and beneath our feet.

This will be a special edition of Real Food Reads, bringing together author Mark Schapiro and farmer, seed preserver, and activist Kristyn Leach in conversation together live at the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture. 

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Filmed at the World Organic Congress of the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements in Istanbul, Turkey. October 2014.

The post Voices of an Organic Planet appeared first on Real Food Media.

Dig into our Food MythBusters resources and citations from the script:

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion reading materials

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Voices of an Organic Planet from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

Can organic farming feed the world?

Ask that question to a chemical industry executive and you’ll hear a resounding, “No!” Ask farmers around the world, who’ve got a grounds eye view of food production, and you’re likely to get a very different answer. That’s just what we did when we traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, for the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) World Organic Congress. Voices of an Organic Planet captures just some of the voices of the more than 1,000 delegates that gather every two years for the IFOAM international convening.

So why don’t more farmers transition to organic? And why isn’t the market for organic food growing even faster? Many farmers are benefitting from organic farming, and consumers are clamoring for organic food, but farmers around the world are finding it difficult to meet the demand for a number of reasons, including: shortages of organic seeds and breeds required for organic production; laws that privatize seeds as intellectual property and criminalize seed saving and sharing; and a lack of funding for research on open-pollinated seeds, varietal development, and traditionally-bred livestock.

Globally less than 1 percent of research dollars for agriculture, public or private, goes into developing and improving organic methods.

Through our conversations with farmers, researchers, and scientists, we heard loud and clear that together we can feed the world—and that supporting inputs, subsidies, and research for organic and agroecological farming is the only path to sustainably feed ourselves in the future.

Read our report from the Congress in Al Jazeera.

After filming Voices of an Organic Planet, we turned to the situation in the country where we live, partnering with the Organic Farming Research Foundation to launch a petition calling on the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to help farmers meet this growing demand. Though support for organic farmers grows every year, the USDA still directs only a fraction of its research budget toward open-source seeds and livestock breeds suitable for organic production. We applauded the USDA’s introduction of programs to support organic farmers and urged them to continue to help farmers meet this consumer demand by at least doubling its annual investments toward the development of open-source, publicly-available seeds and breeds suitable for organic production systems. Our petition stressed that organic and conventional farmers need access to the most up-to-date non-patented genetics and breeds capable of thriving in a range of farming regions and called on the USDA to help support this vital research.

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The Gift chronicles Canadian farmer and seed pioneer Dan Janson. Poetically filmed and directed by Jean-Marc Abela, this short film is a poignant reminder of beauty hidden in the smallest places.

With Valentine’s Day nipping at our heels, surrounded by temptations of far-flung diamonds or flowers, this film is a Zen-like prompt to slow down and focus on the gifts all around us. The diminutive nature of seeds masks their power: As Janson recounts with awe, one Amaranth plant can house a quarter of a million seeds.

Janson asks viewers to pause and think of the humble seed grower, the individuals quietly keeping biodiversity alive. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, just twelve seed varieties supply three quarters of the food that nourishes the planet—a scary sign of biodiversity loss. Janson and his comrades around the world—these heroic seed savers—are trying to reverse this troubling trend.

Instead of that box of chocolate or a dangly delight, we advocate for giving the gift of seeds to your loved ones this February, and passing on the gift of life. For some great ideas, visit Janson’s website saltspringseeds.com.

This piece is part of a series in partnership with Food & Wine Magazine.

Photo by Jean Marc-Abela

The Gift | 2014 Real Food Media Contest Winner from Real Food Media on Vimeo. 

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