"Each seed held a trace of life that would spark when given water, when given the appropriate conditions. Everywhere I looked, I saw how seeds were holding the world together."
— Diane Wilson, author of "The Seed Keeper"
Take a moment to think about what you've eaten so far today and what kinds of fabrics you're wearing. How much of that food or fiber came from plants? And how many of those plants start with a seed?
Most raw ingredients we use to meet our daily needs start with seeds, tiny but powerful players that deserve to be celebrated. Each seed contains all the information necessary to grow into an entire plant, providing food and shelter and even producing the next season's seeds. Over the years, seeds adapt to their environment, the changing weather cycles and soil types, becoming better candidates for success in their little corner of the world.
Since humans began practicing agriculture some 12,000 years ago, we've helped to shape the Earth's seeds — and been shaped by them. However, in the last century, private interests, corporate consolidation and some questionable court rulings have changed how seeds are grown, saved, shared and sold.
Who owns seeds?
"It would be 'unreasonable and impossible' to allow patents upon the trees of the forest and the plants of the earth."
Patents are a kind of intellectual property right meant to promote innovation by providing legal ownership to the inventors of new and useful discoveries for a limited period. Different classes of patents apply to different types of inventions. The largest category is "utility patents," which can apply to "any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof." Many of the appliances, gadgets and gizmos we use daily were covered by utility patents.
Until the 20th century, living organisms such as plants and seeds were considered products of nature rather than products of human ingenuity, making them ineligible for utility patents. However, agricultural products are difficult to classify: They are products of nature and human expertise and stewardship. Plants and seeds operate on a natural model of abundance that defies regulation. A person who plants one or two seeds could harvest dozens or hundreds more by the end of the growing season. The legal system has struggled to fit the square peg of agriculture into the round hole of patents.
In 1930, the Plant Patent Act provided intellectual property rights for asexually-reproducing plants propagated through cuttings, grafting or producing bulbs or runners. Plants that reproduce sexually by generating seeds (including many of the most common food crops) weren't addressed until the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970 (PVPA).
The PVPA walks a fine line: While it offers protection to seed breeders, the Act also acknowledges that continued innovation depends on sharing genetic resources. To keep the practice of plant breeding moving forward and the critical work of farmers feeding and clothing the rest of us, neither plant patents nor plant variety protections provide the exclusivity of utility patents.
How GMOs changed the seed industry
In the 1970s, microbiologist and General Electric employee Dr. Ananda Chakrabarty created a genetically engineered bacteria to break down crude oil. Dr. Chakrabarty sought to patent his invention, which he believed could be useful in cleaning up oil spills. However, his invention inadvertently set the stage for privatizing the global seed supply.
At first, the US Patent Office denied Dr. Chakrabarty's submission because bacteria are living organisms, thus considered products of nature. Plant patents were the only patent class that permitted living organisms, and the GMO bacteria didn't fit in there. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided that although Dr. Chakrabarty's bacteria was a living organism, it was no longer in a state of nature because of the genetic modification to its DNA. Genetic engineering qualified a living organism as a "new composition of matter," making it eligible for a utility patent.
The Supreme Court decision was the first step in privatizing the global seed supply. Utility patents were soon applied to GMO crops and seeds. Private ownership of agricultural products and the chemicals that go with them has generated enormous profits for chemical corporations, and utility patents aren't just for GMO seeds anymore. Today, 60% of the world's seed supply is owned by just four chemical companies.
Protecting GMOs with utility patents reveals a kind of duplicity in the rhetoric of the chemical companies that create them: To investors and patent offices, companies emphasize the novelty and innovation of GMOs to secure funding and utility patents, while to regulatory boards and the general public, they argue the opposite, marketing GMOs as an extension of traditional breeding techniques.
To one audience they cry, "It's totally new!"
To another, "It's totally natural!"
It's no wonder chemical companies face a skeptical public.
Privatization and the food system
Private ownership of the seed supply has vast implications for food security. It takes a commonly held resource, seeds, that were developed over millennia by countless unnamed farmers and breeders, turning it into a vehicle for wealth accumulation by the patent holder. In many cases, patents prevent farmers and breeders from saving, selecting or improving on seed lines, locking genetic material behind an intellectual property firewall. As one chronicler of agricultural history notes, "farmers no longer buy seeds, they rent that seed."
Some of the most powerful corporations in the world routinely harass farmers, seed savers and breeders around the globe if they try to operate outside the monopolized and privatized seed supply. Harassment can come in the form of legal action, as has been extensively reported by the Center for Food Safety. There are also cases of casual intimidation, such as when a major corporation mailed baseless patent infringement notices to small seed companies across the US; or, in another instance, when corporate lawyers rebuffed good faith efforts by small farmers to resolve GMO contamination risks.
Partners in diversity
People have been planting, growing, harvesting and selecting seeds for around 12,000 years, giving rise to countless new crop varieties. All the different kinds of crops, from wild relatives to natural varieties to more recent cultivars, add diversity. Seed diversity is the difference between fortune and famine. A single seed will generate exponentially more for a grower to plant in the future.
However, the converse is also true: When we rely on too few crops or too few varieties of crops, our agricultural systems become precarious and could be wiped out by a single pest infestation or disease. In a diverse system, many different crops are grown together, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The variety makes it harder for a single threat to cause devastation.
Diversity also helps crops adapt to extreme weather events, which occur more frequently as the climate changes. Through each growing season, seeds continue to adapt to the particular microclimate, soil conditions and external stressors they experience. Skilled farmers and seed breeders carry the strongest seeds forward, encouraging helpful traits such as tolerance of drought or poor soil and the ability to grow on uneven terrain.
When it comes to seed and food, diversity is most definitely our strength.
Use it or lose it
"More than 90% of crop varieties have disappeared from farmers' fields." — United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
However, diversity must be nurtured. During the last century, the rise of industrial-style agriculture has undone a shocking amount of the previous 12,000 years of work. An estimated 75-90% of plant genetic diversity has been lost because farmers were encouraged to give up locally adapted, regional seeds in favor of hybrids and GMOs, which can't be saved. A global market of privately owned, unsavable seeds makes farmers dependent on external inputs, supply chain disruptions, and corporate greed.
What you can do
Promoting farmers' rights and seed sovereignty is essential to protecting biodiversity and creating a resilient and healthy food system that works for everybody. Many organizations — including the Non-GMO Project — are working to restore farmers' rights. An obvious first step is to avoid GMOs by looking for the Butterfly — after all, everyone has the right to choose how their food is made.
You can also explore the wide world of seeds online. We're big fans of the Organic Seed Alliance website, which offers fantastic information for home gardeners interested in growing and saving seeds. Here are some additional resources:
- The Open Source Seed Initiative lists seed producers committed to sharing seeds and building our genetic inheritance.
- The Seed Savers Exchange helps you share seeds online with other growers.
- Seed libraries are often affiliated with regular public libraries, and work the same way — search this map to find one near you.
- Follow the work of organizations like A Growing Culture to learn more about farmers' rights and seed sovereignty worldwide.
For all our craftiness and innovation, it's worth remembering that the seeds didn't start with us, nor will they end with us. We hold them in our hands for a while. If we're truly lucky, we watch them grow.