Sowing Seed Security

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 5-28-07

On May 22 the Kew Millennium Seed Bank deposited the billionth seed into its vaults, continuing its mission to preserve the biodiversity of the planet by banking the seed from every plant on the earth. To date, the Millennium Seed Bank, which is located in the United Kingdom, has deposited seed from over 18,000 wild species from over 120 countries and has banked almost ninety percent of all the flora in the United Kingdom. The Bank has room to store half of the plant species found on the planet and it plans to collect twenty five percent of the world’s species by 2020.

The UK Government’s Minister for Biodiversity was proud of the milestone, saying that, “The Millennium Seed Bank must be one of the most significant conservation projects ever. It is a global insurance policy against the loss of uniquely valuable plant species through land pressures or dangerous climate change.”

Other seed banks exist in China, South Korea and the North Pole. Norway’s forthcoming bank will be called the Doomsday Vault. The Berry Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon, caches seed like a junco bird because, as one of its members recently commented on National Public Radio botanical biodiversity is disappearing at a rate we haven’t seen since the dinosaurs. And while humans continue to affect and change the climate in rapid ways, we have also changed the very structure and function of seeds.

In 1998 the Delta & Pine Land Company patented genetically engineered “terminator seeds,” that would yield one crop and promptly die off. While hybrid seeds do not usually reproduce themselves either and must be purchased anew each year, the terminator seeds were formed by artificially manipulating the seed at the cellular level. In doing so, the company “created” a new invention and was able to patent the seed. This process would ensure that farmers would buy the seed each year, but also ensured that the seed would enjoy the legal protections of a patented product. Genetically engineered seeds (terminator or otherwise) that have such patents become intellectual property and in order to use them, farmers must sign contracts restricting their use. Under these contracts, exchanging seeds or saving them is often considered patent infringement and companies like Monsanto have actually sued farmers for such activities.

While banking seeds is a response to the current ecological degradation and genetic engineering (which some are calling biological pollution), the practice of saving seed goes back to the Mesopotamians, whose system of seed banking may have provided the model for how we bank with money.

But another ancient practice is that of actively trading and exchanging seed. In response to the loss of heirloom varieties people began to trade their heirloom seeds with other gardeners and farmers in order to increase their use. The seed exchange tradition has extended into seed libraries and exchange organizations, a process that has been enhance by the internet. 

The UK’s Heritage Seed Library conserves rare vegetable varieties from family heirlooms or those that have been dropped from seed catalogues. But, perhaps more importantly, rather than just bank the seed and keep it for the future, the Library loans out the seeds.

HSL members choose six varieties from an annual catalogue of 200 rare seed varieties. They also hold informal seed swaps. In turn, the organization uses Seed Guardians who grow seed for the organization and provide it to other members. These Guardians provided half of the 40,000 packets of seed that are sent out each year.

Here in the U.S., Seed Savers Exchange has a similar program and members have passed around one million rare seed samples since 1975.

Today, when one in six plants are a source of medicine and one in ten provide food, seed banks like the Millennium project provide a certain sense of security. Their existence hints that if all is lost, we will still have something stored away, safely sealed in foil packets, just in case everything goes errantly, inexcusably wrong. But no one knows if the Millenium or Doomsday Vaults will ever have enough seeds to revegetate our lives. Even so, the seed bankers continue to collect and the librarians continue to lend and believe that their seeds will take root.

Look for the Spade & Spoon column here every Tuesday. If you have article ideas for Spade & Spoon (www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon), email kisha@newwest.net.