Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Imagesįorty years ago, farmers and consumer groups might have welcomed potential opportunities offered by agri-science and large corporate mergers. The small farmer, who has traditionally fed the world and given societies their rich food cultures, will only be threatened further.Ī farmer walks across a field of organic crops in Lower Nandok, Sikkim, India. It is far more likely, say environmentalists and farm groups in developing countries, that competition will be limited and that the legal and biological grip of seed corporates on global farming will tighten. History, however, suggests strongly that the reality will be the opposite. The corporates argue that only consolidation can bring the development of better seed varieties and the innovations needed to avert global hunger and malnutrition, as the world population climbs to around 10 billion people in a few decades’ time.īy innovation, they mean new, “advanced” plant engineering technologies such as GM, Crispr, gene editing and bio-fortification. It is also an act of ecological and political defiance against the immense reach and concentration of the likes of Monsanto and Bayer. By continually selecting, crossbreeding and then exchanging their seeds, farmers have developed varieties for their aroma, taste, colour, medicinal properties and resistance to pests, drought and flood.ĭeb’s community seed bank is one of the last living repositories of hundreds of Indian rice varieties.
This seed-sharing of “landraces”, or local varieties, is not philanthropy but the extension of an age-old system of mutualised farming that has provided social stability and dietary diversity for millions of people. More than 7,000 farmers in six states will be given the seeds, on the condition that they also grow them and give some away. This year he is cultivating an astonishing 1,340 traditional varieties of Indian “folk” rice on land donated to him in West Bengal. While they concentrate on developing a small number of blockbuster staple crops, Deb grows as many crops as he can and gives the seeds away. Instead, it is coming from the likes of Debal Deb, an Indian plant researcher who grows forgotten crops and is the antithesis of Bayer and Monsanto. You might think that these mergers would alert the government, but because political parties in Britain are so inward-looking, and because most farmers in rich countries already buy their seeds from the multinationals, opposition has barely been heard. Backed by governments, and enabled by world trade rules and intellectual property laws, Bayer-Monsanto, Dow-DuPont and ChemChina-Syngenta have been allowed to control much of the world’s supply of seeds. But the takeover is just the last of a trio of huge seed and pesticide company mergers. It will be able to influence what and how most of the world’s food is grown, affecting the price and the method it is grown by.
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