A GREAT POWER LIES IN THE SEED

By Andrea Del Moral

Only 2% of the North American population are farmers. Over half of North Americans live in cities. For city people, politics around agriculture has, so far, largely taken the form of labeling campaigns for genetically modified organisms (GMOs). This movement is uniting them to talk about the food system and what they actually want. It is no coincidence that there is also massive resistance to MAI, WTO, FTAA, IMF/World Bank, and other treaties of corporate global governance. These are co-evolving movements, with huge communities of overlap, in both members and values. As people begin to articulate their ideas, it is clear that the anti-globalization and anti-GE movements are both manifestations of a people's movement for democracy. Vandana Shiva says that in places like North America, where most people don't farm anymore, the struggle for food democracy will be won through consumer campaigns. But food democracy cannot be had through consumers alone.

Simply put, campaigning for a label is not democracy in action. It is an educational project,and a community building one, but it is not democracy--people's rule--of their food system. Food democracy can also be thought of as community-controlled agriculture, and walking into a supermarket to choose between GMO-free corn and GMO corn is not an act of community control over food. Community-Controlled Agriculture

I spent the last two and a half months visiting seed savers and plant breeders in Qu‚bec,Maine, Vermont, New York, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. At the same time, my friend Sascha was doing the same thing on the West Coast, in California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. We have gathered stories of an amazing group--people with the knowledge necessary to build a new agriculture and the wisdom to communicate a culture that accompanies it.

We believe the movement for food democracy in North America will be led by the seed savers. For thirty years they have been preserving and encouraging genetic diversity to flourish in their farms and gardens. The small-scale seed growing community is composed of wise and intelligent plant people who value seeds grown in healthy, diverse environments. This presence has allowed city folks to have an alternative source of plant life in the city, a source of more diverse ecological edge. We see great potential to expand the rural-urban exchange to create another edge,where people with different roles in agriculture (as creators, growers, eaters) and communities(rural, urban, suburban) meet to create a new biological and cultural habitat that will enable us all to thrive.

The foundation of a strong seed movement is quality seed. The next step is getting people together to learn about each other's role in creating diversity and lively habitat for people, plants,and other animals. Instead of cracked concrete driveways and deserted lawns, how about spaces where goldfish, cats, bees, dragonflies, hummingbirds, earthworms, raccoons and hawks converge with wild and cultivated plant varieties, and humans of all colors, sizes, histories, and futures.Arming the people with seeds

I want to see my neighborhood, and the neighborhoods of my friends, across the continent full of miner's lettuce and cilantro and kale and brassicas that are three different species mezclado into one. I want to see beans from Zaire and Central America and corn where several colors twist through every single kernel. I want to see squash that got invented in backyard mishaps and friends made over the sharing of seeds. We want to give people seeds, but it's about a lot more than that.A seed saving project is an important thing, and we've got a great endeavor ahead of us, to preserve and expand the genetic diversity on this planet that so much of our history has disrespected and destroyed. But because plant history is so tied up with people's history, we have to be addressing this culture along with ecology. Organic farmers can grow diversity out their ears but if people in the city who buy the food don't understand why unique and unpredictable foods are good, then farmers are just going to switch back to predictable hybrid, privately owned and exploited seed--seed that is fucking them over as much as it is everybody else.

As a culture, if we don't understand that we are diversity and that we need it to survive and thrive, then saving biodiversity ends up being a museum, an arboretum, that we go to and take pictures of and take tests on and read about in textbooks and see slide shows of, like art from many centuries ago. Will botany classes someday be slideshows of all the life that once lived and is no more? So we have to start understanding the role of diversity, which is the simultaneous existence of our distinct histories, and the meeting together of these differences. For us this means beginning to talk to our neighbors, for real. Crossing class and race lines here in South Berkeley and North Oakland which are very mixed neighborhoods with many communities living side by side but rarely overlapping. It means really learning the histories of these people that share our yards and streets,and also really learning our own. It means listening. Paying attention to the ways in which we have privilege in this society, and figuring out how to not be ashamed of it but instead to subvert it towards good. For instance, Sascha has connections to a bunch of rich people in New York, and instead of abandoning that history, he is connecting that resource to our project. And I, having access to education, am using it to understand the history of agriculture and urban geographical relationships, and how community controlled agriculture can best be done here to get some real power and good food into the neighborhood.

Monsanto has a "diversity curriculum" on their website for teachers to use. We've been thinking about curriculums too. If the masters of doublespeak can get in at humanity early, so can we. We're making curriculums about cultural and ecological diversity, because in the city we understand the ecology of people more than that of plants. It reminds me of the Canadian image of the mosaic of cultures, instead of the U.S. melting pot, and how my friends in Montr‚al are proud that they see their country as a place where the pieces maintain their distinctness, but exist side by side to make a picture that none could accomplish alone. I think of Montr‚al in particular, with all those different languages and traditions and neighborhoods fit together. There is distinct separateness, but it is the presence of everyone together that makes it a beautiful and special place.So we're working the end of people in the city, to begin valuing a different theme throughout their lives entirely, and in particular connecting it to food.

On the other end of things, there are all these plant breeders and farmers and seed growers we know. There are also a lot of gardeners in this city. Putting the four together, we've got the possibility of community controlled breeding programs. What if farmers got together with plant breeders and discussed what kind of crops they need, the characteristics they grow hybrids for, and plant breeders, along with urban gardeners who would learn plant breeding through workshops and the resources of the seed library and its advisory board, then developed new breeds of open-pollinated and hybrid crops that were public domain, unpatented, unpatentable, grown out by anyone anywhere, and saved to regenerate for seasons in the future. Farmers and seed growers, having thespace of rural places, could grow out these populations to large enough size for farmers to grow for crops.

But farmers' food doesn't even make it into many neighborhoods. Where I live there are more places to buy liquor than lettuce. Every couple of blocks a corner store sells soda and candy and cigarettes and whiskey, but you have to walk a mile before you find fresh vegetables. So what if,along with breeding plants for the larger scale farmers, kids were growing food in the neighborhood and selling it at the corner stores? What if they could make enough money doing that that they wouldn't want to sell dope anymore? "I want a job, man, that's all I want," one of the kids in North Oakland said the other day. But there's no work for kids who've been dropped by the system long ago. Unless they start working for each other, for the neighborhood, start closing the circles down and locking the corporate profit motive out. We want to pay our neighbors in cash and seeds and tools, in local currencies and in familiar neighborhoods where we actually know each other and learn about each other and the journeys we've traveled through this culture.

This endeavor to bring agricultural knowledge and respect into the city has a lot more to do with restoring our common humanity than with the plants themselves. Plants, we'll take a lot of them down with us as we go, and they're hurting now, but it is no solution to address only the problem of plants, because it was many breakdowns in the human relationships, to each other and everything,that created problems in the first place. So we're paying close attention to that, learning everything we can about the people around us we usually pass by. It's the same process as learning how to exist well with plants: observe, listen, practice. Be quiet and honest, and act even if you are afraid. Fear is one thing we can take down. And as we move through our fears and unknowns, we discover ways to free ourselves from the systems that seem to hold us in.

Many things in this life have tried to disarm me of my desires; I've been encouraged by the pressures of the economy to do the most lucrative, not the most genuine, activities. I have become jaded and cynical but often I surface for some hopeful air, and those moments of surfacing become more frequent as I see what happens when I believe in desires--they often happen.

I want to make heartlands in cities, that feed our hearts and stomachs at the same time. Iwant the dots on this continent's edge to blur into the empty spaces by cultural contact, for us to know each other; at the very least to know of each other and to understand how we are interdependent. I want this land to be used for feeding and housing and healing, for creating and meeting and learning. I want seeds of plants and ideas and love to flourish, and to multiply through the seasons. I want these seeds to carry histories and to tell them out loud to the people who believe in these things, who spread them around, and make each other free. Šlj Œlj