Dig your hand in the land, and listen to my story,
feel the cotton, wheat and corn, the riches and the glory,
feel the sweaten strain of those who worked before me,
dig your hand down in the land.
[Jeremy Irons] Global Agriculture has changed more in our life time than in the previous 10,000 years.
But as with all change, conflicts of interest have arisen.
Nowhere is this conflict more poignant than in the story of seed.
In this film we’ll look at how the seed has changed in farming and in our culture,
from a sacred element, and the giver of life to a powerful commodity, used to monopolize global food production.
This conflict between farming and business between knowledge and control,
between truth and propaganda, lies at the heart of the story of seed.
[Vandana Shiva] Once a company starts to see royalty collections from every seed,
it pushes its genetically engineered crops, to replace the native crops that farmers and peasants have grown over millennia.
[Melaku Worede] We don’t know what is in their ecosystem.
We don’t know what we have in it.
[Zac Goldmsith] So it’s nothing to do with feeding the world.
It’s nothing to do with tackling some of these huge issues we’re facing today.
It’s about control of the food sector, of the food economy.
SEEDS OF FREEDOM
THE EVOLUTION OF DIVERSITY
We begin the story of seed, thousands of years ago,
at a time when the Earth was covered with disparate communities, isolated by mountains, seas and deserts.
A huge diversity of cultures, traditions and languages evolved across our planet,
adapting to many different climates and ecosystems.
Over centuries the individual societies developed different ideas,
cosmologies, routines, and rituals creating a vast bedrock of diversity.
Today, there are still communities around the world, who give us an insight into this ancestral past.
All traditional cultures have been based on
the recognition that the most important reason we are here on Earth,
is to play our role in maintaining life in its diversity.
Because seed contains life,
seed has been central to reproducing the culture of life.
And if you look at rituals in India, in Africa, in Latin America.
Seed is at the centre of it.
[Muhammed & Alyalnesh] Seed is our life...
Our livelihood depends on it.
[Chief of Vhutanda] We plant seeds to welcome new life.
When a boy becomes a man we shower him with seed.
And when a person dies we plant seeds on their grave.
[Kaguna] Seeds are not just for food…
They have a spiritual meaning…
We use them when we perform rituals.
As our forebearerss diversified so did their seed, and thus their crops.
Long before Darwin articulated his theory of evolution by natural selection,
men and women around the globe were practicing this very process:
resowing seeds best adapted to their particular environment
and thus, becoming a part of the process of evolutionary change.
At the centre of this change was the seed
which each year would be harvested afresh
and could be stored, shared and crossed.
We are the inheritors of this rich global biodiversity.
he more we look at seed and biodiversity, the more we realise that the level of intelligence – in the seed itself -
and in the breeding that farmers have done by working with the seed,
has given us, not just the highest level of biodiversity,
but the highest level of quality of food.
The highest level of nutrition.
[Muhammed] One variety is not enough for us.
If we lose that, we are lost.
Farmers breed for resilience.
And therefore they breed for cooperative arrangements.
They don’t breed one crop.
They know they must have many crops because the climate changes.
They know they must have many crops, because nutritional needs are diverse.
[Liz Hosken] The production of food in indigenous traditions for most of human history
has been to focus on advancing biological diversity.
THE ROAD TO INDUSTRY
At the turn of the 20th century, farming began to rely on technology,
forcing people off their land and into the cities,
as traditional skills and labour were gradually replaced by modern machinery.
But as Europe became embroiled in 2 world wars,
the chemicals produced for warfare were set to change the face of agriculture.
With the world locked in conflict new chemicals began to be produced in large quantities.
And once peace returned, the companies producing these chemicals
needed to created alternative outlets for their products.
By making minor alterations, explosives and nerve agents were reformulated as fertilizers and pesticides,
and chemical agronomy found its way onto farmland around the world.
[Muhammed and wife] Today everything has changed...
Our soil demands food...
It asks for a variety of different foods.
Our fathers never needed these chemicals.
[Malaku Worede] You’re now brining in a whole lot of chemicals.
And the need continues to grow – it’s not static,
and that need never ends.
At one point our soils began to erode,to wear out…
We say they became “drug addicts”.
They became dependent on these fertilizers.
If you choose to use fertilizer one season…
The next season, you must use that fertilizer again. There’s no choice.
[Jeremy Irons] As the farmyard mechanised and chemical use increased,
the story of seed was also about to change.
Natural cycles of seeds saving and sharing,
which had kept business interests at bay,
were challenged by a new breakthrough in seed breeding (bridging):
New hybrid seeds
crosses of two inbred parent plants, produced genetically rich first generation seeds,
which would quickly lose vitality in the second and third season.
This natural process of hybrid breakdown,
meant that farmers no longer benefitted from replanting their seed.
Instead they had to buy new seed each season.
This allowed international corporations to privatise and control the profits from seed.
In the 1960’s these corporations began a worldwide proliferation of their new seeds,
recognising global agriculture as an untapped and hugely profitable market,
they set forth to, in effect, privatise the world’s food system.
Farmers around the world left their traditional farming systems in droves;
buying into a dream of greater productivity, less labour, and more money.
Monocrops, like tea and coffee began to replace indigenous crop species,
and subsistence farming –on which the local community survived -
was replaced by these new mono crops grown to export.
As global food output rose, traditional farmers were being seduced into this new system.
Despite seeing their production costs rise dramatically,
as new seed, fertilizers and pesticides had to be purchased for each new season.
And they found their new crops being subject to unpredictable international markets.
These farmers had unknowingly bought into a system which was proving less resilient,
less sustainable, more expensive and,
ultimately, detrimental to their survival.
[Agnes, Kivaa] When we plant these new seeds...
We can only plant them for one season.
The next season, they won’t perform.
[Norman, Karima, Kenyan elder] Our traditional crops are good for eating.
Whilst the modern crops can be exported.
But we can’t eat coffee.
[Gathuru Mburu] What do you think are the consequences of replacing many different varieties of crops
food crops actually, with a single crop that you cannot eat?
[Caroline Lucas] I think the real concern is that there is an increasing corporate control of the seed chain.
And increasingly that means that a very small number of people
are having a massive influence over the way in which farmers are able to farm.
Traditional practices of saving seed are now under threat and what that does, essentially,
is to put corporate profit ahead of the ability of farmers to feed themselves and their communities.
[Chief of Vhutanda] There are bad consequences to this new seed.
You have to buy it...
And then you can’t store it because it goes rotten.
We’d save money returning to our old seed.
[Narrator] Pieces are linked together in two intertwined chains,
forming a framework, like a long spiral staircase.
And in this molecule you have an essential quality of living matter.
The ability to reproduce, to make copies of itself.
And of all the molecules known to chemistry,
only DNA and its relatives have this ability
[CONTROLLING THE SEED]
[Jeremy Irons] In 1953 Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix,
set the stage for one of sciences most rapid advances.
Genetic Engineering.
The ability to move genes between cells, organisms and species,
soon became feasible.
In agriculture, the possibilities of such engineering seemed limitless.
Higher yields, greater resilience to droughts, better flavour and quicker maturation.
But as this new technology emerged it was accompanied by (fearst) debate to its ethics.
Meanwhile the most significant role of this new technology
was being decided not in the field but in the court room.
[Archive:] “The United States constitution gives congress the power to pass laws relating to patents,
which gives its owner certain rights to an invention.
Those include the right to keep others from making, using, selling, or offering for sale the invention that is described in the patent.”
Intellectual property laws had long asserted that patents could be claimed on new and proven inventions.
But in 1995, the World Trade Organisation proposed a radical change in international law.
Under pressure from global corporations they ruled that micro-organisms, and microbiological processes,
already existing in nature, could be patented.
Under this new law, a seed could be genetically engineered to contain particular genes,
which could then themselves be patented and privately owned.
[Vandana Shiva] As far as the seed is concerned, this leap, in terms of property rights on life itself,
is the most serious threat
to seeds of diversity, seeds of freedom, that are in the hands of peasants.
[Jeremy Irons] A year later the agro-chemical giant Monsanto produced the first GM crop in America:
“RoundUp Ready” soya, which was quickly followed by GM corn and canola.
The genetically modified seeds contained a single noble trait,
they´d been engineered specifically to resist the toxic effects of the chemical herbicide RoundUp,
Monsanto´s number 1 selling herbicide since the 1980’s.
[Vandana Shiva] To put in a gene for herbicide resistance:
you now have a monopoly on the chemical, as well as on the seed that is married to the chemical.
[John Vidal] They are chemical companies first, but they are seed companies second.
That is their… If you can control the seed, you control the profit from growing food.
[Zac Goldsmith] You create a monopoly when you’re providing the seeds,
which have been engineered to be resistant to the pesticides that are used on those seeds.
The net effect of that is that we’re seeing a vastly increased use of pesticides,
which is one of the things that GM was supposed to be tackling.
[Jeremy Irons] Twenty years since GM first hit our markets and the promises of early research remain unfulfilled.
RoundUp-Ready technology dominates the GM market in America.
And now the story of seed will return to the court room
as the full implications of patent law became clear to the world.
[Percy Schmeiser] And I'll never forget, when my wife and I left our door here, the front door
my wife turned around and said "I hope to God I have a roof over my head tonight when I come home."
That’s how close we were to losing everything.
We had put everything on the line,
and I feel sorry for the farmers that didn’t have that opportunity
and who have lost their farms, hundreds of them.
[Jeremy Irons] Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser had been growing canola, saving and breeding the seed for 50 years.
But in 1998, some of his seed was found to contain the patented RoundUp ready gene.
[Percy Schmeiser] Whether it’s seeds blown in from your neighbours field, pollen flow from the wind or from bees,
If that happens to you, you no longer own your seeds, your plants,
they immediately, under patent law,become the ownership of the corporation.
[Jeremy Irons] Percy was taken to the Canadian Federal Court for patent infringement.
His defence, that the GM presence was accidental
was rejected by the court and in 2000 he was found guilty.
[Percy Schmeiser] They had no record of us ever obtaining their seed or buying their seed.
But they said that because our neighbour grew it and contaminated us –
we should not have been using their seed.
We ought to shopuld have known.
Well, that’s completely impossible.
A Canola seed whether its genetically altered or not, or organic,
it looks identically the same, unless you do DNA testing.
[Jeremy Irons] To date, over 140 US farmers have been prosecuted for infringement of intellectual property over seeds.
Thousands more have been investigated for so-called “seed piracy”.
[Henk] What are we supposed to do with seeds?
Seeds are supposed to be planted, multiplied, used, further adapted, etc etc.
That’s exactly what’s not allowed from the corporate mindset.
The corporations sell us the seed, or licence us
to use the seed in a specific way, in the way they are interested to produce it. Full stop.
[Liz Hosken] By controlling the seed you control the farmer.
By controlling the farmer you control the whole food system.
And that’s the legacy of genetics in farming.
[Jeremy Irons] Today, the GM market has spread beyond of North America,
and established itself in Argentina, Paraguy, Brazil and now in India.
Whilst the GM industry claims to be increasing yields and improving lives,
more and more farmers are reporting new and unexpected problems.
In the Indian state of Gujarat, hundreds of thousands of farmers,
persuaded to grow genetically modified BT cotton
– a crop which produces its own pesticide -
found that in time the pests developed their own resistance to the crop.
The rise of these “superpests” has forced the farmers to use ever-stronger pesticides.
[Vandana Shiva] Instead of controlling pests, and controlling weeds, you are getting super pests, and super weeds.
So even in the narrow domain of weed control and pest control, the technology is failing.
[Jeremy Irons] With the rising costs of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,
many farmers have been forced into a spiral of debt.
And the spread of GM cotton has been linked to a tragic increase of suicides among Indian farmers.
In Argentina, thousands of small farmers have been forced to leave their land,
unable to compete economically with highly mechanised monocrop farms.
Many non-GM farmers have found it impossible to avoid the RoundUp herbicide blowing in from neighbours land
and see their crops and their livelihoods perish.
And with the mass exodus of farmers from their land, farm biodiversity has dicreased still further.
Traditional crops have been replaced. Herbicide use has risen dramatically.
And hard learned knowledge and farming systems have been elbowed aside.
[Melaku Worede] With the loss of diversity you lose your security.
Because, diversity is synonymous with security. It also means improved livelihood.
It means improved nutrition. It means improved division of labour.
All this would be lost to one crop.
[Henk Hobbelink] We have to realise that diversity means survival.
Diversity means being able to continue to produce.
Being able to continue to be a farmer.
And without that I think it’s very important to realise that we’re simply not be able
to produce the food that we need if we allow that this kind of diversity is further eroded.
[Jeremy Irons] Behind the global push for GM, and its emergence in new countries in Africa, Asia and South America,
one message has underpinned its progress.
That the developing world is struggling and impoverished and unable to feed itself,
but that GM can turn around their beleaguered fortunes.
[Henk Hobbelink] The poor farmers out there, they are not really efficient, and they have these old seeds,
and they need to become more productive, and then the problems of hunger in the world are being solved.
That message is not based on facts at all.
[Kumi Naidoo] We are concerned about starving people in Africa.
We are concerned about starving people in Asia.
Let us be blunt about it.
It is driven by the bottom line, and the financial interests of those companies.
It is not driven by any public-spirited purpose.
[Zac Goldmsith] So it’s nothing to do with feeding the world.
It’s nothing to do with tackling some of these huge issues we’re facing today.
It’s about control of the food sector, of the food economy.
[Ramon Herrera] In reality it is all about control: stopping farmers
from having their own seeds
and at the same time...
... the eradication of independent food production.
The corporations want the control of the food production...
...in the hands of a very few.
[Vandana Shiva] It’s because genetic engineering is being brought to us by the old agrochemical industry,
which is interested in maintaining its agrochemical sales of herbicides and pesticides,
while also establishing a monopoly control on the seed -
that genetic engineering has gone in the totally wrong direction as far as agriculture is concerned.
[Jeremy Irons] Today, the seed and agro-chemical industry has largely fallen under the control of just a few key companies:
Hybrid Seed corporations like Dupont, Syngenta;
agro-chemical companies like Bayer and BASF;
and the GM giant Monsanto
Within this concentrated centre of power, lies not only the massive profits from seed production,
but the decision making and agenda setting,
which will ultimately establish the legacy of our global agricultural system.
In this future, crop, and seed diversity will be assigned to the dustbin of history
At a cost that we are only beginning to comprehend.
[Song] Dig your hand in the land
touch the toil and sorrow
in the soil where the greenbacks never grow
on what I borrowed.
Dig down and tell me where is my seed for tomorrow.
Dig your hand down in the land [Song]
[SEEDS OF HOPE]
[Jeremy Irons] The agrochemical and GM industry claims that small-scale,
agroecological farming, is backward and inefficient.
But the reality is that in spite of the unrelenting pressures they face,
it is these farmers who feed 70% of the world’s population.
These traditional farming systems use less land, less water and fewer resources.
They grow healthy, nutritional food, and nurture greater crop diversity.
They protect soils, water and ecosystems.
And they are proving more resilient in the face of climate change.
It is these farming methods that can show us the way forward for real food security.
[Vandana Shiva] Ecological systems: localised, biodiverse, are the ones that are really providing
food, nourishment, health and joy in eating for local communities.
We need to decentralise our food system,
and if we have to decentralise our food system, decentralise seed provisioning.
Seed sovereignity must become very much central to food sovereignty.
[Norman, Karima] We have not lost our seeds.
The problem we face is that they are dwindling.
We can still get them back.
They are still there.
[Mpathe] If we don’t take this opportunity we are going to lose the seed and lose the future.
The future of all, the future of our children.
[Liz Hosken] So farmers around the world are coming together, and are working for food sovereignty
the right for people to produce their own cultural food.
[Agnes Kivaa] When I farm my indigenous food...
I know for certain I will make a harvest.
And so, I know my children will eat.
[Caroline Lucas] I don’t think the public should ever underestimate the potential power that they have should they choose to use it.
And, who would have thought that Murdoch and News Corp could have been brought low by,
really by a sense of outrage.
I think if we have a much bigger public debate around the kinds of agriculture we want
and the kind of practices and techniques of some of those big seed corporations,
we might just get that same degree of outrage and hopefully a system in the long term,
that is better for people, and the planet.
[Mpathe] Then if we look at the ancestral way.
We find the solution to rebuild what has been destroyed.
Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
Remember, you cast a vote about your food system every time you shop.
Buy local, organic and seasonal food, and support farmers, markets and idependent shops.
Find out more about food sovereignty and the movements and campaigns which you can join and support by visiting
www.seedsoffreedom.info
Finally, thank yoy for taking the time to watch "Seeds Of Freedom"
Now, please help to sow seeds of change by sharing this film far and wide.
A film by: The Gaia Foundation & The Afrivan Biodiversity Network (ABN)
In collaboration with:
MELCA Ethiopia, GRAIN International & Navdanya International
Special Thanks to:
Dr Melaku Worrede, Dr Vandana Shiva, Coraline Lucas MO, Zac Goldsmith MP, John Vidal, Ramon Herrera, Henk Hobbelink, Liz Hosken, Kumi Naidoo, Percy Schmeiser, Gathuru Mburu, Mpatheleni Makaulule, The Gaia Foundation Team, Florina Tudose, Jason Taylor and the Source Project
And special thanks to the farming communities who are reviving their seed diversity and traditions to enchance biodiversity and food sovereignty
the communities of Wollo in Ethiopia, and particularly Mahammed and Ayalnesh, Chef Vhutanda of Venda South Africa, Norman form Karima in Kenya, Joseph from Kivaa in Kenya, Agnes from Kivaa in Kenya.
Thanks to the support from:
The Roddick Foundation,The Christensen Fund, The Swift Foundation, Swedbio, Norad
Archive Material:
Greenpeace International, Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), Friends of The Earth International, Prelinger Archive
Camera: Jess Phillimore, Jason Taylor, Damian Prestidge
Additional camera:Richard Decaillet, Joshua Baker, Jose Maria Noriega
Graphic Design: Camila Cardenosa
Sound Design: Jay Harris
A film by:Jess Phillimore
Jose Lutzenberger: 1926-2002
It is ten years since Jose Lutzenberger, fondly known as the father of the Brazilian enviromental movement, passed away.
We dedicate this film to the uneding determination and passion to demonstrate how social justice and ecological sanity are two sides of the same coin.
" A healthy cililization can only be one that harmonizes and integrates into the totality of life enhancing not demolishing it"
Jose Lutzenberger
2012