Isprout in India, as my many ancestors did. My place of birth tells the story of the land, air, water and cultures of the area. Several persons have either kept my lineage or even mixed my pedigree. Even though I evolve, I remain rooted to where I stand. Yet, I can travel and have many relatives dispersed across the world. But I belong to no one particular person or nation. There is a large family that both looks after me and whom I feed.
I am the seed. I am life.
India’s seed diversity
India is the land of many Bharats. It is also the land of mega diversity in seeds. Diversity means there is a mélange of crop varieties. The Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) has itself classified India into over 20 agro-ecological zones. The seed diversity in these zones form the basis for the many local food cultures and socio-cultural practices associated with them.
Also in the many little seed republics – local peasant communities organised around their seed systems – your identity is determined by the seed that you sow, grow or gather – thus, the cotton farmers in Telangana, millet growers in Andhra Pradesh, paddy cultivators in Kerala, chilli growers in Nagaland, (wild) vegetable gatherers in tribal Odisha, etc.
Nonetheless, most traditional seed systems involve the multi-cropping of varieties. Seed diversity is an insurance against the uncertainties of the future, whether economic or environmental. If all our farms and fields would sow only one kind of seed, then there is a risk of losing all in time of a disaster, like a disease. Traditional varieties selected by farmers that are flood-resistant or drought-resistant can withstand several days of submergence, and survive long periods without water respectively, and still bear grain. Also, if the price of one crop were to drop in the market, at least others would fetch a better price.
‘Traditional’ seeds
A distinction needs to be drawn between traditional seeds and traditional methods of farming. You might be growing certain crops by traditional methods of cultivation, but that does not automatically mean that you are growing traditional seeds. Such seeds are like heirloom, passed on from one generation to the next. They are long-established varieties that have withstood the test of time and are culturally appropriate, socially relevant and ecologically sustainable. They are seeds that peasants and small farmers have developed themselves, as against sourced from the seed industry, whether public or private sector. Farmers’ own seed have helped India’s farmers in some parts to stay independent of the seed market. This makes it possible to realise the idea of seed sovereignty. Losing control over seed and more so, losing farm-saved seed means reliance on external sources for seed.
All of us as consumers of the end products of the seeds – grain, flour, etc., may not be buying enough for the demand for sustainable production from traditional crops. The mindset that ‘modern’ seed varieties are better, may have so seeped into our thinking that we inadvertently reject local seeds as being old, outdated or of inferior quality. The first step in restoring ‘traditional’ seeds their due respect is perhaps to stop terming them traditional. It also entails revisiting your food cultures with a sense of pride.
There might be many of us also completely unaware of the entire seed architecture behind the food on our plates, and the food products on the store shelves. This means there are lesser people involved in the making of public policies on the seed. Policy makers, scientists and seed businesses then occupy this space. They, rather than seed savers and farmer-breeders themselves, have their say on seed laws. Even though there might exist customary rules on seeds at the local level. Just as the seed, the laws on them must branch out from the ground up.
But it is sad that instead of reviving and conserving our traditional seed varieties, we are slowly losing them. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) makes known a worrying fact that since the 1900s, the world has lost about 75% of plant genetic diversity.
This is due to several reasons. Monocropping of large areas under corporate agriculture threatens agro biodiversity. New proprietary technologies in the seed sector, such as hybrids and genetically modified varieties, are being massively marketed as part of ‘modernising’ agriculture. These replace traditional seeds. Modern day seeds also require chemical inputs, which poison the soil and water, thereby also damaging the health of the natural environment that traditional seeds rely on to thrive.
Conservation politics
How are the traditional seeds conserved? This question can be answered in different ways, depending on where you are. If you were in a village setting, whether individually at the household level or collectively as a community, you would save seed on site. This is called in situ conservation. Those who believe that conserving is about keeping something alive in its natural settings, prefer this mode. Doing so allows for the seed to adapt and evolve in an ever-changing climate. It also guarantees safekeeping of seeds close to the ones who are actually growing them. Socially, it performs another role, that of securing the role of the knowledge-holders, especially women in their communities.
If you were a scientist, whether in the public or the corporate sector, you would preserve seeds in a gene bank, just as money and other valuables are stored in a locker in a bank. You would take them out in time of need. So it is with seed.
The formal seed sector keeps them quite literally in the deep freeze! The biggest of them is the Global Seed Vault on an Arctic island named Svalbard, where a back up of the world’s seeds lies frozen. There are national level gene banks maintained under the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, as well as at the state-level agricultural universities and research institutes. There are also 15 international gene banks, organised crop-wise around the world under the auspices of the CGIAR (Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres). Two of these are in Asia:
Today, ICRISAT’s gene bank in India holds seeds of about 120,000 accessions of pearl millet, sorghum, chickpea, pigeon pea, groundnut, and six small millets (finger millet, foxtail millet, barnyard millet, proso millet, kodo millet, and little millet), including wild relatives from 144 countries. These are from the farmers’ fields the world over, as well as from national collections. They are kept as in-trust collections on behalf of the FAO. ICRISAT is under legal obligation to maintain these as international public goods (IPGs). This means that the seeds cannot become someone’s private property.
Seed laws
Laws and policies cannot be allowed to permit exclusive property rights on the seed. They have to create a supportive environment for local seeds to be developed and distributed.
The formal state through its laws and policies, declares the legal status of seeds in the country. While under international law, seeds are no longer common heritage of humankind, but they are not the invention of a single person warranting patent or patent-like legal protection.
Central seed laws determine the kind of rights on the planting material, as well as on the harvested produce from it. This has become more centralised since the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1960s, despite agriculture being a state subject under the Constitution of India, and despite the decentralised decision-making envisaged by the constitutional amendments of 1992. There are a host of laws that relate to seeds (see box ‘List of laws’, page 9), but despite provisions on conservation therein, not all have been invoked to safeguard traditional seeds locally.