SEED DECLARATION,
INDIA, 2012
The seed is the
first link in the food chain. It is a sacred code of evolution, an embodiment
of life and memory, a latent world waiting to unfold. The seed gives itself to
earth – warm soil, air and moisture – and comes alive. Drawing energy from the
sun, it grows and multiplies manifold. Each seed and plant is unique.
Like the
earth and the sky, the immense biodiversity of seeds is our collective heritage.
Gifted by nature, and the cumulative innovations, adaptations and selections of
many generations of farming communities, these seeds belong to all. They are our
most vital wealth, essential for survival. They cannot be seen as mere commodities,
to be bought and sold at will.
Allowing any
variety of seed or plant to become a proprietary resource is a violation of
natural justice, and a great suicidal blunder of modern economic civilization.
An estimated
80,000 plant species, and many varieties of each species, have been used as
human food, though barely 150 species have been cultivated on a significant
scale. But less than 30 crops now account for more than 95% of the human diet,
and just 8 crops (of very few varieties) provide three-quarters of all human
food.
India is a global centre of origin and diversity of rice. Over 60,000 distinct
rice seed varieties have been collected by Indian agricultural research centres.
Many more yet grew in farmers’ fields, adapted to diverse conditions. About
19,000 rice varieties were collected by Dr Richharia from just Chattisgarh and
Madhya Pradesh, of which 1600 varieties were found to be high-yielding. We have
a rich diversity too of wheat, millets, pulses, coarse grains, oilseeds,
vegetables, tubers, fruits, spices, and medicinal plants. About 25,000 Indian varieties
of dry-land crops are held by ICRISAT alone.
But with
the mono-cultural spread of a few dwarf exotic varieties of wheat and rice, and
hybrid sorghum and corn, under the onslaught of the so-called ‘Green
Revolution’, much of our immense agro-biodiversity is now eroded or severely
threatened in their original croplands. Only a fraction of such diversity yet survives,
mainly in some areas populated by indigenous peoples.
Much of our crop seed wealth has ended up
in distant gene banks – like the IRRI in Philippines, CIMMYT in Mexico, or Fort
Collins in USA – far from its rightful owners and the cultures in which they
were rooted. This wealth represents the collective bio-cultural heritage –
including biodiversity, food culture, ecological knowledge and value systems –
of local communities that freely shared and passed them down from generation to
generation. It is also the most vital resource that must be reclaimed by them
to safeguard their future livelihood options and the people they feed,
especially in a scenario of climate change and increased farm vulnerability to
erratic weather conditions.
With the inevitable growing scarcity and
mounting prices of non-renewable fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers, as well
as rising water shortages, the HIV (High Input Variety) seeds supplied by
agro-industry – tailored to optimal conditions – are sure to face a sharp
decline in yield. Unless our farmers are able to adopt bio-diverse
agro-ecological agriculture with their own traditional, locally adapted seeds,
severe food scarcity looms ahead.
Today, the danger to our priceless
heritage of agro-biodiversity – from proprietary commercial hybrid seds and GM
(genetically modified) crops – is graver than ever. The GM crops threaten
severe contamination of our local crop varieties through cross-pollination, as
seen in the case of corn (maize) in Mexico. The aggressive marketing of GM
crops also drives local varieties out of circulation, as witnessed by the near
total erosion of traditional cotton varieties in India.
The creation
of ‘Intellectual Property Rights’ (IPRs) of plant breeders over seeds and plants,
especially under the ‘Trade Related Intellectual Properties’ (TRIPs) provisions
of the World Trade Organization, combined with restrictions on unregistered
traditional seed varieties, is an assault on our agro-biodiversity and its
free, unhindered use. Such criminalizing of the natural rights of farmers and
farming communities, whose ancestors nurtured such diversity in the first
place, is a mockery of natural justice. Together with the sanctioning of
genetically polluting GM crops, this represents a concerted thrust by
agri-business to wipe out our rich heritage of agro-biodiversity. All legislations
and treaties that abet the biodiversity privatization of our collective genetic
heritage, carving out proprietary spheres for exclusive use, must be discarded
into the dustbin of history. Our failure to do so will ultimately destroy our
agriculture and many millions of agricultural livelihoods, and the food and
nutritional security of all.
We thus hereby adopt the following
seed declaration:
1)
We assert the farming communities’
and indigenous peoples’ sovereign rights over their collective bio-cultural
heritage, including the right to freely plant, use, reproduce, select, improve,
adapt, save, share, exchange or sell seeds, without restriction or hindrance,
as they have done for past millennia.
2)
We reject the validity of any private or corporate proprietary claim
of ownership over any variety of seed, crop, plant or life form, and
particularly any variety rooted in our natural heritage, cultural history and
identity.
3)
We demand a ban on GM seeds and
species, and strict enforcement of corporate liability for any contamination of
seeds/plants, and any damage to the health of farmers, consumers, animals, croplands
and eco-systems from the illegal use/release of GM seeds and species.
4)
We urge our government to partner with
our farmers, gardeners and civil society organizations in systematically and transparently
recording and documenting in a freely accessible database our genetic wealth,
particularly the diversity of our crops and crop varieties, originating in or
found in various regions and cultures of India.
5)
We demand that our government
facilitate and simplify farmers’ and cultivators’ access to our heritage seed
varieties from national and international germplasm collections, and support
their decentralized conservation in the croplands and regions of origin.
6)
We assert our unconditional right to
pass on our collective bio-cultural heritage and the health of our croplands
and eco-systems to future generations.
7)
We demand that our government fulfill
its responsibility of safeguarding and regenerating our collective bio-cultural
heritage and the health of our croplands and eco-systems.
8)
We call upon our government to
pro-actively promote and support bio-diverse and holistic ecological agriculture
to meet our basic, priority needs in a sustainable manner.
The Seed Festival Declaration, Mumbai-Pune, February 2012
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