| from - http://www.primalseeds.org/seedissues.htm Seed Issues
There are rows of different food products available in the supermarkets, but the variety on offer is an illusion. The essential foodstuffs that make up all of these products are derived from fewer and fewer sources. The number of differing crop varieties and animal breeds used in agriculture has declined massively in the last few decades. Whilst we are able to buy out of season fruits imported from around the world, the hundreds of native fruit varieties once available in greengrocers are no longer. What has happened is that a few crop varieties produced by plant breeders are now planted extensively by most farmers in large-scale monoculture. Modern varieties have a very high rate of turnover. This added to commercial demands to produce new varieties cheaply, leads to a progressive downward spiral in diversity, as breeders re-cycle the same breeding materials.
The modern varieties have been bred for characteristics useful to modern industrial agriculture, the needs of supermarkets and the food processing industry.
This has been at the expense of taste, nutritional content an resistance
to crop pests and diseases. They are known as “high yielding varieties”,
but in order to obtain high yields they require high inputs in the form
of fertilisers, pesticides and water
Loss of crop biodiversity A survey by RAFI found that 97% of varieties once listed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture have been lost in the last 80 years. According to the UNDP Filipino farmers once grew thousands of kinds of rice; today only two varieties account for 98% of the area sown. Mexico has lost an estimated 80% of its varieties of corn since the 1930’s, and of 10,000 wheat and 8000 rice varieties being grown in China in 1949, only 1000 wheat and 50 rice varieties remained by the 1970’s. In Western Europe and North America where most of the old varieties have been lost, those still preserved have come be known as heritage or heirloom varieties. Heirlooms are maintained by a few dedicated groups and individuals that understand that the diversity of crop species is essential to agriculture. Illegal seeds Most of these organisations continue to offer unlisted seeds in defiance of this law. However the French authorities have taken a particularly harsh line, leading to the closure an inspirational small seed company that was dedicated to the preservation of biodiversity. Terre de Semences once distributed over 1000 rare traditional vegetable varieties all over Europe, now they have to find other ways to fund the maintenance of their important collection and distribute seed to others. Unsurprisingly the large-scale commercial seed industry has little interest in maintaining unprofitable varieties on the Seed Lists. When the new European seed list, the Common Catalogue, was introduced back in 1980 the seed companies produced a list of 1500 varieties from 23 vegetable species that were not to be included because they were duplicates. 1490 of these were found by HDRA to be distinct varieties, they had been simply deleted from existence. Furthermore to register a new variety on the National Seed List that variety must undergo a series of tests to prove it is uniform, standard and is highly productive using modern farming methods, that it has economic value. A lot of the old crop varieties would not have reached these criteria, and yet it is this very lack of uniformity that makes these old crops highly adaptable and durable. Importance of biodiversity These crops are still vital to many of the world’s small farmers today. For example, in Turkey wheat farmers grow local landraces that are adapted to their non-irrigated, hillside fields because they out perform modern varieties there. In the Peruvian Andes one farming household may grow and maintain several dozen varieties of potato. The ancient Andeans grew over 2000 distinct varieties of potato, and another nine species with edible roots and tubers. Farmers in Chiapas, Mexico cultivate ancient local maize landraces on infertile soils. Farmers benefit from directly from the diversity they maintain. Diversity within the landraces makes them much more adaptable and more reliable under difficult conditions, leading to less variability in productivity. Greater diversity in the form of different crops and different varieties of crops leads to less susceptibility to pests, diseases and fluctuating weather conditions. Old varieties also excel in qualities of taste and nutritional value. The new varieties created by plant breeders are not inventions; the materials from which these varieties are bred are the landraces and the wild relatives of crop species. As an ever-greater proportion of the land is changed from it’s wild state by human activities, the relatives of crop plants are also becoming much rarer. The ability of breeders to create new resistant varieties depends on availability of crop biodiversity and the loss of diversity gives future farmers and breeders less options when looking for varieties resistant to pests and disease and hardy under different growing conditions. A “miserable looking” variety of wheat was collected by Jack Harlan in Turkey in 1948 that seemed to have few qualities of interest to growers. This was later found to have resistance to stripe rust, which had suddenly become a major problem in the early 1950’s. This wheat is now used in breeding all new varieties for the Northwest of the American continent. Seed Banks But there are serious drawbacks of this approach to conserving crop biodiversity. Varieties stored in seed banks are adapting to the conditions of storage. Varieties have to be replanted to regenerate viable seed on a regular basis. Small samples of seed collected and stored from each "growing out" result in a continual depletion of variability and adaptability. The most important wheat collection in Asia, held at the University of Kyoto, grows only five plants per variety for regeneration. Stored varieties become very uniform and adapted to the artificial environment of cold storage. Conclusion Primal seeds have compiled a list of sources of heirloom seed.
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