April 2006

As I write this, it’s a delicious spring day, full of the hope and renewal that comes with new life sprouting from the ground which in turn stimulates creative planning for the season ahead.

For me that includes ordering heritage seeds while the earth warms up and beds are prepared to nourish the green gifts to come. It is this promise of renewed life, like the promise of the sun’s return each morning, which defines us as human beings. It encourages us to be our most loving, nurturing, optimistic selves.

In Earthwatch in the last issue of Vitality, Paul Henderson alerted us to agriculture’s darker side, which threatens the very soul of the Earth; the production of “Terminator” seeds by greedy industrialists who desire to control worldwide food production for their own gain. I would never use the word evil, because most such things are born out of ignorance. However, each lab researcher and farmer willing to grow these Terminator seeds has had to tell themselves: “I am helping to produce seeds that are born sterile, so that the Earth and its human inhabitants can no longer produce plants without paying for new seeds, whose genetic copyright “we” have the right to take from G..d.” To then continue with what they are doing is an abandonment of creation itself.

It reminds me of the ignorance when certain invaders arrived in North America and slammed a stick covered in fabric in the ground and announced to the native people that they now belonged to a King across the water (who now owned their copyright). It was so ridiculous it was almost laughable: however 500 years later, robbed of their language and culture, Inuit children can barely get through their teens without committing suicide.

Surely we can see the consequences of this line of genetic slavery. Yet, to our shame, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture, along with New Zealand and Australia, are the loudest proponents of lifting the United Nations ban on Terminator Technology.

My first, less evolved, response was for all of those involved in Terminator technology to be banished to an island with only a bag of sterile seeds. 

While I was dreaming up a revenge fantasy, my neighbours gathered on a Sunday afternoon to address their concerns by visualizing a desired outcome. Collectively they put their hearts and minds to seeing the UN moratorium on Terminator technology being re-instated and strengthened. Others simply visualized the world without Terminator technology and held the image until it felt complete. Some pooled together and traveled to Ottawa where an open forum took place, with a live feed to the first day of the Biodiversity Conference in Brazil, where the Canadian government continued their lobby against the UN de facto moratorium.

They returned with disturbing news. Robbie Anderman of Cool Hemp shared these highlights. Firstly, the company that developed the technology says Suicide Seed technology can work in any species, and the main reason they developed this is to “stop those cowboys from saving their seeds.”

Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmental activist, flew in from India for this meeting. She told the group that the biotech companies actively lie to farmers to get them to grow their seeds (40,000 Indian farmers in 10 years have committed suicide after putting all their resources into GM crops, letting go of the seeds that they developed over thousands of years, and losing everything). She does call this Terminator Technology “evil.”

Only shareholders in biotech companies will profit. 1.5 billion farmers, most of whom are women in this world, will be disempowered, as will the people who eat this “dead food.”

I highly recommend going to www.banterminator.org and sending a letter to PM Stephen Harper, Minister of Agriculture Chuck Strahl, Minister of Environment Rona Ambrose and Minister of International Cooperation Josée Verner. The letters are already written so it’s quick and easy, or if you’d like, their phone numbers are provided as well.

If you are buying plants for your garden this year ask at the nursery for heritage varieties and, if purchasing seeds, you can ask for certified organic seeds from companies such as Seeds of Change and Aimers Certified Organic (Hamilton). (Ed note: Or order online from Richters Herbs.)  Energetically you can affirm the renewing power of plants by participating in Patricia Bear Claw’s Morning Glory Project. (In March Vitality’s Letters to the Editor she promised to trade a Morning Glory seed for your inspirational garden stories.)

Or we could each of us expand ourselves to our normal non-physical size (which I imagine is about the diameter of the Sun) and place the Earth inside our belly, dream a beautiful world full of loving nurturing optimists and rebirth a beautiful new world for spring.

On an optimistic note, here is a story of Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese man working high up in the biotech industry. He was walking home one day, feeling despondent about the chemicals involved in industrial agriculture, when he looked into a ditch and saw a clump of rice growing there after a heavy rain. At that moment he had a revelation that we should observe the Earth and work with her rhythms.

Rather than plough and use pesticides to grow rice, he let the fields flood naturally (which killed the weeds), and planted by throwing rice seeds inside balls of mud on the now naturally drained fields (usually rice was hand-planted because ducks ate the loose scattered seeds). He quit his job and became an inspiration in Japan, where now over a million acres cultivate organic rice using his method of working with nature.