Seed Economics

Sinéad Fortune with Amber Hayward

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Seed is the currency of hope, of potential. These life-bearing parcels are the foundations of our entire food system. And yet, around them, power dynamics have sprouted. An increase in seed privatization, research has shown, has resulted in more than sixty percent of the world’s seed being owned by four petrochemical companies and a seventy-five percent loss in plant genetic diversity since the turn of the twentieth century. It is time to reevaluate our modern relationship with the seed economy.

Nature is inherently generous, not only with her bounty but also with her knowledge. What can an understanding of seed teach us about the potential to regrow an economic system based on abundance and reciprocity?

On this point, Dr. Angelika Hilbeck of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology believes that “the art of agriculture is to follow ecological rules to produce food, learn from nature, work with nature to understand how nature does it. Growing seeds is knowledge-intensive. You need to understand. You need to be an artist.”

Seed is the currency of hope.

The Gaia Foundation has been reviving biocultural diversity alongside the earth’s best custodians — and artists — for nearly forty years. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, our Seed Sovereignty Programme is restoring seed diversity and resilience with the help of small-scale commercial growers, community groups, and vegetable patch gardeners. At the heart of this effort is undoing the recent drive toward seed privatization and instead putting seed back into the hands of communities, where it rested safely for millennia.

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Not all seed is created equal. There are two main types of seed: hybrid and open-pollinated.

Hybrid seeds (sometimes called F1 seeds) are the type most commonly available from garden centers and online retailers. They are bred for particular characteristics, which means they produce exactly what it says on the packet for one season. Due to this breeding process, however, the seeds the plants produce cannot be saved. This means that more seeds need to be bought each year, resulting in a decline in genetic diversity as the same varieties are sown each season. Controlling seed in this way is very much in line with an industrial farming system, where crops planted in regimented rows yield identical (but not necessarily delicious and nutritious) produce.

Open-pollinated seeds breed true to type. They can be saved each year and sown the next year to produce the same crops, slightly more adapted to the conditions in which they were grown. Open-pollinated seeds thus result in a more diverse and resilient crop adapted to ever-changing circumstances. In the face of climate breakdown and extreme weather events, this is becoming increasingly vital: society is entirely dependent on a secure and productive food system. This type of growing is more intuitive, as it involves working with the plants’ needs and the conditions they find themselves in.

It is interesting, then, to explore this idea of a seed economy and understand how these different types of seed produce opposing systems.

Seed can be considered the first real form of currency from the dawn of economics and agriculture.

Seed can be considered the first real form of currency from the dawn of economics and agriculture. A reliable seed stock ensured a bountiful source of food for the coming season. Without seed, the safeguards for the future were lost. In this sense, seed saving resembled a form of banking: seeds were stored to be used, shared, and traded in future seasons, and with this came resilience, security, and wealth. To this day, society still depends on these beautiful, tiny, fragile bundles that feed us all.

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Two main types of seed systems sprout from our reliance on seed: a growers’ seed system and a commodity seed system.

In a growers’ seed system, growers freely save, use, exchange, and sell seeds. Food is grown in a way that adapts to changes in the environment, making communities stronger and supplies more resilient. Seed supported by healthy, biodiverse ecosystems improves both agricultural conditions and human health.

A commodity seed system is centered around profit and ownership. Today, the four global petrochemical companies that control sixty percent of the global seed market (as well as seventy-five percent of the global pesticides market) circulate homogeneous varieties of seeds that are modified to withstand (and depend on) harmful chemical inputs (herbicides, pesticides, fungicides) and patented so that anyone who is found using them without having bought them can be sued and, in some cases, imprisoned.

What is really being sold is not seed at all but contractual permission to grow a specific variety of seed for one season only.

This idea that a seed can be “owned” is new. It allows corporations to effectively ban traditional, adapted, free seeds, legally binding growers to hybrid varieties reliant on chemicals. What is really being sold is not seed but contractual permission to grow a specific variety of seed for one season only. In Ghana, for example, where cowpea is a dietary staple, Monsanto (one of those four giant agrochemical corporations) has patented a genetically modified cowpea species. The Plant Variety Protection Act in Ghana means that farmers caught using traditional seed can be imprisoned for ten to fifteen years. Local growers, therefore, can no longer use their own cowpea seeds, which have been passed down and adapted to local land for generations.

Impositions like these are accepted as government-backed schemes fueling a shift toward scaled-up industrialized agriculture and away from reciprocal agricultural practices stemming from Indigenous knowledge systems. Yet, in the words of Michael Fakhri, Special Rapporteur on the right to food to the UN Human Rights Council, “Seeds are so central to people’s cultures and food systems [that] to control seeds is to control life.”

But can seed really be owned? Every time a new variety is developed, only a fraction of the seed’s genetic makeup is modified. For the food we consume today, we owe gratitude to thousands of years of seed stewardship by communities who freely have been sharing their seeds, not the corporations undermining this history for profit. Seed can (and perhaps should) be considered part of the commons. Not owned but enjoyed, tended to, and passed on by many hands, paws, and claws.

For the food we consume today, we owe gratitude to thousands of years of seed stewardship by communities who freely shared their seeds.

One interesting take on this issue comes from a project established in the United States called the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), which has now spread globally (GOSSI). The idea is that smaller-scale seed breeders should be able to sell seeds they have taken time to develop while keeping them free from patents, licenses, and other restrictions of freedom. A group of seed breeders has signed a pledge to this effect, meaning that while the breeders receive remuneration for their work, growers can save and share the seeds they buy, and the resulting crops can naturally cross-pollinate without an ensuing lawsuit for the farmer. This is perhaps a good example of how a growers’ seed system can fit within our current economic context.

The magic really happens, though, when we look beyond this context. We can then begin to truly learn from these tiny beads of life containing every future harvest. Returning to the generosity of nature, we can understand the notion of a seed economy from a more-than-human perspective beyond a narrow anthropocentric focus.

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Returning to the generosity of nature, we can understand the notion of a seed economy from a more-than-human perspective.

Our dominant economic system thrives on the notion of scarcity, be that real or manufactured scarcity. Believing something is scarce breeds fears of that something running out, driving competition, and giving rise to privatization and ownership. This is at odds with nature. Treasures in the living world are abundant, given freely, and shared mutually. There is no need to hoard if we trust more will come — which it will, if we only take what we need and reciprocate with care.

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Anyone who has harvested seeds knows the vast quantities each plant produces — more than one person alone could possibly use. Seeds encourage sharing and gifting, not private ownership.

Treasures in the living world are abundant, given freely, and shared mutually.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her wonderful new book The Serviceberry, delves more deeply into this notion of nature operating through a gift economy. Provisions and offerings are circulated “without explicit expectations of direct compensation.” This system is not regulated but affords an inbuilt collective responsibility to reciprocate these “gifts of the Earth.”

Plants produce far more seed than they need, each kernel wrapped up in a juicy, sweet, nourishing package for bird or beast to enjoy and carry far away, spreading offspring elsewhere. These abundant gifts are offered in return for the movement of seeds far beyond the reach of the plant alone.

As Kimmerer elaborates, “When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. . . . Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.”

The seed and its generosity, its purpose and ability to replicate bountifully, is a stubborn opponent of the industrial food system. However, hybridization, patents, and genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) organisms all threaten the very nature of seed. These efforts to control seed could be purposeful attempts to counteract their inbuilt resistance to commodification by making seed static, scarce, and linear to preserve our reigning economic model.

If, however, we remember the seed’s abundance — saving, sharing, and adapting to its image — we will have the grounds for a flourishing, resilient food system equipped to address food insecurity and climate change. And this is not to mention the flavor and nutritional benefits of seeds not grown simply for uniformity and financialization.

Seeds encourage sharing and gifting, not private ownership.

Should we, then, continue to accept the attempted control of seed, or should we strive to learn from its very nature? What kind of economy do we choose to be actors in: one of scarcity and commodification or one of abundance, gratitude, and reciprocity? If we can open ourselves to accepting these gifts of the earth for what they are, can we reciprocate through a system that serves life?

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Support the Cause: Join us in the drive toward seed sovereignty with training, resources, and community connections at seedsovereignty.info

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Sinéad Fortune is Programme Lead for The Gaia Foundation’s Seed Sovereignty Programme. Her experience spans community food movements, sustainable food production, science education, and behavioral change. When she isn’t working in seed sovereignty, Sinéad can be found wandering the woods looking for interesting mushrooms or playing her fiddle.

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Amber Hayward works on communications and events for The Gaia Foundation, crafting content across the Seed Sovereignty and We Feed the UK programs. Her background is in political ecology and environmental justice campaigning, with a strong interest in the intersection of ecological and social issues.