The other day my great-uncle Alfred gave
me a handful of the year’s green beans, dried and ready for
planting next summer. “Give them something high up to grow on,” he
told me. “They’ll grow seven feet tall.”
Alfred knows.
He’s planted this variety in his garden for seven years now, every
year saving a bit of his harvest for the next year’s seed. And for
good reason: This variety is resistant to a common garden pest
known as the black aphid. As green beans go, this is a true
garden-variety green bean. Its flat pod is delicate and tender, its
fresh taste sublime in a salad. The pulpy beans in the produce
aisle of your supermarket — more roadworthy than table-ready —
are a distant relative at best.
Alfred’s green beans have
a history that goes back 60 years. That’s when his neighbors
settled in the Seattle, Wash., neighborhood where he still lives.
They were Greek immigrants, and a satchel of seeds was tucked in
the luggage they carried. These beans had come from the old
country, a place where vegetables are precious, almost like gems —
never just commodities to be bought and sold.
Like his
Greek neighbors, Uncle Alfred saves seed every year. As a kid on
the farm, this is how Alfred learned to prepare for the coming
year: You save the best of the crop. It’s natural, like breathing.
In Guatemala, Mayan subsistence farmers hang next year’s seed, the
most perfect ears of yellow, white and blue corn, from the beams of
their adobe homes.
On the Great Plains, farmers fill
10,000 bushel-silos with saved seed. And in a quiet Seattle
neighborhood, Uncle Alfred keeps a 60-year-old neighborhood
tradition alive by saving a few strings of beans for next year’s
garden.
Every seed contains a genetic signature —
Alfred’s green beans included — that does not belong to anyone.
This signature is as public as the air we breathe. Yet recently,
U.S. companies such as Monsanto have won permission to patent the
genetic signatures contained within their genetically engineered
seeds. In this way, business is now selling what has never before
been up for sale. It’s changing the way we grow our food.
Private ownership comes at a price that the well-oiled public
relations machine of the biotech industry neglects to tell us.
What’s at risk is the millennia-old practice of saving seed. That’s
because when farmers plant genetically-engineered crops such as
corn and soybeans, they are no longer allowed to put aside the best
of their crop for next year.
Put another way, if Uncle
Alfred’s green beans were an engineered variety, he’d be breaking
the law by saving them.
The patented plants we’re talking
about boast some unusual characteristics that border on science
fiction. The leaves of the new Monsanto corn contain a bacteria
that wards off insect pests. It’s considered a plant that packs its
own pesticide. What’s worrisome about these genetically engineered
varieties of corn is that their sci-fi abilities can spread to
other plants. This means that this so-called “terminator
technology” could end up in a neighbor’s crop, and in the era of
globalization, your neighbor doesn’t necessarily live next door.
Genetically engineered corn has appeared in the crops of
subsistence farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico, though nobody knows how it
got there.
The new technology has tipped the cart of the
world’s farmers. “All of the traditional varieties could be lost,”
says seed collector Kent Whealy. “Genetic contamination means that
Monsanto could control all the seed a farmer could save.”
He ought to know. For more than 20 years, he has run the Iowa-based
Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit group with a collection of more
than 20,000 varieties of heirloom seeds. By collecting these
varieties, Seed Savers hopes to preserve seeds that could otherwise
go extinct as manipulated varieties spread.
Whealy says
there is something consumers can do. We can follow the lead of the
European Union and ask decision-makers in Washington, D.C., to
require the labeling of all foods containing engineered
ingredients. We can also press food companies to stop including
genetically engineered ingredients in their products.
It’s time to act: Our supermarket shelves are already full of
genetically engineered ingredients while the jury is still out on
what’s safe to eat. Labeling genetically engineered foods is a step
towards educating consumers about what they’re feeding their
families, and how corporate agriculture is changing the way we grow
our food.
Dustin Solberg is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a Westerner
temporarily living in Decatur, Georgia.
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