Seed Libraries Are Sprouting Up Across the Planet, and Corporate Dominated Govts Are Trying to Stop Them | Alternet
▻http://www.alternet.org/environment/seed-libraries-are-sprouting-across-planet-and-corporate-dominated-govts-a
De telles bibliothèques se développent dans l’espace même des bibliothèques de lecture publique, certains considérant qu’une semence est un système d’enregistrement du savoir, et à ce titre pleinement redevable de la logique des bibliothèques et la construction de communs.
Comme vous pouvez l’imaginer, l’industrie des semenciers est vent debout contre de telles bibliothèques de semences... il n’y a pas qu’en France que des activités qui ne font de mal à personne se voient opposer des règlementations concernant la « propriété intellectuelle ». Mais plus inquiétante encore est la démarche de cette responsable de l’Etat de Pennsylvanie qui estime que son pays serait mis en danger par « l’agro-terrorisme », dont les bibliothèques de semences pourraient être les vecteurs !
Le terrorisme est devenu l’argument ultime de tous ceux qui veulent brider les libertés et les initiatives populaires.
Faudrait me surveiller toutes ces graines fissa... tiens, en leur ajoutant un gène spécial de repérage, puis les scanner en masse, en faire des big data et confier le travail aux Renseignements généraux, car les services secrets sont déjà débordés ;-)))
Comment ? Ça existe déjà et ça s’appelle des OGM....
J’y crois pas !
Seed libraries—a type of agricultural commons where gardeners and farmers can borrow and share seed varieties, enriching their biodiversity and nutrition—have sprouted up across the U.S. in recent years, as more Americans seek connection to food and the land. This new variety of seed sharing has blossomed from just a dozen libraries in 2010 to more than 300 today. The sharing of seeds “represents embedded knowledge that we’ve collected over 10,000 years,” says Jamie Harvie, executive director of the Institute for a Sustainable Future, based in Duluth, Minnesota. “Healthy resilient communities are characterized not by how we control other people, and more about valuing relationships.”
Seed Libraries Rising
“Love the earth around you,” urges Betsy Goodman, a 27-year-old farmer in Western Iowa, where “most of the landscape is covered in uniform rows of corn and soybeans.” Working on an 11-acre organic farm that sprouts 140 varieties of tomatoes and 60 varieties of peppers, among other crops, Goodman has become something of a seed evangelist. In 2012, she launched the Common Soil Seed Library, just across the Missouri River in nearby Omaha, Nebraska—enabling area gardeners and farmers to borrow some 5,000 seed packets (112 different varieties) to date.
“It didn’t make sense to me that no one was perpetuating the cycle of seed and life,” says Goodman. “People have this idea that you put a seed in the ground, harvest your food, and let it die.” Goodman says she is working to perpetuate life. “The basis of our whole food system comes from the seed,” she says. “I think people are not generally conscious of how grateful we should be for our food diversity and wealth.”
Goodman sees the seed library as an essential reclaiming of farming traditions and local food security. “I want farmers to go back to saving seeds. It’s our responsibility to uphold our food system. It takes everybody.” But, she says, many farmers remain isolated and unaware of the seed-sharing movement. “The consciousness around this is not there yet. I haven’t really heard from farmers yet…The farmers buy their seed each year from Monsanto and Syngenta, this huge industrial system that’s very much in control of this state and surrounding states.” Farmers, she adds, “rely on these companies to buy their corn, they are very tied into these companies, and can’t even feed themselves off of the food they’re growing.”
Seed-Sharing Crackdown
But all this seed-sharing love is butting up against some prodigious economic and regulatory challenges. As the libraries spread across the US, they are catching scrutiny from agriculture officials in states such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa, who express concerns about unlabeled seed packets, and the spreading of contaminated seeds and noxious or invasive species.
One flashpoint in this battle is a small seed library in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, which ran into a regulatory dispute with the state’s department of agriculture. Last June, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture informed an employee of the Joseph T. Simpson Public Library that its seed library ran afoul of state seed laws and would have to shut down or follow exorbitant testing and labeling rules intended for commercial seed enterprises. County Commissioner Barbara Cross raised the specter of terrorism, telling local media, “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she said. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge...so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”
The library was forced to limit its sharing, holding a special seed swapping event instead. As Mechanicsburg seed librarian Rebecca Swanger explained to media at the time, “We can only have current-year seeds, which means 2014, and they have to be store-purchased because those seeds have gone through purity and germination rate testing. People can’t donate their own seeds because we can’t test them as required by the Seed Act.”
Saving the Libraries
As state agriculture agencies consider whether to curtail seed libraries, legislative efforts are underway in Nebraska, Minnesota, and other states, to protect them. The Community Gardens Act [pdf] currently moving through the Nebraska legislature would exempt seed libraries from state laws governing seed labeling and testing. In December 2014, the city council of Duluth, Minnesota passed a resolution supporting seed sharing “without legal barriers of labeling fees and germination testing.”
Perhaps more significantly, the Duluth resolution advocated reforming the Minnesota Seed Law to “support the sharing of seeds by individuals and through seed libraries,” by exempting these forms of sharing from the law’s labeling, testing, and permitting requirements. After one reform measure was withdrawn from the Minnesota legislature, activists are gearing up for another legislative push soon.
