• Real Farming Report - Whose seeds are they anyway? - The Ecologist
    http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2988494/real_farming_report_whose_seeds_are_they_anyway.html

    It is tempting to believe that Svalbard and Navdanya can coexist happily. When facing the apocalypse you can’t be picky in your choice of partner, and they represent two sides of the same coin after all. Both are protecting seed diversity: it’s simply that one does so in its original place, the other in a new location.

    For Vandana Shiva though, Svalbard is symptomatic of a dangerous shift in agriculture: it’s going hands-free. By locking seeds in what are essentially long-stay (exceedingly cold) ‘car parks’, they are open to being patented in the future: “While living seeds need to evolve ‘in situ’, patents on genomes can be taken through access to seed ‘ex situ’,” she warns.

    Projects that aim to map the genetic data of seeds held in gene banks rob farmers, "of their seeds and knowledge, it robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, its evolutionary history, its link to the soil and reduces it to “code.”" adds Shiva.

    Svalbard’s samples cannot be accessed by anyone other than their national depositor, but the vault is sponsored in part by two multinational agribusiness megaliths - DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred and Syngenta - as well as the Bill Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. Concerns over what they stand to gain are understandable, and conspiracy theories are rife (though whether there is any fire behind all the smoke remains to be seen).

    Money is - as ever - also at the heart of the debate. The Crop Trust, which funds the world’s gene banks, states: “These crop collections are also often threatened, most typically by inadequate funding”.

    Yet, the same is true of small-scale farming. People Need Nature’s Miles King states that in the UK: “farm subsidies are available only to farmers with more than 5 hectares, which excludes the producers it should be supporting”.

    #semences #conservation_in_situ #privatisation #appropriation