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Guardians of the Seed



This is a trailer for a much longer film on the same topic that Seed Savers
produced over three years, the one-hour documentary , “Our Seeds”, available here

Our food plants originate in areas of the world where the poorest people now live. They domesticated wild plants over the last 10,000 years. Let’s honour, assist and join those who continue to develop and maintain the genetic diversity of tomorrow’s food.

We all need to act either in concert or as individuals. Governments alone cannot be entrusted with this richness. This was evident in the latest international controversy (July 2010) about a large Russian in-situ collection of berry and fruit plants threatened with obliteration, and the destruction of a collection of coffee trees at the Australian Alstonville Department of Agriculture Research Station in 1997. Similarly the colossal permafrost seed bank (Svalbard in Norway) does not allow for seeds needing to adapt to climate change.

Who are the Guardians of the Seed?

This film clip above shows some of the guardians of the seed in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, India, Taiwan, Italy and France.

As ninety year old small-scale Italian farmer/seed saver, Ennio near Orvieto, says, “People come to me for seeds when they have lost theirs.” We recorded him by his cherry tree and in a very modest tumble-down shed where he keeps his precious seed collection. In the film we also see Ilia, an eighty year old who supplies the Orvieto weekly market with an enormous array of greens and vegetables grown on steep terraces at the base of the fortified city. She maintains the seed of all her varieties. No chemicals.

The Erosion of Local Varieties

Local varieties are those that are adapted to any one region’s climate, culture and cuisine. An example in the film is Joseph, a small-scale farmer in the northern Pyrenees, France, who grows just a few rows of grapes to make wine for his family’s consumption. They are the “Madiran” variety that suit his highland region, and the wine his palate. Customarily pink roses are grown at the end of rows of vines to act as indicators of fungal disease and you’ll see them next to Joseph.

The danger is the erosion of these varieties. We use rice as an example through the device of an animated map. It shows how the number of rice varieties in India has reduced from hundreds of thousands to a sorry situation now where just four varieties dominate industrial farming’s rice production. All is not lost, but as little as one family are the guardians of any one of those varieties. The message is: we need to act soon.

Centres of Diversity

It is interesting to consider where food plants originate, for there you will find the wild relatives and therefore the greatest diversity. There the cultivated interacts with the wild. The eight recognised centres of diversity of domesticated crops are animated on a Gene Libraries map with just a few examples of crops that originate in each:

  • South East Asia – mandarin, banana, sugar cane
  • East Asia – orange, soya bean, tea
  • South Asia – rice, cucumber, eggplant
  • Middle East – onion, apple, wheat
  • East Africa – coffee, watermelon
  • Mediterranean – pea, lettuce, grape
  • South America – potato, tomato, bean
  • Central America – corn, squash, chili, cocoa
  • From these centres domesticated plants spread across the globe.

Seed Collecting and Replanting

Leaving plants go to seed is only part of the natural process, as Dr Saviana Parodi, an Italian gardening microbiologist, explains. Collecting and cleaning seeds is also fairly simple. We see a peach seed sprouting into a seedling (grown in the vineyards of the northern Pyrenees), rice heads in India, the collecting of broccoli seed capsules and the shaking of small black onion seeds from a seed head.

Propagules

Included in the definition of “seeds”, are propagules, that is cuttings, divisions, roots and tubers, of plants propagated vegetatively. We see sweet potato tubers, a PNG woman diving into a pile of compost with a cutting of sweet potato.

Good Seeds are the Basis of Good Food

Only good seed can produce nutritious, delicious food. We see coffee raked in India, broad beans picked in a small garden in Italy, bamboo shoots being steamed in Taiwan, choko tips going onto a pot on a fire in PNG, and an earth oven with sweet potatoes, bananas, taro, chokos and ferns.

We spent time with all these seed guardians while filming. They often take part in projects we work with. We visited their gardens and ate the food they produced from them – Anna’s broad beans (by the way originating in the Mediterranean area), Emilio’s lettuce, Ennio’s tomatoes, Ilia’s zucchini, traditional rice from a wheelbarrow in a Hindu snake temple, at Subramania, India, delicious local food from the PNG earth oven and we tasted Joseph’s wine and peaches. The best!

As the former Minister for Education and for Agriculture of the Solomon Islands, the late Joini Tutua, says, “After every quarrel or tribal fighting, only food brings our people together.” In the Pacific, on these festive occasions, sharing food can lead to sharing planting material, especially when vegetatively propagated, like exchanging yams or taro.

Know the Guardians of the Seed

The guardians of the seed can do many other things as well. They include Solomon Islands boys who can play bamboo drums, PNG dancing farmers and women and kids selling their produce on the Tari market in the southern highlands of PNG.

Kids just love handling and planting seeds. Let us not forget to spread the seed saving message in schools. In Perugia, Italy, we filmed Montessori students who had a project to collect seeds of local varieties of vegetables from elderly gardeners in their community gardens and grow them out. One of them, Emilio Gioianotti, exclaims, “I love this project!”

As Anna, a gardening psychologist in Castelgiorgio, Italy, says, “It’s a choice made to preserve an enormous richness. It’s about avoiding homogenisation and GM products. In order not to lose our seeds we need more guardians.”

As Alice Takiwatan, a Bunun tribal woman in Taiwan says, “We are the Earth’s people. We take care of her.”

Yes, we can save seeds.

This clip is just one of 150 clips Seed Savers’ Network has produced as of December 2010. You can see them all at www.youtube.com/seedsavers and selected ones at www.seedsavers.net.

3 Comments

  1. Now strong forces want to replace all this biodiversity with just one kind of rice, so called “golden rice”: https://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/10/15/golden-rice-food-technology.html

    They say “golden rice” is a salvation for the poor. No, biodiversity is a salvation for the poor: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2010/10/28/three-major-reports/

    Also, these people are the real guardians of our crop biodiversity, not big agriculture. Just look at the tragedy that these days take place on the Brazilian Cerrado: https://thinkbiodiversity.org/2010/10/27/the-creeping-destruction-of-brazilian-biodiversity/

    Thank you very much for this film, more important than ever!

  2. Whoops. We omitted to mention in the above article “Guardians of the Seed” that the film clip was a promo, made in 2006, for a much longer film that we later made on these topics. It is a one-hour documentary , “Our Seeds” that we shot in eleven countries.

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