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The Nobility of Seed Research and Its Critics
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10932 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1986 |
3,535 Words |
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Donald N. Duvick
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To provide genetically improved seeds needed for increased production of food and feed crops seems a noble thing to do. Such efforts, both by governments and private seed companies, have measurably increased food and feed supplies in the United States and Europe. They are on the verge of doing so in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
But some people take an altogether different view. They say that the accomplishments of plant breeders represent, at best, unthinking progress toward global disaster in food production. At worst, they say, the efforts of private seed firms represent involvement in an international conspiracy to monopolize the world's seed supplies and thereby its food production capacity--a conspiracy intended to force the world's peasantry into economic servitude to international capitalism.
A coalition of individuals and organizations, led by Pat Roy Mooney of the Brussels-based International Coalition for Development Action, states that the well-being of the world and its food supplies requires that plant breeding should not be done by the private sector, or at least not by transnational corporations. "We recommend that the 'Code of Conduct for Transnational Corporations' specifically include provision that the seed industry be regarded as an area of vital national security, unappropriate for the involvement of international firms," says Mooney.
In persuasive books, articles, and television presentations, Mooney and others have stated repeatedly that genetic diversity is more important than any other single factor in maintaining the stability of food production; that transnational seed corporations, as they monopolize the market, will promote and sell only a few highly uniform varieties in order to maximize profits, thereby reducing genetic diversity; that plant variety protection laws work especially for these large corporations, allowing them to increase their monopolies still further; and that, therefore, plant variety protection laws should be repealed, or their passage should be prevented in those countries that do not have such laws. As suggested by Mooney: "Any government contemplating any form of proprietary plant legislation should reconsider this step..."
The goal, obviously, is to take the profit out of the seed business and thus take the transnationals out of plant breeding.
Mooney states, further, that it is wrong for seed companies of the developed countries (the "North") to use the genetic diversity from developing countries (the "South") for varietal improvement, at least if such varieties are later sold at a profit. He says that because the developing countries originally developed (domesticated) the basic germplasm, "it is difficult to understand why the South should not obtain some benefit from germplasm both as a raw material and, especially, as a processed product derived from the genius of their citizens."
Alternative Opinion
Others recognize even more basic faults with the seed business and with agriculture in general. Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Kansas, for example, says that modern agriculture "is founded on arrogance, on the belief that biological problems must inevitably have technological solutions." He especially criticizes tillage of the soil and use of annual grain
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