Guardians of the Seed

[Michaelangelica]

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

http://permaculture-media-download.b...ntent=FaceBook

[CraigMackintosh]

This was originally here: http://permaculture.org.au/2010/12/0...s-of-the-seed/

The site you linked to didn't ask for permission....

[SueUSA]

It has always been the individuals who do the important things.

Without genome biodiversity, we are dead, dust.

[Michaelangelica]

Preserving potatoes and culture
Peruvian farmers prepare to send seeds of more than 1,500 potato varieties to the safety of an Arctic vault

[Published 4th March 2011 12:58 PM GMT]

Fried, baked, or mashed, potatoes are prevalent in most Westerner's diets. But they're more than just a side dish to Peru's indigenous communities; the starchy tubers are an essential part of society. But with climate change threatening the valued crop, local potato farmers are scrambling to save the imperiled plants.


Potato Park in Cusco, Peru
Asociación ANDES
"The encroachment of dry lands is a big concern," says Alejandro Argumedo, a plant scientist at the Potato Park in Cusco, which is home to 1,500 of the region's potato varieties and more than 6,000 local farmers. As temperatures climb, farmers are forced to plant their crops higher and higher in the mountains. "As this trend continues, we won't have land to plant potatoes. The future doesn't look that bright if we don't do something."

To circumvent a potentially catastrophic potato crash, Peruvian farmers are sending seeds from heirloom varieties of the root vegetables to a vault in Arctic Norway to ensure their safekeeping.

"Potatoes are the iconic crop of that region, very important in their culture and religion -- and diet, of course," says Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a non-profit that promotes the conservation of crop diversity and partner in the establishment of Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault. "There's simply no way to separate the people from potatoes in the Andes. They essentially coevolved." Sending potato seeds to the Arctic vault for safekeeping "provides a good insurance policy" for this important part of South American culture, he adds.

Peru is the birthplace of potatoes, with most marketed varieties around the world stemming from a single cultivar first raised in the southern part of the country. Nearly 10,000 years of farming has produced more than 4,000 varieties with unique colors, tastes, and nutritional qualities. Unfortunately, changing climate and weather patterns are threatening this diversity.



To protect Peru's potatoes, the Potato Park is collecting seeds from as many varieties as it can, and shipping them off to the Svalbard seed bank. But it's not as simple as plucking a few seeds off the plants in the fields, Argumedo notes. Unlike most crops, the vast majority of potato cultivars are propagated by the tubers themselves, not the seeds. While some varieties produce seeds naturally, others do not.

"It's going to be a rich process of learning," he says, outlining the Park's plan to raise each variety under greenhouse conditions to try to coax them to produce seeds -- an effort the farmers will undertake with the help of the International Potato Center, a potato research institute in Lima. Once the proper conditions and substrate are identified, "we can harvest each one of the cultivars and prepare them for sending them to Svalbard -- dried, stored, [and] packaged in a way that's appropriate for sending."

Saving the potato seeds may help preserve health benefits of the different varieties, says Mary Ellen Camire, a professor in the department of food science and human nutrition at the University of Maine. "Along the way we've bred out a lot of things that at the time didn't seem to be important, but now we're realizing have health benefits."

A recent study, for example, showed that colored potatoes "did a much better job of reducing oxidation and inflammatory problems" than their white-fleshed relatives, she says. While most commercial potato varieties have white flesh and brown skin, the South American cultivars come in all different colors, including red, blue, purple, and yellow. "By having those ancestors, we may be able to go back and produce more nutritious crops for us in the future."

But the people of the Peruvian Andes, are more focused on preserving their culture. "Potato for us represents more than a food crop," Argumedo says. "We have potatoes for almost every aspect of our social life. We have potatoes for the bride, for welcoming ceremonies, for marriages -- all the important moments of life. So our culture without potatoes would be something without much meaning for the future of people of the Andes."


Related stories:
Relief for parched plants
[14th October 2010]
Critical plant bank in danger
[11th August 2010]
The roots of farming
[20th February 2009]


Read more: Preserving potatoes and culture - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/news/di...#ixzz1FsTpDK57

[eco4560]

Who owns the seed vault in Norway?
It worries me that this could be like the Emperors' New Clothes. Everyone thinks that everyone else has the seeds tucked up safe, but they don't realize that the only way to preserve plants is to keep cultivating them as even in permafrost they eventually lose viability. And you'll lose all the varieties that are propagated by means other than seed. By the time they figure it out - we'll have a few brands of seed all sold by one of 4 big multinationals.