The seed is the first link in the food chain. It is a sacred code of evolution, an embodiment of life and memory, a latent world waiting to unfold. The seed gives itself to Earth — warm soil, air and moisture —and comes alive. Drawing energy from the sun, it grows and multiplies manifold. Each seed, plant and animal life form is unique.
Like the earth and the sky, the immense biodiversity of seeds and life forms is our collective heritage. Gifted by nature, and the cumulative innovations, adaptations and selections of many generations of farming communities, these seeds belong to all. They are our most vital wealth, essential for survival. They cannot be seen as mere commodities, to be bought and sold at will.
Allowing any variety of seed, germplasm, plant or animal (livestock) to become a patented / proprietary / corporate resource is a gross violation of natural justice, and a great suicidal blunder of modern economic civilisation.
Our amazing heritage of seed diversity and indigenous cattle breeds, adapted to diverse local conditions and needs, has the boundless potential to sustain farming and allied rural communities in independence, health and dignity for generations to come! Founded on unique, region specific landraces bred by farmers, these traditional seeds include varieties with unique features like tolerance to drought, cold, flood, salinity, and resistance to pests and diseases. The traditional crop seeds also include varieties that are highly nutritious / medicinal; and many that are high-yielding.
The great diversity of our traditional seeds is of vital importance to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of millions of farmers and the millions they feed, especially in a scenario of high soil degradation/ erosion, water scarcity, climate change, erratic weather, and looming shortages of non-renewable / chemical inputs of modern agriculture. Unless our farmers can adopt bio-diverse ecological agriculture with their own locally adapted seeds, severe food and nutritional scarcity looms ahead.
Sadly, we have already lost many traditional seed varieties since the wide promotion and adoption of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ technology. Our heritage seeds, evolved over millennia, continue to get lost through neglect. If a seed variety remains unplanted for even a few years, its reproductive capacity is destroyed. It has thus become more urgent than ever to widely promote and share our remaining traditional varieties for decentralized in situ conservation and propagation on farmers’ fields, before they are irretrievably lost.
While traditional seed varieties can be saved and replanted by farmers from their own harvest, the commercial hybrid and GM seeds have to be repurchased every cropping season. Further, the traditional varieties grow quite well with only locally sourced organic inputs; but commercial hybrid and GM seeds are dependent for their yield on the addition of increasingly expensive toxic chemical inputs that are highly import dependent; and also greatly hazardous to human and ecosystem health. Such suicidal farming technology that relies on external industrial inputs devastates the atma-nirbharta (self-reliance) of both the farmer and the nation, making them highly vulnerable to sudden, sharply mounting scarcities, costs and foreign exchange outflows.
Today, the danger to our priceless collective heritage of agro-biodiversity from patented / proprietary commercial hybrid seeds and GM (genetically modified) crops is graver than ever. The GM crops (including the products of ‘gene editing technologies’) subvert the integrity of natural life forms, posing significant bio-safety concerns, with spill-over adverse consequences on human/animal health, soil biota and micro-organisms as well. With ‘Herbicide Tolerant’ GM crops like HT Mustard, the associated spraying of toxic herbicides will inexorably wipe out surrounding vegetation, sharply reducing both biodiversity and the availability of organic matter. The livelihoods of millions of farm workers too will be inevitably lost.
The GM crops also gravely threaten contamination and consequent ruination of our local crop varieties through cross-pollination; and through surreptitious admixtures of commercially purchased seeds. Further, the deceptive promotion and aggressive marketing of GM crops drives local varieties out of circulation. Consequently, any governmental sanction for open field trials or commercial release of any genetically tampered crops, germplasm, plants or organisms would be an anti-national, anti-farmer, anti-people and anti-Nature act with severe, irreversible consequences. Any steps in such direction need to be urgently and strongly resisted by all. This declaration was adopted at the National Beejotsav (Seed Festival), Mysore, November 11 to 13, 2022.