Seeds hold the key to a GMO-free food future

As the nat­ural foods indus­try  gears up for an unprece­dented assault on genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMOs), much empha­sis has been placed on con­vinc­ing gov­ern­ment to label foods con­tain­ing GMOs and on sway­ing gro­cers and man­u­fac­tur­ers to rid them from the retail shelf. But Hubbard and oth­ers say those actions will mean lit­tle if farm­ers can’t find clean, GMO-free seed to plant in the first place.

Thanks to float­ing pollen, stow­away seeds on deliv­ery trucks, and the fact that even organic farm­ers must turn to con­ven­tional seed due to a short­age of organic vari­eties, seed experts say the vast major­ity of corn grow­ing in the United States already con­tains some degree of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied (GM) mate­r­ial. Soy, canola and alfalfa are also high on the list for pos­si­ble contamination.

Even non-GM seed breeders—forced to buy their genetic mate­r­ial from biotech com­pa­nies in an age of increased seed com­pany consolidation—can’t guar­an­tee that their seeds are genet­i­cally pure any­more, says OSA founder and con­sul­tant Matt Dillon. Furthermore, because fund­ing for uni­ver­sity research into nat­ural, non-GM alter­na­tives is a frac­tion of what it once was, Dillon says that it’s becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to find inno­v­a­tive solu­tions to pro­tect the non-GM seed that still exists.

Meanwhile, organic con­sumers are grow­ing out­raged that even when they buy “organic” or “non-GMO” prod­ucts, they may still be eat­ing genet­i­cally altered food.

So what’s the answer?

“We have to cre­ate our own seed sys­tem,” says Dillon, who will join stake­hold­ers from indus­try and non­prof­its to roll out a host of seed-preservation ini­tia­tives in the com­ing months. “If we just say ‘stop GMOs’ and we don’t pro­tect and develop the seeds we really need, we haven’t suc­ceeded at anything.”

How did GMOs alter the seed landscape?

Dillon points to the 1980 Diamond v. ChakrabartySupreme Court rul­ing as the begin­ning of the end of seed purity. In that case, the court ruled that “a live, human-made micro-organism is patentable,” and by the mid-1990s, it was evi­dent that this applied to plants too. Soon a hand­ful of agri­chem­i­cal com­pa­nies includ­ing DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto—which pre­vi­ously had showed no inter­est in seeds—owned more than 65 per­cent of the world’s pro­pri­etary seed.

“It was kind of like a land grab, only it was genes they were inter­ested in,” says Dillon. Today, accord­ing to the Independent Professional Seed Association, only 100 inde­pen­dent seed com­pa­nies remain (com­pared to 300, 13 years ago), serv­ing an organic indus­try that has grown expo­nen­tially. The result: Many organic farm­ers are forced to use con­ven­tional seed that orig­i­nates from the very com­pa­nies that spawned the GM rev­o­lu­tion. In fact, accord­ing to the OSA’s 2011 State of Organic Seed Report, just 20 per­cent of organic farm­ers sur­veyed used strictly organic seed over the past three years.

“There sim­ply isn’t enough cer­ti­fied organic seed to meet the demands of the grow­ing organic food indus­try,” says Hubbard.

Although organic seed is a good start, there’s no guar­an­tee that it’s GMO-free either.

Even organic seed com­pa­nies try­ing in good faith to develop non-GMO vari­eties are often forced to turn to biotech, rather than the uni­ver­si­ties they once relied on, for their genetic mate­r­ial. Over the last 16 years, just $9.4 mil­lion fed­eral dol­lars have been spent on sus­tain­able plant breed­ing and edu­ca­tion at land grant uni­ver­si­ties, Dillon says.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at NewHope360.com.