International Seed Day
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]eed has been the centre of life for all our cultures. Farmers have been sowing harvesting, preserving and re-sowing seeds, a cycle through which they are not only revitalizing seeds and life but also a valuable culture passed down from generation to generation.
On the international Seed Day this is the knowledge and tradition that all of us shall celebrate this year on 26th April, 2015. People all around the world will be with us in this celebration of human wisdom and ingenuity by singing the poems of our seeds and taking pledges to protect this wealth of knowledge from a concerted assault by national and transnational corporations who are determined to take over this seed wealth of ours and make us slaves under their seed regime. They will also use these as a gateway into India for un-natural seeds such as genetically engineered seeds.“We will flood your market with our seeds in such a manner that you can’t but surrender” had said a Monsanto official in Canada in early 2000. The same threat has been repeated in India in 2015. For instance, in some parts of our country, the market is so flooded with seeds of BT Cotton that the farmers have no option but to plant them. And then the industry turns around and claims triumphantly that farmers are not opting for Non B.T. Seeds. They forgot the fact that they are the ones who have manipulated the disappearance of traditional cotton seeds from the market. They have not only spread poison into our soils and waters but also have compelled farmers to surrender themselves to commit suicide as the last option. This will be the kind of sordid saga that will haunt our agriculture if we let the current corporate-free-ride on our farming. To stop this, and to strengthen the great tradition of our seed keeping in this country we need to firmly resolve that we are going back to our traditional seed systems and strengthen farmers hands in retaining them and fight Government laws and policies which pro-corporate have to be driven back. We must act now to make this possible through farmers meetings, public meetings, media conferences, rallies and demonstrations.
For millennia, the Nagas have been practicing ecological agriculture. The rich agrobiodiverse jhum fields and terrace fields on the mountain slopes and valleys have been the hallmarks of the Naga community. Seed keeping and sharing heritage is strongly imbedded in the community’s social and culture ethos of people. Nagas’ sacred relationship attached with their land and seeds have been sustaining the Naga communities. However with the advent of modern technology and profit oriented development, Naga agrarian society is also impacted and the ecological principles ingrained in the communities are slowly eroding to destructive corporate ideologies. Many Naga farmers are now shifting towards commercial agriculture, whereby a mass production approach using market seeds have largely increased, and traditional seeds are alarmingly marginalized. This shift threatens community’s seed saving and sharing heritage, and the rich knowledge associated with it. If we lose our seeds, we lose our control over the right to choose what to grow and what to eat. The shift towards a profit oriented economy and privatization also has repercussions on the community cohesion, traditional knowledge, common property resources, marginalization of poorer section of the community, etc.
Losing our traditional seeds would mean losing our food sovereignty, our culture and our identity.
Let us make the voices of our farmers resound all over the country so that their views and seeds get a priority over corporate seeds on the Indian agrarian landscape.
North East Network (NEN)
Chizami Village
