seed saving banned?

View the update to this post here.

Here’s a bit of polit­i­cal unpleas­ant­ness I read about in a seed descrip­tion in the Baker Creek Heir­loom Seeds cat­a­log list­ing for the Iraqi tomato vari­ety, Rouge D’Irak:

Sav­ing seeds was made ille­gal under the “Colo­nial Pow­ers” of the United States. Under the new law, Iraqi farm­ers must only plant seeds from “pro­tected vari­eties” from inter­na­tional corporations.

First Hilibur­ton, then Black­wa­ter, and now mon­ster agribusi­ness tak­ing advan­tage of the war. I wish I was surprised.

The Baker Creek online cat­a­log actu­ally lists five dif­fer­ent plants of Iraqi ori­gin, in case you’d like to help pre­serve vari­eties that Iraqi farm­ers now can’t legally grow from their own seeds: four toma­toes, Tatar of Mon­golis­tan, Rouge D’Irak, Al-Kuffa, and Nin­eveh; along with a melon, Bagh­dad Long. Aren’t you heir­loom tomato spe­cial­ists look­ing for new vari­eties to try? How about these plants with an amaz­ing con­tem­po­rary history?

Doing some quick research on this I ran across a post­ing over at The Alchemist’s Gar­den that’s great read­ing. Take a look!

January 10 2009 03:04 am | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • • • • • • •

4 Responses to “seed saving banned?”

  1. Sunita on 10 Jan 2009 at 3:35 am #

    But isnt that uneth­i­cal? How unfair ! Apart from the busi­ness angle, was there any other rea­son for this ban?

  2. lostlandscape on 10 Jan 2009 at 9:40 am #

    I think it’s all about busi­ness. Accord­ing to the Novem­ber 15, 2004 issue of The Agribusi­ness Exam­iner: “The seeds farm­ers are now allowed to plant — “pro­tected” crop vari­eties
    brought into Iraq by transna­tional cor­po­ra­tions in the name of agri­cul­tural
    recon­struc­tion — will be the prop­erty of the cor­po­ra­tions. While
    his­tor­i­cally the Iraqi con­sti­tu­tion pro­hib­ited pri­vate own­er­ship of bio­log­i­cal resources, the new U.S.-imposed patent law intro­duces a sys­tem of monop­oly rights over seeds…The new law is pre­sented as being nec­es­sary to ensure the sup­ply of good
    qual­ity seeds in Iraq and to facil­i­tate Iraq’s acces­sion to the WTO. What it
    will actu­ally do is facil­i­tate the pen­e­tra­tion of Iraqi agri­cul­ture by the
    likes of Mon­santo, Syn­genta, Bayer and Dow Chem­i­cal — the cor­po­rate giants
    that con­trol seed trade across the globe.” Reprinted at the Organic Con­sumers Asso­ci­a­tion (http://www.organicconsumers.org/patent/iraq111704.cfm)

  3. susan (garden-chick) on 10 Jan 2009 at 2:11 pm #

    James, this seems so shock­ing, I’m not even sure how to respond.

  4. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » after a little more research… on 14 Jan 2009 at 6:06 am #

    […] you read it on the inter­net it must be true, right? I’ve had some ques­tions about a recent post that relayed some infor­ma­tion on farm­ers in Iraq being pro­hib­ited from sav­ing seeds. After doing […]

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