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 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • • • • • • • | 4 Comments »