“Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds” by Claire Hope Cummings

Reviewed by Tanya Brouwers

The seed: it has been a subject of poetry, a symbol of fertility and a promise of hope. Throughout history the much lauded seed has coevolved symbiotically with farmers in a fundamental dance of planting, nurturing and harvesting, each one’s survival dependent on the others’ health and vigour. Once the property of none, yet freely used by all, the seed of present day has assumed a different role. In “Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds”, environmental journalist and lawyer Claire Hope Cummings analyzes the emerging modern role of seeds. She argues that genetic engineering, although one of the graver issues affecting agriculture, is a symptom of a larger, socio-political problem.

According to Cummings the problem began when geneticists and private corporations involved in genetic engineering successfully disengaged themselves from the democratic processes of public accountability. The result, she notes, is the rise of self-regulated industry exempt from the “most important environmental and consumer protection laws”. She utilizes the example of seed patenting to demonstrate the manner in which these private interest groups, with their substantial economic and political power have gone beyond the philosophy of free enterprise. Seeds now are owned as if they are a material object: a car, a gadget or a child’s toy. Cummings illustrates that farmers, once free to engage in the age-old tradition of seed saving and trading, are now restricted by laws which favour “the privatization of life.”

In “Uncertain Peril”, Cummings presents examples of unjust legislation and contempt for human rights. She recounts her travels around the globe and points out the farmers in the U.S. and Canada sued by the seed-owning corporation Monsanto, for genetic contamination of their crops. She moves on to the famine stricken countries of Africa where, in 2002, the only form of aid from the U.S. came in the form of transgenic corn. Cummings then points out the farmers in Mexico whose locally adapted and diverse species of corn cannot commercially compete with large quantities of cheap, subsidized and genetically modified varieties from the U.S. that are being dumped on their market.

Collectively, these actions highlight the downside of “industry consolidation, industrial agriculture and patented seed technologies”: the loss of seed diversity. Cummings cites the results of a study conducted by the ETC Group, a non-governmental organization. Of the seventy-five kinds of vegetables that were on old USDA lists, ninety-seven percent of them are now extinct. Given the nature of the environmental crises threatening life on earth, the loss of various plant species able to withstand a multitude of conditions gravely limits our options.
As the extent to which private and technological interests control the public arena becomes evident, the reader of “Uncertain Peril” may feel hopelessness.

Thankfully, Cummings provides relief as she sprinkles her work with hopeful examples of human strength and courage in the flowing river of corporate control and what many experience as oppressive conditions. She argues that “control of the federal government by big business has now reached the point where people no longer expect the government to act on their behalf. They are finding other ways to control their food and farming locally, as people always have.” The result of this rebellion is the global emergence of groups dedicated to reviving the key elements of our pre-industrial agricultural heritage so vital to our environmental survival. Organic farmers, seed saving exchanges like the SSE and the Organic Seed Alliance, the Cultural Conservancy, RAFT, urban agriculturalists and many others are struggling to take back their historical rights to plant and harvest the seeds that belong to us all.

In “Uncertain Peril”, Claire Hope Cummings successfully identifies one of the fundamental problems of our current global political sphere, that of the privatization of public interests. The seed, an unwitting volunteer to patenting, hybridization and genetic engineering, sits silently at the centre of this controversy. Cummings, however, warns that such a model of agricultural “domination” is certainly “doomed”. Our success as a species depends upon our “reaffirmation of the basic covenant between ourselves and the seeded earth.”

In “Uncertain Peril,“ Cummings powerfully and convincingly encourages this reaffirmation by calling on all humans to take back their undeniable birthright: the seed.

 

Tanya Brouwers is a Consultant for the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada. Please send comments or questions by phone to 902-893-7256 or by email to oacc@nsac.ca.

 

Posted October 2008