Dan Jason sees hope for a world where people, not corporations, hold onto the seeds. Photo by Derrick Lundy

Seeds find sanctuary on Salt Spring: Dan Jason wants to ensure that seeds survive in the face of corporate ownership
Sarah Cox Shared Vision Magazine Vancouver Canada June 2007

City dwellers rarely give a thought to seeds, even as we fill our grocery baskets with conveniently palatable seedless oranges, seedless grapes, and seedless watermelon. (Trivia question: How old were you when you last spied a seed in a banana?) Yet troubling events are fast unfolding in the world of seeds, and not just at the caprices of a stressed and protesting Mother Nature. If diminishing oil and water supplies are grounds for increasing world conflict, ownership of seeds represents an emerging third pinnacle in a triangle of survival. Jason, author of seven books on food and gardening, believes that an Oryx and Crake world, in which corporations control life-giving necessities like seeds, is closer than we think. As the Canadian federal government sheds its traditional role as a seed custodian, and Monsanto and other companies race to patent seeds and make it more difficult for farmers to save seed, Jason has taken matters into his own deft hands. Two years ago, on Salt Spring Island, he created the Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. ...

Every seed variety has a story, it seems, and this is precisely Jason’s point. We are intrinsically connected to the food we eat, whether it is the Trail o’ Tears beans Jason cultivates—small, shiny black beans with a splash of white that were carried by the Cherokees during their tragic winter dislocation—or the Ruckle Bean, a flavourful white kidney bean grown a century ago by Salt Spring’s famous pioneer farming family. When the Iron Curtain fell, notes Jason, a plethora of seeds tumbled out and were shared around the world. We owe our existence to seeds just as much as we do to water. Jason stores more than 1,000 different types of seeds, but these represent only a snippet of the globe’s fast-disappearing food diversity, threatened by the twin demons of monoculture and the industrialization of farming. ... The disappearance of diversity boils down to one axiom, says Jason: It is most profitable to sow and market one crop variety, usually selected for its large size and post-harvest durability. “Whatever you see in the store isn’t really grown for consumers,” he says. “It’s just the easiest way to make money.” There are 450 apple varieties cultivated on Salt Spring Island alone. Most people, however, will sample no more than a handful or so of apple varieties during their lifetimes. ...

Slowly, the government has relinquished responsibility for plant breeding to the private sector and whittled down the scope and contents of federal seed banks. Now the government promotes corporate interests over the well-being of family farmers and market gardeners, says Jason. Last February, for instance, the Canadian government attempted (unsuccessfully) to overturn an international moratorium on terminator seeds: seeds genetically engineered to be sterile after the first harvest. The farmers’ union reports that the right of farmers to save, re-use, and exchange seeds is under attack. Monsanto and other seed companies are proposing new Canadian laws. These laws could force farmers and gardeners to pay royalties on seed for every planting and criminalize the age-old practice of exchanging seeds with neighbours or saving seeds from a bumper crop to sow the following year. The goal is to encourage Canadian farmers to buy more certified seed; one suggestion is to link the annual purchase of seed to crop insurance, so that farmers who re-use seed would pay higher insurance premiums. The Canadian government, like the U.S. government, also promotes genetically modified crops whose genes have been manipulated to incorporate a new trait or to silence an existing trait. Genetically modified squash, potatoes, corn, soy, cotton, canola, flax, wheat, and tomatoes are all approved for sale in Canada. ...

Related: Salt Spring Seeds

Welcome to Salt Spring Seeds’ website and online heritage and heirloom seed catalog. This is our twentieth year of supplying seeds to farmers and gardeners, promoting organic growing, and encouraging people to save their own seed. We believe we carry lots of very special grains, beans, vegetables, herbs and flowers, and we hope you will agree with us! All our seeds are untreated, open-pollinated and non-GMO. We grow all our own seeds and sell only our most recent harvest. ...

Dan Jason’s Message for 2007
Salt Spring Seeds

Global climate change is always in the news these days. Many more people are starting to realize that we’ve overdone it with our disrespect for Mother Earth. The coming social and environmental challenges are unpredictable. Who would have imagined that we on the wet west coast would ever have severe water problems as we did at the end of 2006? What seems certain is that people, communities and bioregions will need to become more self-reliant. It may no longer be easy or even possible to have access to food and bottled water from somewhere far away. The good news is that we can focus on the good news. The knowledge of how to grow sustainably already exists. It can be tapped into and enhanced in myriad ways. Around the world people are feeling and thinking that it is time to create the world we want rather than to fight the world we don’t want. We all, each and every one of us, have bought into the destruction of the earth that has resulted in global climate change. We can stop buying into it. ...