Category: Policy

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Where do your garden seeds come from?

Patrick over at Bifurcated Carrots had a post a couple of days ago echoing the “fact” that “98% of the worlds seeds come from one of six companies.” He went on to list them and to say a bit about how companies that sell smaller quantities have to enter into straightjacket contracts with the big six that mean the “small” guys cannot say where they get their seeds, or whether they are F1 hybrids.

I’m deeply skeptical of the original claim, and asked Patrick where it came from and how it was calculated. He replied:

This in not a very hard statistic. It originally came from the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. … I don’t own a copy of the book, and I have only seen lots of other people on the Internet cite the reference, so I can’t say a lot about it. I assume it does include cereal grains. I’m sure the person who came up with the statistic did it for purposes of making a point, rather than making an accurate statement. Perhaps this was a poor choice of a statistic to give here. If you have other ideas of a more accurate statistic, I’d love to hear.

On the final point, I have ideas, but not the ability to implement them. It is interesting, though, that there are far more than six registered maintainers of seeds listed in the EU Common Catalogue. But that’s an arcane discussion for another time. As for the rest, I had already determined that almost all the noise around this 98% number did trace back to Barbara Kingsolver’s book, and I do have a copy, which I’ve almost finished reading.

First, I had to find the quote. Not so easy when there is no index. ((There is one now that you can download from the book web site.)) But there it is, on page 51 of my US paperback edition, published by Harper Perennial. So I turned to the notes and references at the back of the book, to see if I could discover where Kingsolver had got the figure. Alas, the references given are not tied to anything; not the chapters, not the pages, certainly not the individual claims.

OK, I’ll just ask her directly. But can I find an email, or any other way to get in touch? Can I heck. Neither on her “personal web site” nor on the book’s site is there any way that I can see to get in touch with the author.

Shouldn’t I just give her the benefit of the doubt? After all, her heart is in the right place. Well, as I read the book I was making notes of inaccuracies and outright errors. ((Sample: page 57, Arugula is not, and never has been, a member of “the lettuce clan”.)) I stopped because it was interfering with my reading and enjoyment, having to pause and find my notebook and pencil every page or so.

But this figure of 98% and six companies is gaining truthiness just by being echoed uncritically all over the shop, like so many other useful but wrong “facts”. It is a perfect example of what the great J.B.S. Haldane called The Bellman’s Theorem, ((“What I tell you three times is true.”)) and I fear that I cannot just ignore it.

There is concentration in the seed industry. There may be contractual obligations on people who retail seed from others. But people who think that those things are bad should not rely on untruths to support their arguments. My hope, then, is that while Barbara Kingsolver may not want anyone disturbing the quiet of her old Virginia home, she may just be egotistical enough to monitor, and care, what the internet is saying about her, and that she’ll pop up in the comments here to tell us all where she found the figure, so that we can go back and check it for ourselves.

That’s how one assesses truth.

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Gates speaks

The Annual Newsletter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is online. Page 3 deals with agriculture. The emphasis is clear:

New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist.

A big reason [for the Green Revolution’s failure there] is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions.

Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions.

Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. … Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture.

But as Tom Philpott over at Gristmill points out:

The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?

A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.

The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa — and build food security and soil fertility in unison.

Making better use of agricultural biodiversity and other solutions that do not involve what the Gates’ think of as technology is, I think, an even more exciting challenge that just trying to duplicate the Green Revolution again for Africa. And if Africa’s “widely varying climate conditions” were the problem (to say nothing of widely varying soils), how exactly will new seeds and fertilizers address that problem?

Gates also makes much of climate change, whose “negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem”. Does he really think he can breed, from scratch, fast enough to keep up? Or would he do better to devote at least some resources to making more and better use of existing agrobiodiversity in ways that can deliver the improved stability and size of harvests he says he wants?

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Kenyan farmers reject technology solutions

Farmers are saying traditional crops were much better because they rarely ever lost everything even in the worst of droughts.

Well, well, well. That’s from a news piece in The Nation, explaining that many farmers are turning away from improved varieties of maize and beans because they don’t deliver a reliable harvest. Kenya does put a little money into its “orphan crops programme,” designed to rehabilitate traditional crops such as cassava, sorghum and millet; The Nation stops just short of calling for more research into these crops.

And that, in a microcosm, is the entire story of international investment in agricultural R&D. Not enough, on the wrong things, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Philip Pardey and his colleagues Julian Alston and Jennifer James have published a paper on Agricultural R&D Policy: A Tragedy of the International Commons that makes for pretty grim reading. They analyse the extent of the current failure to invest and the reasons for it, useful ammunition for anyone who needs to know these things. And they offer some possibilities for the future, which personally I found less than convincing.

The Nation noted that scientists need to move speedily, to prevent the current food crisis one day being remembered as a picnic. But not all scientists are the problem. They chase money, and they solve the problems the money asks them to solve. The money needs to sit up and pay attention.