How important is the issue of seed crop biodiversity?!
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/s...
Answers: I'm curious what the veg*n community thinks about the issue of seed crop biodiversity. Since the industrialization of farming genetically engineered seeds are being developed that only the seed companies have the rights to reproduce. This has caused a bottlenecking of only a few varieties being grown. For example, "In the Philippines 30 years ago, there were thousands of varieties of rice grown, but after the Green Revolution, only five or so varieties of rice were grown," says Clive Blazey, the chief executive of Digger's Club, a mail-order seed company that specialises in non-hybrid or open-pollinated seed varieties."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/s...
Seed Crop Bio-Diversity is critically important to every living being on the planet. Please take a look at Andrew Kimbrell's important book Your Right to Know and my review of it
http://www.your-vegetarian-kitchen.com/y...
The collusion of our government and its watch dog agencies and Monsanto Searl, and DuPont et al at the expense of bio-diversity and human health is criminal .All it is is their greed and we sit by and allow it to happen apathetic, and uninformed.
Thank you so much for raising this issue here where people may actually take a look at the evidence and begin to bring some pressure to bear on the Congress.
Of course the public has the power of the purse and we really must stop buying GMO fruit and vegetables, grain et al. Saying No in the market place is the only real power we have.
Its another in a long list of worries. Certainly better biodiversity of plant crops would be better but there are actually more pressing even more depressing things to work on first. Saving farmland, soil conditions, climate change and air quality are all more serious matters.
Seed biodiversity is very important. That's why I was excited to hear that finally they are stuffing the vault in Svalbard with millions of original seeds.
Evil companies like Monsanto are destroying seed diversity and creating freak GM foods. Monsanto basically has a monopoly on the market and you can only buy commercial seeds from them in certain countries. They are now modifying seeds that basically die after one cycle. This means that farmers can't use the seeds that the fruit produces. They just have to buy more more more. That's the American Capitalist system to the core.
gene splicing has been around our food for a very very long time
I'm excited about the future prospects particularly for starving peoples.
I am not a vegetarian and don't agree with most of the beliefs that go with the vegetarian lifestyle.
However, I do believe that crop diversity is of growing importance. As we more and more depend on fewer and fewer varieties of grains and legumes, we become more and more vulnerable to a botanical disaster.
If a blight strikes the most common rice and wheat varieties, we could face a disaster that would make the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's look like a banquet.
I am not saying that we should abandon hybridized crops, but that we need to conserve other varieties for the sake of safeguarding a stable food supply.
Doc