CONSERVING THE BIODIVERSITY OF IRISH AGRICULTURE (1,890 words, slightly edited for clarity):
Hello. I feel like a bit like a priest, standing up here. I was horrified when Michael said we had to sit in this row. I prefer little circles, but so be it!
I'd like to begin saying a few words about the Irish Seed Savers Association, and then speak about how very strongly the GM issue impinges on us.
The Irish Seed Savers Association was founded 50 years ago with a brief to preserve native agricultural biodiversity and our agricultural heritage. We were already aware that 75% of agricultural diversity had been lost world-wide in the 20th century. That's seeds that have been developed by our forebears over hundreds of years had just disappeared. Recently we have come across a figure that 97% of vegetable varieties available on seeds lists in the 1950s are now unavailable. There are no figures for Ireland. This has come about because small local family owned seed companies have been taken over by the larger agro-chemical industries.
Since the 1970s when we joined the EU, any seed that is to be sold commercially has to be on the official register. Last time I looked at the figures, it cost about € 3,000 to register a seed variety. Unless you are selling to commercial growers in huge quantities, small seed companies just can't afford that kind of money. So the big seed companies are reducing down ‚ clearly 97% of UK vegetable varieties lost in 50 years ‚ they are narrowing down the seeds available all the time. Now that is very dangerous because many of the seeds - that may not produce the best flavours or be the most prolific - may well carry traits for disease or pest resistance. When some disease comes in, a whole crop could be wiped out because it's a monoculture. We should know about that because we had the potato famine, but eyes are just being closed because if you have a very few seed varieties you can sell them in huge quantities to commercial growers who are more interested in harvesting them all at the same time, how though the skins are, can they by packaged, can they be transported and how long their shelf life is. I was recently at an apple growers' conference: flavour was about number 29 on the list of criteria ‚ as you probably know from the kind of apples you buy in the supermarkets.
In the Irish Seed Savers Association, we find native varieties that are on the edge of extinction. We have been very successful over the last few years in putting together a native Irish apple collection which now includes about 150 varieties, about a hundred of which are available to the public. You can buy trees; they are all sold for this year but there will be a new catalogue coming out in August. They are extremely flavoursome. They are also pest and disease resistant. We grow under an organic regime and other pomologists and agriculturalists who have come down have been amazed at just how healthy our stuff is, in East Clare where the ground is lousy.
We have also put together a native grain collection. Ireland was the only Western country which had no grain collection. Grains were a very staple of our diet before potatoes were introduced. That collection is now at the stage where we've built it up, having researched gene banks world-wide, we got as little as five grammes of grain from most of them, we're now at the stage where we want to do commercial trials.
Our apples have been accepted under the REPS progamme [Rural Environmental Protection Scheme], and we are also now in the process of getting our grains accepted under the REPS programme. We also have a lot of vegetables. We have over 600 very rare varieties of vegetable including 48 types of potatoes. A lot of our vegetables are native Irish, especially the Brassicas. We have also been very lucky in developing a relationship with a gene bank that used to collect from all over the former Soviet block; they have let us have some very interesting things like tomatoes, aubergines, peppers, that grow in similar conditions and daylight hours to those found in Ireland, which we are experimenting with and will make the seed available to our members. We have an education project with only one worker on it; she attempts to build gardens in National Schools around the country so that children realize the value of our heritage. We are also trying to do a research programme with older growers and farmers, who have a wealth of knowledge that is given little or no credibility and is likely to disappear and die out with them ‚ and that would be a huge loss for everyone. We collaborate nationally and internationally with other organic and seed saving organisations. At the moment we have about 1,200 members and hope to get this up to 5,000 in the next couple of years because we want people to grow our produce all over the country so that it doesn't come so close to the verge of extinction again. In addition, our members provide us with an income so that we can continue our research work. We need to increase our members to be more self-reliant and be in a position to challenge government. Our budget is now around €300,000 a year, including wages for seven full time posts so it's bloody good value for money.
Our work is challenging. It's a race against time. A lot of the varieties of the fruit, vegetables and grain we're looking for have been literally on the verge of extinction. you know, one tree lying dying in a field. We've also had to stand up against people's dismissal of the old varieties, saying that they're unproductive, that they don't work. And we've been very involved in promoting organic growing, and a lot of people pooh-pooh that as well. But on the whole we were generally acceptable, we were benign, we were even a little bit quaint.
The GM issue has changed that. We tend to be an optimistic crowd. The initial reassurances by our current government on the run-up to the last elections, with phrases like "under no circumstances will GM crops be grown in Ireland". There was even chat about "over dead bodies". I'm not aware of any suicides yet! Ireland was going to be green and beautiful and sold on that image. But now they are frantically promoting GM here and throughout Europe, as Michael said earlier.
I challenge our government. How are they going to ensure that our native agricultural and wild biodiversity can be protected from GM contamination? Especially in light of the maize situation in Mexico. They talk about 6km buffer zones [required to protect conventional and organic crops from being contaminated by GM pollen ‚ Ed.]. But contaminated maize has been found in Mexico over 60km from where GM crops were grown! And this is in the cradle of maize! It's very very frightening...
We are back to the 1970s with the Green revolution, when monoculture rice was being grown throughout South-East Asia. And that rice fell foul of the grassy stunt virus. And it really was on the verge that rice could have been wiped out. This would have been a bit of a problem for people in Europe, but an absolute disaster for the people of South-East Asia who are completely dependent on it for food. A wild variety was found up in Uttar Pradesh (India) that actually has a resistance to this grassy stunt virus, and it was able to be crossed. Of course the commercial bodies had a real interest in getting rid of this disease, so it was done very efficiently and rice was saved, but there still is a huge problem with the native varieties being wiped out, and with farmers again growing a monoculture and being dependent on buying their seed from commercial agro-chemical companies.
I also want to know who will be liable to pay damages when crops are cross-contaminated with GM. The bio-tech industry don't seem to have the confidence to say "this won't happen, and if it does, we will pay". Hit them with money! That's what they're interested in! But they will not put their money where their mouth is, and say "we'll pay if anything goes wrong". I was very heartened to read a few months ago that a lot of insurance companies are refusing to insure farmers who want to grow GM crops. And I think that is where the answer lies.
Then there is the whole issue of intellectual property rights, and patenting materials from plants that are generically grown in any number of countries, and thus preventing people from making use of their own belongings which their own ancestors have developed and grown over generations!
In the next issue of the Seed Savers magazine, which our members now receive four times a year, I have simplified an article by Dr. Barry Commoner and Steve de Merrigan, a scientist and an environmentalist. He is currently working on the Critical Genetics Project, investigating the role of living molecular constituents in the biology of inheritance. In his article, called Unravelling the DNA myth: the spurious foundation of genetic engineering (download PDF), he makes a very strong statement not dissimilar from what Ruaidhri Deasy said: "What the public fears in not the experimental science, but the fundamentally irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the real world, before we truly understand it." The full text of Barry's article will be on the Seed Savers web site at the end of May.
There is a crucial problem with molecular genetics and its application to agriculture, medicine and pharmaceutical drugs: the science is based on a 50-year old theory! We all heard about Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA when we were doing biology at school. Now they are saying that DNA carries all the information for inheritance. But experiments over the last 20 years reveal that this is inaccurate. There is a huge disjunction between this premise and the experiments that have been done recently. I want to know why this disparity remains unacknowledged. And I want to know why the biotech companies' claim that their technology is specific, precise and predictable remains unchallenged, when it is clearly a flawed argument. DNA does the first job in inheritance, but that is then refined two or three times down the line by proteins which haven't even been identified yet by our scientists. We have been evolving for millions of years. It's a very complicated system, and I am just aghast at our arrogance to think we can understand it in just 50 years. We can't! We're getting it wrong. And nobody knows what happens when you transfer a fish gene into a tomato. You don't know what those refining proteins in the tomato are going to do to that fish gene. We are in a Frankenstein situation. It's actually worse than that, because there was only one Frankenstein but there are millions of GM crops.
Seed Savers' work is in direct contrast to the agro-chemical companies. We're trying to broaden the spectrum of biodiversity.
The last thing I would like to say, having spoken to Michael during the week, is that Seed Savers has had a directors meeting on Friday afternoon and they agree that our site a Carraroe can be declared a GM-free zone, and we will do our best to get other organizations to do the same. Thank you very much.
Michael O'Callaghan
It will be terrific if you do declare your land GM-free.
Bridget Carlin
I want you to tell me how to do it.
Michael O'Callaghan
Well Adrian Bebb is the expert on how to do it. As you probably know, JP Donleavy is the first farmer in Ireland to declare his land GM-free. He did it standing right here where we are now a couple of days ago.
Apropos of some of the things you said, I would just like to say that the health and the scientific aspects of GM - the instability of the genes and so on - are very important areas that we need to be aware of. We will have two or three of the leading experts in Europe speaking on these subjects at the conference we are planning for the 19th of June. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho from the Independent Science Panel on GM will be talking about the science, and Dr. Arpad Pustai from the Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology, who has done some of the important work on the health effects.
One important thing about seeds is that contamination happens in a number of ways: through pollen blown around by the wind, through birds and insects carrying the pollen from GM to conventional crops, and through horizontal gene transfer. But the contamination of the seed supply is one of the biggest risks. One of the speakers who is coming to our conference in June is Benedikt Härlin, who was the director of Greenpeace International's global GM campaign for many years. He now runs Future Foundation Farming, a German-based NGO which is focusing on a proposed EU Seed Purity Directive. He is very concerned that this EU directive has a contamination threshold which is much too high. If it goes through as presently planned it will inevitably result in the European seed supply getting contaminated by GM seeds. And in this area again I'm afraid that Ireland is one of the bad guys, because the largest department of the European Commission - called the European Joint Research Centre - is run by an Irishman called Barry McSweeney, who used to be a director of Bio-Research Ireland and who is currently giving the EU stamp of scientific approval to these unacceptablly low standards for the Seed Purity Directive.
I apologise for having this split between the audience and the panel, but we are doing it because we are filming this workshop. We are going to produce a DVD to circulate to farmers and other stakeholders around the country with excerpts from this morning's session and also from the conversations we hope to have with you the audience this afternoon. So that's the reason: it's easier to film this way. But in the afternoon we can sit around in a circle.
So thanks. Let's break for ten minutes and then continue with the rest of the programme.
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