This year’s World Food Day, celebrated on October 16, focuses on the theme “Right to Food for a Better Life and Future.” Ensuring this right isn’t just about access to food—it starts in the soil, with seeds. Seeds are the foundation of all plant life, and protecting the right to food means safeguarding the diversity of seeds, standing with the farmers who save and share them, and resisting the corporate domination that threatens global food systems.
Exterior of Svalbard Global Seed Vault in February 2020. Credit: Cierra Martin for Crop Trust, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The World Food Prize, awarded annually near World Food Day as a tandem celebration, will this year be awarded to Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin and Dr. Cary Fowler, two scientists who spearheaded the development of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The vault, a concrete behemoth located in the frozen arctic circle, holds 1.25 million seed samples of more than 6,000 plant species in its underground facility. Its purpose is to protect these seeds — and the world’s food supply and biodiversity — against both global and regional threats including war, disease outbreak, and the climate crisis. It has aptly been nicknamed the “Doomsday Vault”.
Protecting the world’s seeds, and by extension its agricultural biodiversity, is certainly a worthy cause and one worth celebrating. What’s most urgently needed are proactive solutions addressing the root causes of global challenges, so that vaults securing our most precious resources are an ex-situ conservation strategy, not the first line of defense against catastrophe.
Heirloom rice from Phillipines Cordilleras. From middle to outside: Inawi, Minaangan, Ominio, and Imbuucan. Credit: Lokalpedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The importance of protecting seeds has been recognized for thousands of years, with farmers and communities saving and trading seeds freely among each other. Before the industrialization of agriculture during the “Green Revolution”, small-scale farmers relied on seed saving to plant the next year’s bounty and enjoyed a wide diversity of crop varieties. Globalized industrial agriculture, with a reliance on monocultures, herbicides and pesticides, and GMOs, has dramatically changed the way we grow food. Farmers have been encouraged to plant only those handful of crop varieties that yield the biggest, most uniform harvest. These practices have increased crop yields at the expense of biodiversity.
Seeds have become a controlled commodity – trade agreements, marketing laws, and patent protections have all been wielded as weapons against seed sovereignty. Seed saving and sharing, far from being a protected practice, is becoming criminalized. Whoever controls seeds has power, and the accompanying wealth and resources to match. Today, just four companies – BASF, Bayer/Monsanto, ChemChina-Syngenta, and Corteva Agriscience – dominate half of the global seed market.
We are in the midst of experiencing the ripple effects of this system – in 1999, the FAO estimated that more than 75% of all agricultural crop varieties have been lost since 1900. In the United States alone, we have lost 93% of seed diversity during the same timeframe.
What world do we want to pass on to our children and generations beyond them? One in which we must store our most precious resources in underground vaults to protect them from destruction? Or one where agricultural systems across the world and the people who depend on them can thrive? We hope for the latter – a world where seeds and the people who plant, cultivate, and harvest them are honored. By taking lessons from history and organizing through global movements like La Via Campesina, a more just future is entirely possible.
Seeds are precious originators of life. We urge the world’s leaders and policymakers to take action to protect seeds for the future we all share by protecting and supporting the true stewards of seeds. Farmers must be supported, not obstructed, to control their own seed supply. Increased freedom for people of all societies to save, swap, and share seeds will allow us to sustain life for centuries to come.