1st December 2014

London has recently hosted its first Great Seed Festival in honour of protecting, conserving and sharing seed.  The event took place at the world’s first Garden Museum in the beautifully restored St Marys-at-Lambeth Church adjacent to Lambeth Palace and surrounded by lush gardens.

Seeds are the bedrock of traditional and diversity rich farming and growing systems all around the world. And the right to swap and save heritage or heirloom seeds are at the root of these systems. However, this long held practice is increasingly under pressure from State protected agribusiness which wants control of the global seed supply. 

A cornucopia of talks, films and workshops demonstrated how important heritage seeds are to every morsel of good food we eat. There was an eagerly anticipated presentation of the film GMO OMG (See official trailer http://vimeo.com/71035892) that investigates the perils of allowing the seed supply to fall into the grasp of Monsanto et al. In the US, this has resulted in 80% of processed foods containing unlabelled, untested GMOs (genetically modified organisms). The film’s director Jeremy Seifert aided by his precocious seed saving six year old son has found a captivating way of warning that a corporation that is too big to fail is too big.

A lively Q and A panel comprising of Lawrence Woodward CBE and former Ecologist Editor Pat Thomas co-Directors of Beyond GM and GM Free Me, Ed Hamer of the Land Workers Alliance and Jo Wood an organic entrepreneur reviewed the film. They addressed an audience concerned about GM crops and what will happen if the UK follow down the same hazardous road made permissible by US food and agriculture regulators.

Pat Thomas explained that the backlash against GM in the US has largely been brought about by people power groups like Moms Across America which started because mothers were worried about their children’s health. Lawrence Woodward stated that the problem in the UK and in the EU is that the media is complicit with the reductionist, pro-industry “independent experts” who are doing the same PR job that companies like Monsanto do in the US by constantly trotting out the line that GM crops are safe.

Both Beyond GM and GM Free Me (see http://www.gmfreeme.org/) have successfully launched new campaign initiatives to encourage members of the public to have their say.  GM Free Me is a lively online visual petition inviting people to express concerns and feelings and to upload their selfies onto a nationwide banner. Meanwhile, Beyond GM has been instrumental in launching the Letter From America, http://www.theletterfromamerica.org/ signed by a host of celebrities, including actress Susan Sarandon, and signatories from groups and individuals representing millions of US citizens. In November 2014, the letter was delivered to Downing St, published as a full page ad in The Times and advertised on a giant digital billboard at London’s Waterloo – Europe’s busiest railway station.

Other organizations participating in the Great Seed Festival ranged from the Biodynamic Association, the Slow Food Ark of Taste, the UK Food Sovereignty Movement and the Community Food Growers Network, all celebrating and disseminating ideas and solutions for continuing to grow seed free from patenting and corporate profiteering.

A parallel can be drawn between preserving heirloom seed varieties and the efforts of The Garden Museum’s founder Rosemary Nicholson, who saved the site from demolition in 1976, when it was scheduled to be made into a car park during the development of the Jubilee line at Waterloo Station.  She discovered the derelict church and its neglected gardens on a pilgrimage to the tomb of royal plant hunter John Tradescant (1570 – 1638), a gardener, naturalist and traveller pre-dating Darwin by some two hundred years. His collection of rarities were displayed in the Museaum Tradescanteum, England’s first museum open to the public in London around 1630, now forming the basis of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This determination to preserve our natural heritage is an impulse that won’t give way to the soulless machinations of clearing historic sites to make way for car parks, but it does require a special kind of person and an awful lot of good will and private donations to do that.