Wonderful article- and it's more than just bananas that are at stake! Just six companies—Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, Mitsui, Aventis and Dow—control 98 percent of the world’s seed sales. These seeds are patented and threatened with modification with “terminator” genes, to prevent any farmer from engaging in the old practice of seed saving. As Barbara Kingsolver explains in her book "Animal, vegetable Miracle", “Humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola.” In case we believe we’re living in the midst of the widest possible variety of food selections, consider that “[m]odern U.S. consumers get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago.” We literally don’t know what we’re missing. If a blight attacks these crops selected by the companies who control them- Lord help us all.
The government of Norway is worried enough about various catastrophes to invest in a seed vault in frozen tundra not far from the North Pole. Investors may deposit seeds in the bank which they would continue to own. For more info: Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault
The government of Norway is worried enough about various catastrophes to invest in a seed vault in frozen tundra not far from the North Pole. Investors may deposit seeds in the bank which they would continue to own. For more info: Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault