Our hands are our best tools: A composite image of seeds. (Image design: Zamano Xolo)
About 10 years ago I started doing research on local seed practices on the West Coast as part of my work with the land organisation, the Surplus People Project (SPP). This was spurred on by the push to ratify laws and protocols that govern seeds.
The seed laws — the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act 15 of 1976 and the Plant Improvement Act 53 of 1976, among others — govern industrial crops, from protea, rose and lily varieties to large-scale monoculture crop farming of, for example, potato and maize. These laws may seem obvious and safe protocols to protect growers and food security yet, just interrogate them and they become highly concerning.
Two seed Bills have been in process since 1976, and the more recent versions have seen a backlash from farmers, researchers, organisations and activists. These Bills restrict the freedom of seed users to share, save, exchange or sell seed and creates a dependency on bought seed. The idea of freedom is inherent to seed. Its very purpose is to share itself as wide as possible to ensure the continuity of the species. It is argued that in terms of these Bills, plants are not free to spread their seed. Instead they are limited and contained; not free to be propagated by people, nor allowed to continually be selected for in-situ environmental needs, but restricted to field trials and laboratories.
My research on the West Coast was to understand the relationship farmers supported by SPP had with seeds. What we learnt was that farmers whose connection to land was severed, usually through forced removal during apartheid, had their cultural practice of saving seed detrimentally affected to the extent that they were buying seed.
Seed was expensive to buy and the quality of the seed was usually vastly different to their agroecological system of cultivating food. The bought seed was usually grown in large areas with fertilisers and pesticide. This was vastly different to the diverse and biologically supportive systems these smallholder farmers were living in. The bought seeds also often struggled with limited water supply; they had previously adapted varieties slowly to be more drought-tolerant.
Seed can be a livelihood investment. Allocating some crops to continue to produce seed allows for a more resilient subsequent season and there is no need to buy foreign seed grown in vastly different conditions. Seed production is specialised knowledge and being forced off the land means people are moved to commonages that may not be fertile and have adequate water. Seed is abundant and generous. People who had been living for generations further away from towns, for example, had an established seed practice, indigenous seed-saving methods and traditional seeds and recipes.
Using seed as tool for play at Baitul Ansaar Child Care Centre, Beacon Valley, Cape Town. (Photo: Zayaan Khan)
Being invested in indigenous food reclamation, I began a seed library with some friends, which has become the focus of my PhD dissertation. What is this relationship we have with seeds, from a deep time perspective through to the sociopolitical and environmental concerns we are faced with today?
On 5 September 2017, I organised a workshop with the support of the African Centre for Biodiversity to discuss and share information with local farmers about the seed Bills. The initial processes held by the government were not well advertised. We had decided to host a regional meeting in Cape Town and connected with various organisations to transport farmers from across the province.
In breakaway groups, farmers discussed how these Bills could affect them personally and as a collective. Various points were raised during the report back session, including that the Bills appear to exclude anyone who is not a large-scale propagator or farmer and that they were about protecting profits, not food security, biodiversity and local livelihoods. As one attendee stated: “These Bills are protecting big companies. Big companies make enough money and have so much power; they do not need any more protection.”
Participants also discussed how they feel abused by the government, as one local farmer said: “It seems as a small-scale farmer I’m being neglected, that I’m nobody in my own country.” There was a general feeling of being lost in the system, that there was never a moment of recognition. The effects on biodiversity were also raised and the fear that more varieties the farmers have worked with for centuries would disappear. The fear is valid, because communication about these Bills has been very slow and quiet. The majority of farmers I worked with have not been informed of these Bills and it has been largely left to civil society organisations to share this knowledge.
Displaying seed together reminds us of immense diversity, use and the many stories that come from seed, how they distribute themselves through shape, form and colour. (Photo: Zayaan Khan)
Liziwe Stofile, who farms in the city, said: “[The seed Bills] will affect the future of farming and nutrition because we’re going to lose diversity and variety of foods. We produce different foods for different [nutritional needs]. When I am hearing about the Bill, I become concerned about becoming poorer.”
Mariam Mayet, of African Centre for Biodiversity, stated at the National Seed Dialogue in December 2017 that: “[These] laws are very difficult to understand because they speak to a certain seed sector, corporate, and international law. These discourses have gone on internationally for a long time, and are embedded. A lot of the time when we are in meetings with government and industry they say we do not understand. But what people do understand is that laws are part of the architecture that upholds and entrenches the formal seed sector that allows corporates to flourish. The laws are not concerned with farmer-managed seed systems except to what farmers may or may not do with protected seed or to enter the commercial seed market.”
Seeds, as part of life, are of a multicultural nature. And although I speak mostly about food and food security, seeds have so many uses — from musical instruments and jewellery for hair and body to toys and teethers for babies and even as dyes.
The legal systems valorises one type of seed over the other (industrial or corporate over traditional) and by extent, the seed practitioners too. There is also the negation of the source material used for protected or patented varieties, the silencing of generations of cultivators transforming wild species into the domesticated foods we consume today. There is a binary of corporate seed versus traditional seed: corporate seed with distinct, uniform and stable criteria and traditional seed as dynamic, adapting and evolving to changing environmental or social conditions.
Washiela Isaacs of Colorado Park, Cape Town, sprouts seeds as part of her health practice. (Photo: Zayaan Khan)
For ease of reference, we can discuss this binary as the formalised seed system (FSS) and farmer managed seed system (FMSS). The FSS has directly affected the livelihoods of millions of farmers around the world, in many cases tragically, as in what is known as the suicide belt in India. Farmers were pushed into debt and the environment was degraded by buying into the industrialised Green Revolution agricultural model.
Currently the FSS is being driven at great speed across the continent through the African Union, with meetings often favouring the private sector and not leaving sufficient consultation time or accessibility for all — particularly smallholder farmers whose rights are infringed upon the most — to understand the contexts and meanings of policies and frameworks.
As stated by the African Centre for Biodiversity: “Despite over 90% of seed on the continent being sourced through farmer managed seed systems, including local markets, which therefore provide the base for food and nutritional security to the African population, this process focuses exclusively on private sector growth, seed certification, and restrictive quality and marketing controls standards.”
What has caught the attention of civil society is the way in which these laws and protocols are being pushed out across the continent. Over the years it has become clear that the agenda of the AU has been to push for the industrialisation of the FMSS and not to encourage the ancient practice that is the majority of peasant custodianship on the continent. Laws are being harmonised through regional economic communities and not country by country and the processes have been largely left to the private sector, with initially no communication with civil society. The ratification of these laws through harmonisation is quite an undertaking as seed is embedded in our cultures and at the heart of sovereign food systems, each relationship with seed, land and people is particular and reliant upon diverse and ecologically harmonious systems, weaving spiritual methodologies into the farmer managed systems.
A look into the indigenous and endemic seed collection with seasonal sowing at Good Hope Gardens Nursery, Cape Town. (Photo: Zayaan Khan)
As an attempt to standardise global seed protocols, particularly phytosanitary and industrial quality standards, the FSS plays out in colonial fashion, copy-pasting European ideals onto the FMSS and with little democratic process, ignoring the needs these producers have as well as the resilience of the existing systems — particularly in changing climates.
Doing this through regional economic communities allows for a faster uptake but at grave cost. It seems that Africa is being treated as a country and as homogenous. It groups economically contrasting countries such as South Africa and Lesotho, or a country as large as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Djibouti, which have vastly different geographies, cultures, languages and seed use, negating particular needs of seeds or farmers.
Questioning our collective loss of seed culture through forced removals during and pre-dating apartheid, the effects of capitalism on farming and our relation with the land and relegating our sovereignty in agricultural systems are all contemporary issues we face. Yet all is not lost because the conclusions are often about rebuilding our seed knowledge base, reviving our practice with seed, forming and connecting seed networks and seed libraries and beginning to grow from seed as opposed to buying in seedlings.
This is reliant on support, but the government is not rising to the occasion, so it is often left to people to rally together and get the support of civil society organisations and foreign researchers. This process is slow but has seen remarkable change in certain areas such as in parts of KwaZulu-Natal where farmers have been supported by the environmental justice nongovernmental organisation, Biowatch.
I started my career as a horticulturist and landscaper. Learning about seeds and how to create a seed system has been many years in the making and requires land, which has only happened to me in the past three years. It is specialised knowledge that takes years to embed itself as seasons change (and within a broader changing climate). Our needs differ, yet there is a certain determination that guides the process and allows for knowledge to return. We have patience, a slow listening to the land and to the seeds and watch and learn their adaptations that we encourage through a gentle custodianship.