Iran, new seeds produced without multinationals
Published on Wired Italy online on December 12 th 2014
http://www.wired.it/scienza/ecologia/2014/12/12/seedversity-nuove-varieta-semi-antichi/
Marco Boscolo and Elisabetta Tola
Thanks to Italian agronomists, the Fertile Crescent ― the birthplace of agriculture ― has become
an open-air laboratory for the production of more robust seeds, directly in the field and without
GMOs.
“Economically, we were increasingly dependent on the government and our land was becoming
less fertile year by year,” says Ahmed Taheri, who has been farming for more than thirty years in
Garmsar, Iran. Over the last ten years or so, he has become a true innovator and local leader. He
has built a community and searched for a new path to produce seeds for their fields
independently, developing new plant varieties suited to the local climate and an agricultural
production chain with greater added value. It is a good example of the participatory approach that
we described in the Seedversity webdoc, created with the support of the European Journalism
Fund.
We are in the province of Semnan, a few hundred kilometres east of Tehran, in the centre of the
so-called Fertile Crescent area, where agriculture first began ten thousand years ago. As we enter
the wheatfields near the state highway, Taheri informs us that this is also the birthplace of former
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who contributed decisively Iran’s difficult reputation in the
West and its international isolation.
Taheri’s wheat fields are different from those seen in the large farms of Europe or America. This is
not only because of their smaller size, cultivated by families, but also because of the striking
variety of plants, with different shapes and colours. Like the farmers who followed him, Taheri is
constantly producing new varieties of cereals, which he tries out by planting them in a small
section of his land. They are supported by agronomists from Cenesta, a Tehran-based NGO
involved in agricultural development. However, there is also an Italian presence, Salvatore
Ceccarelli, internationally renowned for his campaigns to support the empowerment of rural
communities and their autonomy from large seed companies. “The world seed market is currently
in the hands of ten large companies that control about 75% of it,” he tells us during a training
seminar for farmers in the hills of Pisa, in Italy. In other words, 75% of a global market that is
worth billions.
Ceccarelli’s great idea, developed fifteen years ago and now widely followed in many countries of
the South, as well as in Italy and France, is called participatory plant breeding. (See the interview
to Ceccarelli on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/113436321 ). This is perhaps a slightly convoluted
name for a very simple and straightforward practice: the selection of the varieties to be grown in
various areas, whether pure or mixed, must be the result of collaboration between agronomists,
geneticists and farmers, at every stage of the process. “This,” he says, pointing to one of the
experimental plots where his idea has been put into practice, “means no longer having to go to
the market to buy seed”, giving farmers at least a little more control over their own destinies.
According to Ceccarelli, and people working at all latitudes and in all climates who share his views,
you can begin with local seeds. These are mainly preserved in seed banks and germplasm
collections, which have been created and built up in all corners of the world in recent decades.
Seeds can also be found in small, marginal cultivations that still remain in the fields of some old
farms.
Commercial seed varieties must comply with current European seed law, which has been used as
a model for similar laws in other parts of the world: seeds must be certified, registered and sold
exclusively by seed companies. This prohibits reproduction by farmers for commercial purposes.
So-called traditional conservation seed varieties, however, are not subject to these constraints.
These are ancient varieties, often of local origin, considered as public and common heritage and
therefore preserved in the seed banks of research institutes or regional collections. Moreover,
they are accessible. Ceccarelli and other innovators around the world began from here, reusing,
multiplying and preserving these seeds in the field, and seeking new hybrids and varieties that
could satisfy both agronomists and growers.
The first projects of this type certainly included those of Ahmed Taheri and the other Iranian
farming communities, who were tired of the low yields and poor quality of the seeds supplied, in
their case, by the government. Today, the map of PPB (participatory plant breeding) projects is
considerably larger. (The map can be seen here: https://formicablu.cartodb.com/viz/658e884a4414-11e4-9d7f-0e230854a1cb/public_map)
What are the benefits of participatory breeding and why is it proving to be a suitable choice,
particularly in situations of low-input, marginal agriculture in areas of non-intensive production,
free from the constraints of the agro-industry? The first studies on PPB shows that new varieties
based on traditional seeds selected directly from the fields have faster production cycles than
those from the procedures typical of seed company laboratories.
Other advantages are often found in the countries of the South, such as Senegal and Ethiopia,
which we visited for SEEDversity, the webdoc published by Wired, on the occasion of World Food
Day 2014: traditional varieties have colours, flavours and aromas that are more acceptable to local
communities than imported varieties. The latter are perhaps popular initially because they are
considered more modern, but then tend to disappoint, either because they are not suitable for
traditional cuisine or because they require costly technical support that is not readily available in
low-income countries.
Another advantage is that various products can be obtained from the same plant: flour from the
milling of grains, feed from straw and scraps, fermented products, etc. This is an essential factor,
considering that 90% of agriculture is composed of small, family-scale production units, as noted
in the recent FAO report, The State of Food and Agriculture 2014, published in the International
Year of Family Farming, which also emphasises the fact that small farmers such as these produce
80% of the world’s food. Therefore, large Western farms count very little in the overall scale of
subsistence farming.
Finally, there is also freedom, because farmers produce their own seeds, as they always did
before, and once more control their own food security. Going a step further: “Our goal is and
must be food sovereignty,” we were told by Omer Agoligan, a farmer from Benin and president of
an association involved in sustainable production. We met him in Djimini, Senegal, during the seed
fairs described in the SEEDversity reportage on Western Africa. Aliou Ndiaye, coordinator of the
Rural Organisation of West Africa, expressed it more directly: “A farmer without seed is a poor
farmer.” His opinion is shared by French farmers, such as Bernard Lassaigne, Armand Duteil and
Jean-Francois Berthellot, and Italians, such as Rosario Floriddia and Giuseppe Li Rosi, who belong
to “Rete Semi Rurali” (the Rural Seeds Network) and have been engaged in recent years in the
recovery of traditional varieties of corn and wheat.
This was emphatically reaffirmed by Ahmed Taheri. Being independent, relying on varieties
improved in the field and selected for a higher yield in the arid climate of Semnan province, and
increasing and preserving seed on their own farms are the factors that offer farmers like him a
possibility of economic growth. It is sustainable, low-input innovation in harmony with rural
culture and that produces resistant crops. Above all, however, it is innovation that is easily
accessible to those who hold the key to the food security of most of our planet: small farmers and
their families.