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Resilient Seed Fliers

Resilient Seed was a film made by Ella von der Haide of the seed saving event in Brussels in April 2011. I’ve posted about this earlier. Booklets to accompany the film have just been released, and you can find them here:

Versions of the film corresponding to these languages can be found on her YouTube channel.

While they are oriented towards Europeans, I think the film together with the booklet are a really good introduction to what the seed saving movement worldwide is all about, together with some very practical information on how to organize your own seed swap.

In the background of the film preview picture above, you can see the backs of Søren and me giving away seeds that day.  He has the red shirt, and me the white.

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Field Liberation Movement Calls for Support

Now nearly a year and a half ago, I posted on the Belgian Field Liberation Movement, and their Field Liberation Day in Wetteren.  This was a demonstration against a genetically modified potato field planting trial.  After much public debate, and many long winded speeches by politicians, they finally decided last May to sue eleven of the ‘Field Liberators’ in civil court for damages.

Last month a Belgian court, acting on a filing from Greenpeace, declared the original permit authorizing the field trial invalid, and thus the field trial itself illegal.  Way to go Greenpeace!

The civil trial is now scheduled for 15 January 2013.

You can help!  You can donate to help offset possible sanctions or civil liabilities, as well as pay their legal or other expenses.  You can buy their t-shirts or beer!  You can also attend the hearing in January to show your support.

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Monsanto loses in Mexico

In a small victory in the ongoing fight against GMOs, beekeepers in Mexico dependent on selling GMO free honey to European customers, have won a suspension in the planting of GMO soy.  Now the fight continues to make this ban permanent

It goes to show how many of these fights come down to what we as consumers are willing to buy, and how linked together our world has become.

Cynthia, a long time reader and commenter here just sent me this link.

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Important Message from Al Kapuler

Both Peace Seeds and Peace Seedlings now have blogs for the posting of annual seed lists.
Hence PeaceSeedsLive.blogspot.com and PeaceSeedlings.blogspot.com are preferred destinations for the availability of our organically grown, open pollinated seeds. Some of our seeds come from public domain plant breeding and contribute to our work of supporting and developing a sustainable food system based on roots and tubers. Thus we continue to grow and select Andean South American and Pacific Northwest USA food plants that have been used for food for thousands of years.

For many of you Alan Kapuler needs no introduction.

For others who may not be familiar with his seeds, in my opinion he has one of the most exciting collections of seeds available.  Many are products of his own breeding work, or that of other public domain plant breeders.  In particular Alan is known for his work with corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, tagetes, and certainly other things too.  Both for beginning gardeners as well as the more advanced, their collection of seeds is a fantastic resource not to be overlooked.

Please consider supporting their work by buying, growing and sharing their seeds.

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Kokopelli Ruling

http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=125002&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=35284

Yesterday the EU Court of Justice made a ruling in the Kokopelli case.  I posted about this earlier here.

It’s not great news I’m afraid.

I’ll leave the full interpretation to others out there, but on the surface Kokopelli seems to have lost most of their arguments.

The good news is that farmers cannot themselves categorically be prevented from growing saving and selling their own seeds — but this is not really completely clear in the ruling.  This would appear to legalize what companies like Kokopelli do, but not make it much more likely traditional varieties will become more widely grown or slow the erosion of agricultural biodiversity in Europe.

This is perhaps a small step in the right direction, but far from a complete scrapping of the DUS related marketing rules that’s needed.

The fight goes on!