Open Source Seeds and Open Source Software
I hope by now there are a number of readers of this blog who understand these two principles are one and the same. Vandana Shiva famously talked about this in an Internet video, and I’ve certainly talked about this here before too.
It’s not like you can’t grow OP seeds in your garden by day and surf the Internet with Windows at night, but if you do it’s a bit like growing both OP and commercial F1 seeds in your garden at the same time. There’s nothing wrong with this, but some will see it as a small conflict of ideologies, and often people don’t do it themselves for this reason.
This is because the principles behind non-commercial seeds and non-commercial software are pretty much the same.
Inventorying Genetic Resources
One of both the strengths and weaknesses of today’s genetic resources is they are spread all over the world and tucked away in different places. There are an estimated 1700 genebanks in the world, most in different localities and jurisdictions. Probably even more important are farms and gardens all over the world, each with their own important collections of plants.
No less importantly, there are increasingly people offering their own collections of seeds for trade, often over the Internet like the Bloggers Seed Network.
The diversity of locations is a strength because if something happens at one location or with one collection, the damage can be isolated and duplicates that may be stored elsewhere can be used to replace the losses.
This diversity is a weakness because it can both be difficult to locate needed genetic resources, and more importantly it can be difficult to detect when important resources are lost.
Garden Seed Inventory
I’m not the first person to have an idea like this. Kent Whealy, cofounder of the Seed Savers Exchange, identified a similar problem in the 1980s which led him to compile the Garden Seed Inventory. This is something he more or less kept up to date until the time he was forced to leave the SSE a few years ago.
Kent noticed there was a lot of consolidation in the seed business in the US and Canada, and every time a seed company went out of business or was taken over by another part of their inventory was lost. He noticed a lot of OP varieties were disappearing in this way, and no one was doing anything about it because they weren’t noticing it.
These inventories published by Kent were catalyst for a number of things.
First of course were the SSE themselves who began to purchase as many of these seeds as possible before they were lost, and added them to their collection. This became a very important part of the work of the SSE.
A number of other people were motivated to start maintaining them as part of their private collections, and people like George Stevens of Synergy Seeds even started seed companies based on the idea of protecting these seeds that were being lost. At one time Synergy Seeds was identified by Kent’s Garden Seed Inventory as the 13th most important source of non-commercial OP garden seeds in all of North America.
More Complexities
The world is a much more complex place than it was at the time of the Garden Seed Inventory. Most importantly the issue of genetic resources has become much more visible in light of climate change and peak oil. Agriculture needs to change, and genetic resources are key to this. No longer is the availability of OP garden seeds and consolidation of seed companies in North America the focus of attention, but rather it’s the world as a whole.
Our genetic resources are threatened by personal greed, like we’ve seen at the Seed Savers Exchange and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
We’ve seen massive consolidation in seed companies worldwide, leaving Monsanto owning most of them.
We’ve seen the introduction of a number of very complex treaties and changes to intellectual property rights laws.
We’ve also seen the introduction of MTAs or Material Transfer Agreements, in many ways much more insidious that other treaties or laws. MTAs are a written contract between you and the person giving you the seeds. Treaties and laws will change and go away with time, subject to different interpretations in different jurisdictions, but written agreements are always and forever! These are also usually written with future changes possible, so in fact when you sign them you aren’t aware of all the restrictions or obligations that might possibly be placed on you. MTAs are also something a company like Monsanto can deal with, and have the money to defend in court, but the administration of these is impossible for an independent plant breeder.
The Task at Hand
On the most basic level an Internet based application is needed for the Blogger Seed Network. Something ordinary people on the Internet can use search for and trade seeds.
At the most extreme level, it should include all plant varieties everywhere in the world, commercial varieties, garden and farm varieties, plant breeders and plant collectors personal collections, and the collections of the estimated 1700 world’s genebanks, together with their legal status with relation to the various treaties and MTAs that are around, as well as their availability. We will need to identify duplicates and possible or near duplicates.
Obviously what we end up with will lie somewhere in between, and will very much be an ongoing project. A lot of this information already exists, and key will be identifying and securing it, then figuring out how to best incorporate it. We need to be able to keep this information up to date, and identify trends.
The basic application needs to be based on non-commercial software with an open architecture, with the possibility of maintaining some confidential information. It needs to be distributed for robustness, and to prevent the possibility it could be shut down due to laws in one or a number of jurisdictions. It needs to be kept up to date!
At one time I was paid to work as a software developer, but I was never very good and those days seem pretty far behind me. I also don’t have time to do much work on the technical side of this. I can however help with some of the support, planning and architectural details, as well as acquiring data. You need to be very self motivated, and most of the work will need to be done by yourself or others you find to help you. Mostly it will be up to you to implement all aspects of this on your own.
Can I tempt anyone into getting started on what promises to be a very high visibility programming project?
