Seeds: A Matter of Life and Death

When Ethiopia’s civil war threatened to engulf the capital of Addis Ababa last May, a group of scientists and activists meeting near Stockholm reacted swiftly to rescue the precious contents of the Addis Ababa seed bank.

The bank’s director, Melaku Worede, had been among the experts and international leaders participating in discussions about how to best protect crop plants and seeds--key to the world’s ability to feed its people. In the face of violent reality, talk shifted to action.

“We moved very quickly,” said Canadian Pat R. Mooney of the International Genetic Resources Program. “In the course of two hours, we had managed to get the Swedes, Dutch and Americans together.

“The Dutch government would provide the aircraft. The Food and Agriculture Organization would provide the United Nations flag, and the seeds would be moved into the plane and flown back into Holland, Sweden and the United States” for safekeeping. In Ethiopia, seed-bank workers alarmed at the fighting had already begun to send some of the materials to farmers outside the capital for safekeeping.

Through bloody wars of aggression--when a single day’s battle can wipe out generations of painstaking cultivation--or quiet revolutions of spirit, there have always been those prepared to take great risks to safeguard seeds.

In Ethiopia, the gene bank escaped the fighting without need for heroic measures. That was not the case, however, during the protracted siege of Leningrad in World War II.

Workers at the Vavilov Institute starved to death, rather than eat the seeds and sacks of potatoes that were part of the irreplaceable collections gathered under the direction of Nikolai I. Vavilov, the father of modern-day plant collecting.

After the American Civil War, innumerable acres of farms and fields throughout the South lay in ashes. All that remained of Mrs. Robert E. Lee’s stately gardens were the seeds of two tomatoes; a young Confederate soldier, unable to deliver the ripe tomatoes to his general as ordered, painstakingly saved the seeds.

For centuries, political and religious refugees have smuggled seeds out of their homelands with them, sometimes hiding them in skirt hems or hatbands. In the past decade, exotic eggplants started from seeds brought by Hmong villagers, who fled Laos after the Vietnam War, have been struggling in new gardens in Northern California.

Wars--military and economic--have been fought over plants. In the 1630s, the Dutch went crazy for tulips imported from Turkey, even trading them on the stock exchange. Speculators went to extremes to corner the tulip markets, just as Dutch traders did with nutmeg, cloves and other spices. In the spice wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, sea battles raged, and on the land, the Dutch uprooted or burned orchards of spice-bearing trees in the East Indies to keep them out of competitors’ hands--and to drive up prices.

Today, the bulldozers of industrialization and development daily wipe out hundreds more species of plants; many varieties of the world’s most important food crops exist now only in seed banks.

And still other forms of violence threaten international food security.

Activists have sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture, operators of the National Seed Storage Laboratory in Ft. Collins, Colo., seeking improved measures to protect valuable collections that critics maintain are vulnerable to fires, computer hackers and even terrorists.

Such charges can’t be dismissed as far-fetched. In the late 1980s, Sendero Luminoso terrorists twice made attacks on the International Potato Center in Peru. Afterward, its director began carrying a handgun.