Gather the Women Global Matrix From: Criss Raintree
Date: Sunday, December 31, 2006
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GM FOODS AND SUICIDE SEEDS


Thank you, Bettye, for bringing this important topic to us. For more information, see a good film on the subject: "The Future of Food" (2004), directed by Deborah Koons Garcia. It is 90 minutes long and I found it at Netflix. It will also tell you of the incredible stories of the small farmers who were sued by the giant agribusiness corporations that market the GM seeds when their mutant products drifted into the farmers' fields, unwanted, of course and the corporations accused the farmers' of "stealing" their technology.

There are wonderful organizations working to keep normal, naturally occuring seeds available to all of us. They offer memberships, some at reduced rates for low income families, as well as low cost catalogs of seeds for sale. Some of them are:

Seed Saver's Exchange, Rt. 3 Box 239, Decorah, Iowa, 52101

The Flower and Herb Exchange, also at Rt. 3 Box 239, Decorah, Iowa, 52101, patterned after Seed Saver's Exchange, but a separate organization, financially independent of SSE though they share space.

Native Seeds/SEARCH,2509 N.Campbell #325, Tucson, Arizona, 85719

The Heritage Seed Program, which is a project of the Canadian Organic Growers (I don't have an address for them at this time.)

The listings for these organizations come from a 1991 edition of "Seed To Seed, Seed Saving Techniques for the Vegetable Gardener", a book by Suzanne Ashworth, so I can't verify that the addresses are still current.

At this point, we still have a choice, unlike some of the other countries (as well as some farmers here in the U.S.) who have been duped by the agribusiness giants into using their "suicide seeds" and now are dependent on purchasing more GM seed each year because they are no longer able to produce their own from the crops they grow. I am afraid that unless we work to maintain our freedom of choice, before long it could be taken away from us.

Green Blessings, Criss Raintree