Over 76% of the Seed Market Is Now Patented by Corporations

Just six companies in the world have patented most of the seeds grown in the entire global agricultural market.

May 8, 2014 | Source: Nation of Change | by Christina Sarich

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Just six companies in the world have patented most of the seeds grown in the entire global agricultural market. Decisions made in high courts in the 1980s that favored the likes of Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Group Limagraine, Land ‘O Lakes/Winfield Solutions, KWS AG, Bayer, Dow and Sakata have given away our food heritage, built around thousands of years of agricultural knowledge, to a few greedy entities in just a few short decades, but seed saving might just halt this corporate greed and degradation of our food.

With corporate consolidation of our food supply and seed industry, the amounts and varieties of seeds are diminishing. “On average, across all crops grown in the US over 90% of the varieties grown 100 years ago are no longer in commercial production or maintained in major seed storage facilities.” Most scientists have warned that food diversity, just like biodiversity, is critical to future food stores, anddespite the astonishing pace of seed industry concentration, an estimated 1.4 billion people still depend on farmer-saved seeds – the vast majority of whom are based in the global South.

What is the number one trait that biotech seed has given the world? Is it food abundance, or higher levels of nutrition? How about better crop yields or chocolate flavored soybeans? The one thing these patented seeds have in common is herbicide resistance. One farm official in Arkansas has put it this way, ”
herbicide resistant weeds are the single largest threat to the production of agriculture we have ever seen.

Farmers everywhere were sold a biotech lie.