Today was the inaugural Liberty Plaza/Zuccotti Park seed swap and seed library. Just to be sure we got the point, a federal judge rejected a class action lawsuit by organic farmers against Monsanto. Chemical culture got a boost from the UK government who decided that their own Parliamentary recommendations on clean air are too expensive, even though the pollution is acknowledged to kill thousands a year. To adapt Gandhi, we might say that Western democracy would be a very good idea.

Seed swapping at Liberty/Zuccotti today

Occupy the Food Supply’s day of action began outside the Stock Exchange and then marched to Liberty. We heard from David Murphy (below), an Iowa-based activist with Food Democracy Now! about the threat posed by Monsanto’s aggressive patent campaign for its genetically-modified corn. He held up an ear of Oaxaca corn that he had acquired at the recent California seed swap (covered here).

Murphy with indigenous corn

Because it has been decreed by agribusiness that corn is yellow and that other forms are therefore not corn, this green cob is a biological misfire in their view. In fact, Monsanto used the food crisis to push GMO corn into Mexico:

After originally denying authorization for a pilot program to cultivate its GM corn in Sinaloa last year, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) just gave the company the green light to plant genetically modified yellow corn resistant to the herbicide glyphosate as a part of a pilot program in Tamaulipas’ current agricultural cycle. According to the National Commission for the Use and Understanding of Biodiversity (CONABIO), Tamaulipas is home to 16 of the 59 remaining strains of native corn.

The risk of contamination between the GMO corn and native varietals is clear to everyone except agribusiness and their allies, who don’t care. Nonetheless, Monsanto also aggressively sue farmers who find themselves accidentally growing Monsanto’s patented pesticide-resistant plants because of seed dispersal. That is to say, they not only patent life, they sue it.

The Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and several other growers and organizations filed a counter-suit against Monsanto to prevent the company from taking such hostile action. Regrettably but unsurprisingly, today we learned that:

U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald, for the Southern District of New York, threw out the case brought by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) and dozens of other plaintiff growers and organizations, criticizing the groups for a “transparent effort to create a controversy where none exists.”

The hard lesson here is that seed democracy is unlikely to be fostered by a legal system whose prime function is the defense of “property” rights.

Against this grim background, Liberty was filled with would-be urban growers collecting and swapping seeds. The organizers had sensibly brought an extensive collection, which they gave away in packets and then encouraged us to sub-divide amongst ourselves.

Seed distribution

The promise exchanged was that everyone who grew plants should let a portion run to seed and bring them back to the next seed swap, or to create a seed library. On the way downtown, I happened to read an essay by Jeff Sharlet about OWS in which he spoke of the “joyousness” and “beauty” of what he called “the physical democracy” of Zuccotti during the encampment. In the more confrontational atmosphere post-eviction, we sometimes forget what that was like and how good it felt. This event reminded me and gave me hope.

And in case you wondered why we occupied in the first place, a quick look over the Atlantic shows why. In November 2011, a Parliamentary committee reported that air pollution caused over 30,000 death in 2008. EU air quality standards are being flouted wildly in London, whose air is notorious.

Welcome to London

Yet today the appalling heirs to Mrs Thatcher (another quick boo for Meryl Streep here, please) in power in the UK dismissed the issue as generating “disproportionate costs.” Disproportionate to whom? Certainly not to the one in five Londoners whose deaths are attributable to the pollution, a figure the government did not dispute. And, let’s see, who thinks we’ll have a debate about London air quality before the Olympics in the way that we did before the Beijing Olympics?

These two issues are linked biologically as well as conceptually. Aldo Gonzalez, a Zapotec engineer who has led the struggle against GMO corn in Mexico, points out that indigenous varietals evolved over 10,000 years in a great diversity of climates and altitudes. It may very well be literally life-saving to have some of these hardier plants at our disposal once the neo-liberals have had their way with the climate.

Let’s go back to the beginning. When the Occupy movement began, the Very Important People wanted to know what our demands were. When the courts and the representative governments reject basic claims to life–except should one happen to be a foetus–there was and is no point in making demands to them. You have to sow democracy.