Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Seed Privatization on Sustainability

Executive Summary:
Seeds of Sustainability is an interactive presentation series centered on engaging with audiences to highlight an underreported fact: Farmers have lost their rights to regrow their seeds after harvest. I show how this is loss of “seed sovereignty” is due to plant patents and the implications it has for both industrial farmers and indigenous communities. Furthermore, the project shows audiences that a mere four seed corporations now control the global seed market. This is all shown by highlighting the hidden business structures of pharmaceutical-agricultural-chemical conglomerates. By doing so I connect the implications to sustainability, expose price fixing, dwindling crop diversity, and the promotion of environmental pollution through agro-chemical usage.
The project offers policy recommendations of reforming plant patents to instead allow an open commons of plant genetic profiles (germplasm), of global industrial crops as well as wild-crop-relative-varieties still existing in nature. This open source commons will serve as a priceless tools for sustainability goals.
The project also includes showing the public how to research the impacts of corporations in their own unique interests pertaining to sustainability. This project and research methodology has been translated into a class I am currently teaching “It Starts With Seed: Food, Medicine, and Corporate Inflation” at UCLA.

Importance:
Any discussion of sustainability in agriculture needs to include the discourse around seed sovereignty, as biodiverse crops are better positioned to allow the food system to survive in an increasingly volatile climate. Yet plant patents have dramatically restricted this right and resulted in decreasing biodiversity levels of the global food system and countless societal implications.
I am particularly passionate about seed sovereignty as my family was sued for regrowing our seeds in the US Supreme Court Case Asgrow v. Winterboer (1995). Our loss directly precedes the trends of corporate mergers and acquisitions of once small locally based and diverse seed companies by agricultural conglomerates such as Monsanto.
By presenting this information to the public, I expose the greenwashing campaigns of corporate giants throughout the food system trying to pass off their efforts as being sustainable. The project highlights instead local systems as being the sustainable wave of future food systems. I highlight ways to diversify global industrial crops through a cooperative model. It also promotes protecting the wild-crop-relative-varieties still existing in nature which may hold genetic keys to the future of our food system.

Impact and Reach:
The project featured presentations geared towards five different audiences: toddlers/elementary students, high schoolers, college/graduate students, experts in the field such as lawyers and geneticists, as well as the general public. I presented at a day care facility, a local high school, and in numerous university classrooms. I also participated in the UC GradSlam competition highlighting this project in a 3 minute Ted Talk style presentation. In totally, I have presented each format numerous times and have reached over 300 audience members.
Beyond just a presentation series, this project has also been turned into a seminar course in which I am currently teaching 23 undergraduate students through UCLA’s Food Cluster program, which uses food as a lens for environment and sustainability. The course I built is titled “It Starts With Seed: Food, Medicine, and Corporate Inflation”. I guide students to explore issues pertaining to food, sustainability, and how corporations impact their own unique interests. Each student is building out their own research paper detailing similar stories to those that I have laid out in regard to seed patenting. The students show how the pattern is playing out in every sector of society and the detrimental corporate impacts on sustainability and human health.

Collaborations:
A local elementary school and high school had me come present this topic. I have also presentend in numerous classrooms at UCLA as well as Santa Monica College.

UCLA’s Food Cluster Program brought me on to teach my own course detailed above.

Your Role Well Defined:
My role was being a presenter, researcher, and teacher. My own research focus is centered on exploring the implications of corporate power privatizing previously public resources, and their implications towards sustainable innovations of the future. Beyond its implications to the field of sustainability, I apply a focused approach on genetic modification, legislation surrounding a farmer’s right to regrow seed, and how they detract from sustainable agriculture goals.
I translated my graduate research into this project and used it to inform the public about practices of agriculture I witnessed growing up on a farm in Iowa. I brought this project into almost every aspect of my graduate experience and

NEXT STEPS:
This is a cumulation of all my work into a passion project which I will continue to present for the rest of my life. This project also served in memorial to my Father Denny Winterboer who passed in Spring 2021.
My next direct steps are researching for Professor Michael Roberts on global regulatory bodies pertaining to food. I intend to map the systems that currently hinder seed sovereignty and to explore avenues of reform. I plan to connect Seed Sovereignty debates and tie them into the current legal discussions surrounding a universal “right to food”.
I am currently submitting grants proposals to fund my continued research, and will also be applying for PhD programs in a year to further my research. I also intend to continue teaching my seminar course in the future whenever possible.