Seed Savers Exchange and the Svalbard Doomsday Vault: Biopiracy by U.N. Treaty

Reported by Paul Griepentrog

Amy Goldman has traded Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection for an international photo op in the permafrost beside the Svalbard Doomsday Vault. For three long years her misuse of SSE’s nonprofit resources has been legally enabled and empowered by Neil Hamilton, while Cary Fowler is lying his way towards a Nobel Peace Prize. By putting Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection into Svalbard, SSE’s Board has broken the trust of thousands of current and former Seed Savers’ Members who donated samples believing that their families’ heirloom seeds would always be maintained and protected from exactly this kind of misuse.

Speech by Kent Whealy
Prairie Festival, The Land Institute, Salina, Kansas
September 26, 2010

For past three years, Amy Goldman (Chair of the Board of the Seed Savers Exchange) and Cary Fowler (Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust) have been depositing portions of  Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection into the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the far north of  Norway.

Goldman and Fowler are being dishonest – to Seed Savers’ Members and in the  avalanche of self-promotion from the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the entity that oversees  Svalbard – by concealing the fact that being deposited in Svalbard places Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection under the control of the United Nations’ FAO Treaty, which was specifically designed to facilitate access by corporate breeders. Goldman and Fowler targeted an exemplary U.S. nonprofit in order to gain control of and then misappropriate Seed Savers Members’ Seed Collection of 26,000 varieties, by far the best collection of heirloom garden crops in the world.

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