Seeds under influence

Food is one of the key issues facing society today. From time immemorial, the agricultural world has selected its seeds to improve production, but in recent decades, ever more sophisticated varieties have been created in the service of unbridled productivism. Mechanical, chemical, biological and genetic technologies, combined with industrialization and the perpetual race for yield, have led us to an environmental, food and health disaster.

Without even mentioning the famous GMOs, whose use is fortunately still strictly regulated in Europe, intensive farming, overexploitation of the land and the use of so-called "hybrid" seeds have made agriculture dependent on products that are harmful to all living organisms.

Faced with this dominant form of agriculture, small-scale farmers are developing an alternative based on ancient seeds at national and European level. But the battle to assert their right to use seeds not produced by industrial laboratories is a tough one. Indeed, legislation - and the validation criteria for inclusion of seeds in the "Official Catalogue" - favor industrial products, and agroecological farmers have been forced to operate illegally for decades.

With "Semences", Renaud De Heyn takes us behind the scenes of a sector in which private interests all too often take precedence over the preservation of the environment and public health...

renaud de Heyn - Éditions La Boîte à Bulles - 80 pages