Biodiverseedy: Sewing Connections for Living Seeds

Seed conservation is the foundation of agricultural biodiversity, and its importance for our future cannot be overstated. Slow Food has spoken before about the role of institutes like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in protecting biodiversity, yet it is also true that seeds must be more than museum artifacts or numbers in a frozen archive: they are stories, and these must be told within a living environment.

BiodiverSEEDy is a small international project that aims to reconnect seeds to the cultures that have passed them down through the generations. The work of thousands of years could be lost in just a few decades if the current trend towards monocultural cultivation, genetic modification and privatization of seeds continues unabated. The danger is that one day the incredible wealth of crop biodiversity which farmers have created and conserved may be limited to places the Seed Vault, and not be grown or eaten at all.

Photo: biodiverseedy.com

Sewing Connections for Living Seeds” is making a quilt of patches from around the world to show the importance of the work farmers do and have been doing since the dawn of civilization, to be shown at Svalbard itself in December 2017. The aims are to increase the international recognition of on farm, “in situ” seed conservation by farmers, and to call on governments to increase their financial commitment to supporting the farmers who safeguard biodiversity by growing their local, traditional plant varieties.

For more details on how you can contribute personally to the artwork, read more here!