Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear. "Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination."
posted by homunculus on Apr 3, 2008 - 77 comments

Norway unveils "Doomsday Vault" design. The Svalbard International Seed Vault, administered by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, aims to safeguard the world's agriculture from future catastrophies.
posted by amyms on Feb 8, 2007 - 35 comments

The last hope of life on earth: Svalbard. Most of humanity depends on just 12 plant species, down from over 7,000 historically. Fortunately, seeds can be viable for up to thousands of years, and seed banks have already preserved many species, including the entire plant population of Antarctica. But with seed banks being destroyed as the result of wars and accident, Norway has has begun work on an underground facility, protected by polar bears, in the Arctic permafrost that is designed to hold millions of seeds, as "final safety net" for humanity.
posted by blahblahblah on Jun 19, 2006 - 36 comments

Farmer Homer McFarland is being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Monsanto corporation. His crime? Replanting his crops' own seed, as farmers have done for millennia, which violates the biotech giant's intellectual property rights, the company claims. Quietly, Monsanto's aggressive "seed police" have been suing farmers in 25 states for years, often settling out of court for huge sums, according to the Center for Food Safety's new report, Monsanto vs. US farmers [PDF link]. For more information, also see a new documentary called The Future of Food.
posted by digaman on Jan 15, 2005 - 55 comments