Seed Saving Survey

10/9/2013

Hello all,
The Mother Earth Rights/Defense of the Commons Committee of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) is conducting a survey of folks who save seeds and who advocate for seed saving in the US.

We are trying to paint a picture of the way seed saving is alive in our different communities, Urban and Rural as well as those who are advocating for it. You can take the surveyonline<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bzabmDdcTRr5KfVXDKMNzFUrTR5LRD7m6U3MV7coxPg/viewform or fill out the attached form and send it to the address in the letter below.

We would appeciate it if you could pass this letter on to friends and collegues so that we can get a diverse set of experiences and practices represented. The letter below describes the project in more depth and explains how we intend to work with the information you provide.

Thanks for all you do for the people, the plants and the planet

Bill Aal
Tools for Change
Unconference.net

Dear friends:
This is your invitation. You may participate if you save seeds, or even if you don't but do advocacy or other work related to seeds. And please pass to farmers and groups you know of. Thanks! You can take thesurvey online<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bzabmDdcTRr5KfVXDKMNzFUrTR5LRD7m6U3MV7coxPg/viewform> if you prefer.
The Mother Earth Rights/Defense of the Commons Committee of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA) supports and promotes the concept and practice of saving seeds. Farmers of many crops have savedseeds for millennia, but the practice has recently come under fire by corporations that have developed and patented seeds largely for profit.

To support the growing number of farmers, gardeners, eaters and advocates of seedsaving, this committee wishes to understand who in the U.S. saves seeds, as well as which, how, and why these seeds are saved. We conduct this seedsurvey as an act of food sovereignty. In this spirit, collecting data on agroecological practices and heirloom seedswill move us all forward towards seed and food sovereignty.

The women of La Via Campesina International, who recently declared the following in their manifesto in their international convening in Jakarta, Indonesia in June 2013, share the value of seed saving:

We can affirm that we have taken up the fight and the exercise of Food Sovereignty. In order to reach this objective we have worked hard "to summon all our knowledge, to recover our seeds, multiplying them, care for them, swap them and let them walk again, grow and multiply by our fields without hindrance or aggression". This has put us in an opposition to intellectual property, certification rules, GMOs and Pesticides.

We have constructed this survey in Spanish and English, and will try to translate it into more languages for wider distribution.

We hope that you will be able to distribute it among a diverse representation of your constituents. If that is not possible, please try to summarize the responses on behalf of your organization.

We recognize the sensitivity of how information has been extracted in the past, and we hope your participation in this survey is voluntary and in good will, trusting that the purpose of this survey is to build our own seed sovereignty model.

Please send your completed survey (and any pictures or stories you have about seeds!) to any of the members of the USFSA Compilation Team for this seedsurvey:
Devika Ghai - devika@panna.org
Ife Kilimanjaro - ifekilimanjaro@gmail.com
Andrew Kang Bartlett – andrew.kangbartlett@pcusa.org
Charity Hicks - sublimelight@netscape.net

www.usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org

http://www.usfoodsovereigntyalliance.org/

(502) 569-5388

(888) 728-7228 x5388

andrew.kangbartlett@pcusa.org

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