Dark harvest of the suicide seed

The seedlings on my window-sill, the first of the year, are like little green ballet-dancers, all grace and energy, arms flung up to the light. They can't wait to get on with life, grow six feet tall, have sprays of yellow flowers and big glossy trusses of tomatoes.

That's all ahead of them later, in the greenhouse. For the moment, they share the warmth of my study, changing and growing and shifting their balance, each in its recycled yogurt pot. I welcome their company in a room where only the computer, muttering and warbling, pretends to any sort of life.

The little plants were grown from seed I saved myself, picking them out from the pulp of a ripe tomato and drying them on a saucer: a pleasurable gesture. Their variety, Harbinger, is almost a century old, its genes carried forward from year to year because its flavour is so good. But it is not a supermarket tomato, having too fine and thin a skin to take mechanical handling.

Farmers have been saving their own seeds for 12,000 years, and more than 1.4 billion of them still do, mostly in the countries of the developing world. They do it for economy, but also because, over time, their seeds have selected themselves to grow well in local soils and climate.

Last year came first disclosure of what has been dubbed the "Terminator" gene, a technique for genetically altering a plant so that the seeds it produces are sterile. The patent, jointly owned by the US Department of Agriculture and a Monsanto subsidiary, has aroused world-wide alarm. The fear is that, introduced with other genetic "benefits", it could tie farmers into buying commercial seed each year, and kill off the present biodiversity of farm-saved plant varieties.

The "Terminator" tag was coined by the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a reputable NGO based at Winnipeg, Canada (its website is www.rafi.org). Now RAFI claims to have uncovered more than three dozen further patent applications which use the terminator principle. Many of them take the technology further, so that genetic traits can be switched on and off by spraying with an external catalyst mixed in with the company's pesticide, herbicide or fertiliser.

If the patents are allowed into use, says RAFI, farmers could soon be sowing seeds that will germinate and grow productively only if regularly sprayed with one of the company's chemicals. As further genetic characteristics are added, their "added value" could be switched on in the same way, according to what the farmer can afford.

Some of the genetic traits will be matched to the demands of processors for particular sizes, colours, shapes and flavours. Thus, plants will become mere products at the base of the supermarket food chain, and farmers could be drawn increasingly into what RAFI terms "a bioserfdom" of contract farming, ultimately directed by a handful of transnational corporations.

It is hard not to see all this as a sinister capitalist conspiracy (words I would normally use only with the heaviest of irony) to gain control of the very production of food on the planet. All the major seed companies have been bought by chemical companies, or are tied to them, and a mere five giants now dominate the world of biotechnology breeding. In Ireland, as in many other countries, the whole technical culture of farming, government and otherwise, has been permeated for decades by the values of the agrichemical sector.

Biological research in agriculture was traditionally carried out by public agencies, but biotechnology is now overwhelmingly a private enterprise, investing billions in R&D. Even universities are seduced by the profitable science of biotechnology contracts. Slowly, the idea of private patents on living processes and organisms is becoming acceptable.

The engineering of suicide seeds is already being given its environmental alibi. The technology could, it is argued, eliminate the problem of horizontal gene transfer - the escape of engineered genes from modified plants to nearby weeds or wild relatives. In the same way, some gene manipulated (transgenic) plants are said to "do good to the environment" by ostensibly reducing the need for pesticides.

As Monsanto's little Irish beach-head of modified sugar-beet becomes a focus of protest, the sowings of transgenic varieties of seeds in America, Argentina and elsewhere (principally soybeans, maize, cotton, potatoes and rapeseed) already exceed 28 million hectares. Ireland has a special reason to be wary of proposals for field trials of transgenic organisms: an island is an ideal fail-safe laboratory when the final risk is unknown.

Given our climate, we are also unusually at the mercy of imported seed. According to RAFI, individual countries can still ban suicide seeds through their national patent offices, but Ireland will undoubtedly, in this as so much else, leave things to a European consensus.

Meanwhile, the ordinary Irish gardener may find it hard to find more than a philosophical difference between terminator seeds and F.1 hybrid seeds such as those for some cabbages, cucumbers or sweetcorn. These seeds are grown as two pure lines and crossed by artificial pollination to produce their exceptional vigour. Seed from hybrid seed will grow again, but without this first-cross quality it is generally not worth saving.

The alternative is "open-pollinated" seed of traditional varieties, serviced naturally by bees and hoverflies. Even better, most organic gardeners and growers think, are seeds from plants which themselves were grown organically. The Organic Centre, at Rossinver, Co Leitrim, is offering its first seed list (the crops for it are grown "in inclement areas" of Europe, which should appeal).

Another source of UK organic seed is the catalogue of Chase Organics (Deelish Garden Centre, Skibbereen, Co Cork). And members of the Irish Seed Saver Association (Capparoe, Scariff, Co Clare) are helping to multiply an increasingly diverse list of traditional varieties, most of which appear in no one's catalogue.