Few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds, treasured since the dawn of humankind. World Community presents the multi award-winning film, SEED: The Untold Story (94 min.) on Tuesday, March 7 at 7pm at the Stan Hagen Theatre, North Island College.

Seeds feed us, clothe us, and provide the raw materials for our everyday lives. In a very real sense, they are life itself. Like tiny time capsules, seeds contain the songs, sustenance, memories, and medicines of entire cultures.

SEED: The Untold Story follows passionate seed keepers protecting our 12,000 yea rold food legacy. In the last century, 94% of our seed varieties have disappeared. Without seed diversity, crop diseases rise and empires fall.

Biotech chemical companies such as Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer now control more than two-thirds of the global seed market. In response, concerned farmers, scientists, lawyers, and indigenous seed keepers fight a David and Goliath battle to defend the future of our food. These reluctant heroes rekindle a lost connection to our most treasured resource and revive a culture connected to seeds.

The time-lapse cinematography is breathtaking and is just the antidote we need after our long winter. The Hollywood Report Card calls this film “a beautiful piece of art, careful, deeply coloured and poetic”.

Admission is by donation. Everyone is welcome. FYI: 250 337 5412

Read more about the film.

Few things on Earth are as miraculous and vital as seeds. Worshipped and treasured since the dawn of humankind, these subtle flecks of life are the source of all existence. Like tiny time capsules, they contain the songs, sustenance, memories, and medicines of entire cultures. They feed us, clothe us, and provide the raw materials for our everyday lives. In a very real sense, they are life itself.

Yet in our modern world, these precious gifts of nature are in grave danger. In less than a century of industrial agriculture, our once abundant seed diversity—painstakingly created by ancient farmers and gardeners over countless millennia—has been drastically winnowed down to a handful of mass-produced varieties. Under the spell of industrial “progress” and a lust for profit, our quaint family farmsteads have given way to mechanized agribusinesses sowing genetically identical crops on a monstrous scale. Recent news headlines suggest that Irish history may already be repeating in our globalized food system. Articles in the New York Times and other mainstream sources report the impending collapse of the world’s supplies of bananas, oranges, coffee and coconuts—all due to a shortsighted over-reliance on a single, fragile variety. Without seed diversity, crop diseases rise and empires fall.

More than a cautionary tale of “man against nature,” the remarkable story of seeds is an epic “good-versus-evil” saga playing out in our modern lives. For eons, cultures around the world have believed seeds to be our birthright: a covenant with the earth shared by all and passed down across generations. But today, our seeds are increasingly private property held in corporate hands. A cadre of ten agrichemical companies (including Syngenta, Bayer, and Monsanto) now controls more than two-thirds of the global seed market, reaping unprecedented profits. Genetically modified crops (GMOs) engineered in their sterile laboratories dominate farmers’ fields and dinner tables in the United States and countries around the world. Farmers from Minnesota to Madhya Pradesh, India toil in economic thrall to the “Gene Giants,” paying hefty licensing fees to plant their patented crops. If they attempt to save their own seed at the end of a season, following a tradition practiced by humans for over 12,000 years, they face ruthless prosecution. (Suffering under this indentured servitude, over 250,000 farmers in India have committed suicide in the last 20 years.)