Continuing the discussion from Coated seeds, should I wash it off?:
I’m seeing the issue of ordering seeds from an international (particularly Chinese) vendor is worthy of discussion. @MarkReed, you clearly are strongly apposed to the idea. I was not meaning to stir up the hive with my concern about coated seeds but it seems I have since you suggested I burn them! I’m open to being convinced that ordering seeds internationally is not a good idea. I don’t place a lot of international seed orders but I have on a few occasions. I have Pearl millet I got several years ago from a vendor in Ghana. And I just ordered rhubarb seeds from Australia. I’m not in the seed train and none of the internationally ordered seeds I have overlap with the GTS mixes but I don’t want to cause any problems.
I have a number of seeds of Indian and Asian varieties that were ordered from domestic vendors but are still clearly imported seeds. Is this problematic as well?
I am new to this community and wouldn’t want to return seeds that caused anyone concern.
As far as imported seeds from domestic vendors: if they are imported by reputable companies, they will have complied with the relevant regulations. If it is some guy on ebay, probably not.
My personal opinion is that if we want to import seeds, we should follow all the regulations. GtS can help with this. And for those in the USA, almost anything can be found without importing it.
I think my position is correct whether or not one agrees philosophically with the government’s right to regulate the importation of seeds. Even if the government shouldn’t do this, we should take into account how much trouble we could get into for importing them. (In the worst case schenario, people could get into a lot of trouble!)
Brief, you could be importing diseases along with the imported seed or plant.
And that could be a problem for the industrial farming. I don’t see this causing real problem in an ecological farm where you have a vibrant ecosystem.
I would also add, China is the last place I would trust to import seeds from.
China is experimenting in a lot of different breeding and genetic modification.
China has also repeatedly shown they do not care or respect regulations.
You can find endless cases of imported products from China. Baby products containing lead, or “pure” metal products that turn out to be unknown alloys (sometimes referred to as Chinesium), or contaminated car tires causing major accidents. And these are being produced under well-known and previously respected companies claiming to have very high standards of quality control.
My point is, if they are willing to cut-corners in the production of products for the major corporations, anything being sold to the ‘little guy’ is a total wild card.
Also, if it’s coming from China through a 3rd party seller (Ebay, Etsy, Amazon, etc.) it is very likely you may not even receive the correct species. Most of those are pure scams.
And that could be a problem for the industrial farming. I don’t see this causing real problem in an ecological farm where you have a vibrant ecosystem.
I’m not sure this is true. Chestnut blight managed to kill wild trees in natural forests. And besides, whether or no, most of our food is currently produced by industrial farms. We should move away from this, of course, but at the moment, a new pathogen could be devastating to the food supply and individual livelihoods.
I tried looking at the aphis guidelines for buying seeds and it is a bit hard to interpret. It asks you to file a request to see if your order requires a permit but also that most herbaceous seeds don’t require one.
The millet seeds I ordered in the past came with a phytosanitary certificate but it seems that’s often not required for seeds to be compliant.
At the very least the labeling of my recently purchased Hosta seeds isn’t right so it seems safest to just not plant them.
I shouldn’t be surprised at the level of extreme disconnect between what is legal and what happens in the marketplace. The option to direct order seeds from China are all over e-commerce to the point that I assumed it was legal but apparently it’s just that nothing is enforced.
Ok. Supposing this is true, how do you reconcile the idea of increasing diversity with the idea of not importing any seed? Do you think local heirloom seeds are enough?
Not to mention that probably those heirloom seeds were imported from another continent not so long ago.
Depending on where you are, there might be a lot of diversity already present, whether commercially available or in genebanks or maintained by seed savers. In Spain, can you legally buy seeds from other EU countries?
And there are legal and safe ways to import seeds even from other continents; here in the USA, so long as one has a permit (and in some cases a phytosanitary certificate), seeds of “safe” species can be imported. I believe GtS has or is working on obtaining such a permit.
Buying Chinese seed from Ebay is about the riskiest way of doing this I can think of, short of smuggling potato tubers from Latin America.
I would be interested in donating to GtS for the specific purpose of supporting the ability to safely (both with regards to disease transmission and regulatory risks) import seeds that are unavailable or impure in the US. If one of the powers that be can help me ‘earmark’ a donation to put towards the administrative and financial burden of that process wants to send me a message, I’m not rich but I’d love to send a little spare change towards it being more feasible in the future.
I have a low-key obsession with sweet lupin - which is especially hard to get because of the invasiveness concerns - and long bean cowpeas. The latter has been easy enough to accumulate a nice variety of, thankfully, but I’ve seen references to some disease resistances in varieties I can’t get my hands on. I imagine every crop has some foreign heritage lines with something interesting hiding in them - having a safe way to make those available to our tinkerers would be wonderful!
Interestingly, we stopped shipping seed to the USA a few months ago after a string of ‘seized by customs’ notifications that our customers got. This coincided with the change to digital declaration forms. I’m surprised this chinese stuff gets through at all.
Biosecurity is a live issue here. last year the supplier of I believe 40% of supermarket tomatoes in Australia destroyed their whole crop after receiving seedlings from a local wholesale supplier who had grown them from imported commercial seed from Turkey. testing confirmed an additional 2 seed lots from Israel were also infected. These seeds had passed clearance in the country of origin. All infected sites are now under quarantine for 12 months and cannot grow solanums. Current cost of surveillance to tax payers in Australia $5 million.
I don’t want to be that guy.
So if they got it wrong, I imagine random ebay sellers are not going to be any more biosecure.
I’ve bought seeds from France and Portugal without any issues, from established companies and associations. I suppose they are sending healthy seeds from healthy plants. But even healthy plants may carry pathogens. I am not worried to introduce them in my terrain, there’s so much diversity that I don’t believe it can cause any trouble.
I understand that if you are growing industrial, then you need maximum security, since the immune system of those lands is destroyed. I understand these farmers need the extra protection. But I don’t think this has to apply for every farmer, especially ecological gardeners. Pathogens can be introduced but they do not thrive here, there’s so much competition.
The consequences of bringing something new to a place cannot be known, ecological gardens are in no way immune, nor will it be contained. If you make the decision to import unknows to your garden you are making that decision for your entire continent and once it’s done, it’s done.
I thought we were fighting to prevent the seed industry from controlling all the seeds. What you said seems to go in the opposite direction. You are buying into the reasons of the big industry for controlling the seeds. Next thing you won’t be allowed to buy seeds outside of Bayer.
I think importing things within Europe is very different from importing things from one continent to another. That’s when things tend to really go wrong. Pathogens within continents tend to have many ways of traveling, and as far as I can tell such imports may even be legal; you would know better than I. Think about what happened to native peoples in the “new world” when Europeans and their diseases showed up. The old world was one “pool” that tended to share diseases, but the “new world” had been isolated for a long time, and the results of the interchange were disastrous. (And, of course, a Chinese Ebay seller is a whole issue of its own.)
Even if it was true that pathogens and pests didn’t harm ecological gardens (which isn’t true; I have plenty of pests in my gardens, and native, wild ash trees are dying by the millions here due to an imported insect) something you import could devastate surrounding industrial farms. For better or worse, the majority of human beings today depend on those crops. We should be working to make farms more resilient; but until that happens, caution is warranted.
As far as Bayer controlling seeds: I don’t want industry to control our genetic resources. But disastrous imports are just the sort of thing they will leverage to gain control. And governments keeping pathogens out is not the same thing.
Edited to add: I sure wish somebody had not imported Japanese Beetles here!
Abraham,
There are numerous examples where the introduction of novel pathogens into intact, diverse ecosystems (with probably more diversity than in your created garden ecosystems) have lead to the collapse of those ecosystems. Take the example of myrtle rust in Australia, which is now devastating 300 species of native plants in the Myrtaceae. Eucalypts dominate Australian ecosystems. Yet myrtle rust is marching through our forests changing them forever. A bit like clearfell logging, but without the economic benefits.
Another example - Cinnamon fungus, particularly in the south west of Australia (a world biodiversity hot spot) which again destroys eucalypt forests smashing all the life forms that are associated with or rely on them.
Veroa mite. Fire ants. Northern Pacific seastar. cane toad. Alligator weed.
I suppose if you reckon its OK for Homo sapiens to totally modify every environment in the world without regard to the other life forms and their ‘rights’ to exist then this isn’t a problem. I hold a different view.
People reckon climate change is the major environmental crisis facing us. Wrong. We can fix climate change in a few centuries. Invasives are for ever.
gm
I agree with everyone even if you do not all have the same opinion.
Botanical gardens have been importing seeds for centuries in Europe with a very low percentage of pathogen introduction. When a new seed is imported it requires observation to destroy everything as soon as possible if something seems sick.
There is a greater risk of introducing pests from cold countries to warm countries. In the opposite direction, frost plays a very saving regulatory role.
Something else that seems important to me, diseases or parasites are very rarely reported with seeds but rather with what is used for transport: container, soil, packaging, means of locomotion. If Abraham imports seeds from France there is little risk because we are on the same continent…thousands of birds and trucks transit daily between our countries, if it imports a disease it is only an acceleration of the process that would necessarily happen one day.
I will not, however, send seeds to a tiny tropical island in the middle of the ocean to maintain this natural isolation.
the health regulation is sometimes absurd too, in France you need a certificate to send a bulb of garlic inside the country…
However, from the moment that the bulb of garlic is declared as food you can make it transit without paper…
It does not make sense, if it is contaminated the disease will be spread more quickly by a consumer who will throw it in a simple trash without taking special measures.
I appreciate the good discussion on this topic. It seems we can all agree the best approach is to proceed cautiously and take adequate measures to not cause harm with our actions.
One thing I’m left especially confused about is how in the US there are thousands of online vendors selling seeds from overseas that one can order with a click of a button. Often without even realizing they’ll be coming from outside the US. It seems that most of these are in categories that would be exempt from requiring a permit or certificate but by my reading of the APHIS site it seems like they’re saying a buyer should still file a request to find out which can take months. It is simply impossible to think that any sizable number of people ordering these seeds are filing a request months in advance.
On eBay alone there are thousands of active listings for seeds from outside the US and looking at them many seem to be selling in abundance. These don’t appear to be small time sellers but sizable businesses. Not to mention Etsy and numerous stand alone websites that come up at the top of google results.
So yes, let’s all be prudent and careful but also hopefully these seeds are benign because with the apparent volume of exchanges happening, the cat is out of the bag so to speak.
Yes these seeds are being brought in whether by you or someone else.
It’s more a question of do you want to be a part of it by bringing in these seeds and supporting these sellers?
It’s happening at such an overwhelming scale that even if they are trying regulate it the system cannot catch everything coming through.
And I don’t think they are actually trying to do anything about these small packages.
Also many sellers will just label it as something like “jewelry” to get around the regulations.
Yes, the one time I accidentally bought seeds from China (the Ebay seller did not clarify that they were based in China), they came labeled as “plastic flowers” to circumvent customs. I did not plant them, for all the reasons discussed on this thread.
I think one concern is that, while lots of people are obviously doing this, some percentage of them do get in trouble with the Feds over it; and do you want to be that person?
