Throughout his life, Jefferson exchanged seeds with gardeners in both the Old World and the New. He considered gardening one of life's greatest delights. Though an old man, I am but a young gardener. A century ago, there was a 30-times greater variety of food plants available to Americans. Today, we are seeing a thousand-fold increase in the rate of plant extinctions.
Genetic diversity maintains the world, allowing crops to survive pests and disease.
The high-tech hybrid monocultures of today's agribusiness are so vulnerable that a single pestilence could wipe out an entire region or continent of that food plant. Over thousands of years, Third World farmers have selected and bred a wide array of plant germ plasm. Northern, developed countries now take these native strains and biotechnically alter a few of a plant's many thousands of genes. These transnational corporations then claim they own that plant variety and patent it. They then sell these hybrid seeds back to the Southern world at monopoly prices, including the costly chemical fertilizers and pesticides that these seeds must now have in order to grow.