This Eco-Club Action is tailored for high school students. See the current YEA for children K-8 and teachers or the current GRA for adults and college students. Global Response helps protect the Earth by telling you about environmental emergencies and what you can do to help. This month, small farmers around the world need our support to protect their rights and their survival. In many parts of the world, families depend for their survival on food they grow themselves - mostly wheat and rice.
Women do most of the farming.
Every time they harvest a crop, they save the seeds from the strongest, most productive plants. One and a half billion people depend on farm-saved seeds for their survival. A new technology threatens farmers' rights to save seeds for their next planting cycle. Two huge companies, Monsanto in the U.S. and Astra-Zeneca in England, have figured out how they can alter the genes of plants so that they bear sterile seeds. So that farmers are forced to buy seed from them every year, instead of planting seeds saved from the previous harvest.