Giving Compass' Take:

• Women are playing a huge role in saving seeds around the world: and in turn, the seeds are playing critical roles in their health, culture, and resilience.

• How can we help food security in Africa? How does climate change and rising temperatures factor into food insecurity? 

• Here's an article on seeding the future: how to invest in effective agroecological practices. 

In northern Uganda, nestled in the Western Rift Valley homelands of the Acholi people, Immaculate Omona grows a local groundnut (peanut) variety called Acholi valencia. High yielding and drought tolerant, this variety reliably provides essential nutrients her family depends on. However, this plant provides more than just food, it also embodies her culture, telling a story of resilience and survival.

For many years the north of Uganda was plagued by a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony. Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) predated on the people of Uganda, abducting tens of thousands of children in his campaign of mutilation, torture, slavery, and rape. His horrific reign of terror led to millions being relocated to Internal Displacement Camps for over 20 years. It is at one of these camps that Omona’s aunt waited for the terror to stop. For these 20 years, she saved a single family heirloom, the Acholi valencia. Every year, she cultivated this plant on the side of the camp, growing enough to keep it alive, furthering the very essential characteristics that make it unique. Even during the war, she understood the significance of this variety and did everything she could to keep it alive.

However, it is not just wars that threaten the world’s biodiversity. African governments are giving in to corporate pressure to adopt laws that deny farmers’ rights to save, plant, exchange and sell their own seeds. Well-funded promotion, subsidies, coercion, and advertising are being deployed in an attempt to roll out industrial seeds designed for monocultures and chemicals and to displace farmers’ varieties suited to organic farming. The end goal is clear: to prevent farmers from saving seeds so that they buy corporate hybrid seeds instead.

Read the full article about saving seeds by Million Belay and Loren Cardeli at Food Tank.