Tough Questions, Hard Choices
This essay first appeared in our 2015 Seeds and Supplies catalog. The conundrum presented here was resolved in our 2024 catalog, when we decided to stop offering all varieties from Syngenta and its subsidiaries.
In this catalog we celebrate the importance of pollinators and address their peril. Not much significant has changed since I first asked in these pages in 1995, “Do You Know Where Your Seed Comes From?” The names of the chemicals have changed, some of the technologies of choice to deliver them have changed, but the penetration of the seed industry by multinational pharmaceutical and chemical corporations has not.
Some of our seed in this catalog comes from Hild (3 varieties), a subsidiary of Bayer, and more from Syngenta (20 varieties). Each of these corporations is a manufacturer of neonicotinoids, a class of systemic insecticides that are absorbed and transmitted to all parts of plants including pollen and nectar, and have been found by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to be “acutely toxic for bees.”
In 2013 after conducting a formal review of existing studies, the European Food Safety Authority concluded that neonicotinoids pose an unacceptably high risk to bees. Following their report the European Union voted for a 2-year moratorium restricting the use of imidacloprid, clothianidin and thiamethoxam on crops that attract bees. Syngenta has taken them to court, claiming it was based on a false process and inaccurate assessment. After paying Bayer a $120 million settlement resolving a patent dispute, in 2002 Syngenta gained worldwide rights to thiamethoxam. In 2009, the last year for which figures are available, sales of thiamethoxam reached $627 million, second highest among the seven neonics. Thiamethoxam is used for seed coatings. More than 90% of all corn seed and half of soybean seed is treated with neonics.
Despite being hit with the EU restrictions and with a class-action lawsuit by Canadian beekeepers alleging $450 million in damages from thiamethoxam and its metabolite imidacloprid over the past seven years, Syngenta recently petitioned the EPA to increase the legal tolerance of residues for these neonics in numerous crops. Seeking to use them as leaf sprays rather than just as seed treatments, they asked for a fifty-fold tolerance increase for sweet corn, a twenty-fold increase for sunflowers, etc.
Fedco does not sell treated seed. Nevertheless, continuing to offer even untreated seed from Syngenta poses ethical dilemmas. On the one hand, like Seminis/Monsanto, with whom we parted company in 2006, Syngenta boasts a high-quality line, delivers consistently high germination, always ships on time, and almost never errs. Market and home gardeners count on their superb varieties, many of which have no equals, such as Raven zucchini (2,652 packets last year), Gustus brussels sprouts (1,675), Masai haricot vert (1,629) and the venerable Silver Queen sweet corn (622). Our customers, especially those making part of their living from these varieties, would sorely miss them and might just shop for them elsewhere (and they are widely available).
On the other hand, can we, with a straight face, call our agriculture sustainable if we are addicted to varieties produced by multinational corporations that thrive by feeding a system dependent on the toxic chemicals they manufacture? Syngenta also makes the herbicide atrazine, the world’s secondbest selling after Monsanto’s Round-Up, and lately has come under criticism for allegedly harassing whistle-blowing scientist Tyrone Hayes whose research claims that atrazine disrupts frog reproduction. See: A Valuable Reputation. So we leave the choice to you and it is no easy one. We have coded Syngenta and Bayer varieties with a ⑥ so that you may identify them and come to your own conclusions.
–CR Lawn, 2015