If you pick up a package of seeds at your local community Seedy Saturday, or order some heritage seeds from a seed company, it's probably the furthest thing from your mind that those seeds might be illegal. If you do worry about it, you're either concerned about Canada's "Plant Variety Registration" laws, or you're doing a special kind of gardening where your produce goes up in smoke (if you know what we mean).
With all the Red Fife flour and bread on the market these days, and gourmet heritage potatoes showing up in supermarkets, would you believe that it's illegal in Canada to sell most varieties of heritage grains and potatoes?
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency manages an official list of so-called "registered" varieties of crops. Under the Seeds Act, any grains and potatoes not on the official list cannot be sold commercially for planting as agricultural seeds. We checked: of the 7366 varieties of wheat known in Canada only 239 varieties are legal. That means anyone selling seeds for 97% of your wheat heritage would be breaking the law.
Fortunately, Plant Variety Registration specifically exempts fruit and vegetable seeds so you can enjoy thousands of varieties of garden vegetables (there are over 5900 varieties of vegetables offered by Canadian seed companies). But farmers' choices for grains and potatoes are very slim, and that bottlenecks our whole food system.
Canadian agriculture is going to undergo more changes during the next century than it did in the last. How did we adapt our food system from the simple life of 1900 to the modern life of 2000? By using the natural genetic diversity of our food crops to employ the right characteristics in new and unexpected situations. How will we adapt the food system in the 21st century? Plan "A" is to use biodiversity again. And there is no viable Plan "B".