By Timi Gerson

Mon­santo has donated $4 mil­lion in seeds to Haiti, send­ing 60 tons of con­ven­tional hybrid corn and veg­etable seed, fol­lowed by 70 more tons of corn seed last week with an addi­tional 345 tons of corn seed to come dur­ing the next year. Yet the num­ber one rec­om­men­da­tion of a recent report by Catholic Relief Ser­vices on post-earthquake Haiti is to focus on local seed fairs and not to intro­duce new or “improved” vari­eties at this time.

Some tough ques­tions need to be asked and answered before we’ll know whether or not Monsanto’s dona­tion will help or hurt long-term efforts to rebuild food suf­fi­ciency and sov­er­eignty in Haiti. Here are five of them:

• What do Haitians think? Do rural orga­ni­za­tions rep­re­sent­ing Haiti’s farm­ers actu­ally want these seeds from Mon­santo or not? We know at least one spokesper­son for Hait­ian farm­ers isn’t inter­ested. Cha­vannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peas­ant Move­ment of Papay and the National Peas­ant Move­ment of the Papay Con­gress said in a recent arti­cle pub­lished by Grass­roots Inter­na­tional that “if peo­ple start send­ing hybrid, NGO seeds, that’s the end of Hait­ian agriculture.”

• Will Hait­ian farm­ers be able to use exist­ing farm­ing meth­ods with these seeds or do they require a com­pletely dif­fer­ent set of tech­niques – for exam­ple, is it pos­si­ble for these seeds to be banked year to year for use in more than one plant­ing cycle? Hybrid seeds don’t have a great track record for re-planting, which means that farm­ers typ­i­cally must buy new seeds every year.

• Does cul­ti­va­tion of these seeds require expen­sive new inputs and/or chem­i­cals that may neg­a­tively impact the envi­ron­ment and soil over the long-term? Hybrids typ­i­cally require a lot of fer­til­iz­ers, pes­ti­cides, etc. and accord­ing to the press release, these will be pro­vided through the USAID’s 5-year WINNER pro­gram. When the WINNER pro­gram is done, will farm­ers find them­selves reliant on exter­nal inputs they can’t afford or access? What will the inputs leave behind in terms of the soil’s condition?

• Will the rest of the Mon­santo seeds sent to Haiti over the next year be con­ven­tional or genet­i­cally mod­i­fied (GM)? GM seeds are as con­tro­ver­sial in Haiti as they are here at home. It is crit­i­cal that Haitians them­selves are in charge of the deci­sion to plant or not plant GM; they first need to know what is being offered to them in the first place.

• Will the Mon­santo seeds (whether con­ven­tional or GM) affect indige­nous seed diver­sity by mix­ing with them and con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing exist­ing seed strains? Large influxes of non-native seeds have touched off con­tro­versy and alarmed envi­ron­men­tal activists and peas­ant farm­ers from Mex­ico to Malaysia to Mali.

Agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment is crit­i­cal for Haiti and was even before the earth­quake. Lambi Fund of Haiti, a part­ner orga­ni­za­tion of Amer­i­can Jew­ish World Ser­vice (AJWS), has been work­ing with rural com­mu­ni­ties to cre­ate indige­nous seed banks, build­ing exper­tise in farm­ing tech­niques and using environmentally-friendly meth­ods to renew depleted Hait­ian soil.

Advo­cates for com­mon sense food aid, includ­ing AJWS, are ask­ing Con­gress to spend the $150 mil­lion dol­lars requested by the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion for Food Aid to Haiti on resources that will help Haiti feed itself for the long-term. You can make your voice heard by sign­ing this peti­tion.

Monsanto’s dona­tion – just like the US government’s in-kind food aid dona­tions – should empower rather than dis-empower the rural com­mu­ni­ties work­ing to grow food for their coun­try over the long term. More to the point, the com­mu­ni­ties most affected by these dona­tions should decide whether they want this aid at all and if so, what they want and when they want it. It’s unclear in this case if Mon­santo or any­one else has asked them.

Timi Ger­son is Direc­tor of Advo­cacy for Amer­i­can Jew­ish World Ser­vice. Ger­son started her career orga­niz­ing leg­isla­tive cam­paigns for fair U.S. trade pol­icy as field direc­tor for Pub­lic Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. A flu­ent Span­ish speaker, Ger­son has lived and worked with women’s and human rights groups in Colom­bia and Costa Rica.

http://civileats.com/2010/05/17/five-questions/