I grew up as a farmer, so I see something happened in my farmer’s life. The first thing that I see it, when I was kid, my family or people in my village used to grow more than 5 varieties of rice every year. So, I used to ask my mother why we need to grow 5 varieties of rice? And at the end we’ve just mixed everything together to eat. My mother said we have to save varieties of rice because different kinds of rice, they have different quality, different character. Some kinds of rice, they survived in dry season, even if no rain for many months they can survive. Some kinds of rice, they survived in flooding. When they have a big flood, they can extend itself for 1 meter in one or two nights. Some varieties they can survive even they have disease, they have some epidemic. So, when they grow more than 5 varieties of rice whatever happened, they still have food, have rice to eat. That it means security of life, but now people grow only one or two varieties for sell, so whatever happened they lost, they don’t have anything. That it means life has no security.
When I was kid, nobody sells seed. Seed is something you give to people, you can share with people, and you can trade with people with something else. But, when I was about 12 or 13 years old, there’s a company came and then they start to give hybrid seed, hybrid watermelon seed to people in my village. Because people in my village used to grow watermelon for many years and they’re very famous about there. When the company came, they gave hybrid seed along with the chemical fertilizer. So, when people start to grow hybrid seed, they love it because they grow very fast and have a lot of fruits and then, all the fruits looked the same size and it tastes good. Next year, villages want to grow that seed again but they need to buy. After 3 years, they grow hybrid seed, the local watermelon seed disappeared. So, after that everybody needs to buy seed. You have no choice because there’s no local seed left in that area and in many places around, and the price of the seed rising up very fast. At the beginning, is only less than 100 baht per kilo but after 4-5 years later, the price goes up to 1000 baht per kilo. And now the price of watermelon seed goes up to 12000 baht per kilo. It’s not happen with watermelon seed only but also happens with all kinds of vegetable, all kinds of seed that we grow for eating. For that thing I feel like it’s not normal, why we need to buy seed so expensive like that? Why the seed have to be very expensive like that? So, the price of watermelon seed in the village now it’s about 10000 baht per kilo or 300 dollars per kilo.
The farmer in the village, they have average income about 30000 baht or 900 dollars per year. So, if one farmer who wants to grow watermelon about 9 acres, they need to invest at least 100000 baht. So, when they start to think about it, they need to think about where to get money. That’s the beginning of debt in farmer’s life. Because now 60% of money that farmer invests, will go to the company. So, if one family wants to grow 9 acres of watermelon, so they need to be in debt for sure because they have 30000 baht or 900 dollars per year but they need 100000 baht to invest. This is a big problem in everywhere. We can see it quite clear that the seed business and the chemical business involved with debt of villages everywhere. It’s now the whole village, people become in debt 100% now and most of them they don’t know how to pay the debt.
Our ancestor select the best for us, what kind of plan that they grow well, last long, keep a lot of fruits, and tastes good. They saved those things and it turned to the life heritage for all of us now. Now we have a lot of food to enjoy, that’s the benefit of our ancestor that gave to us. But now, we don’t save seed we let a few companies save seed for us but they did not select seed as our ancestor used to do it before. They select a worse one and then they develop our seed to make them weaker. They cannot stay long, they cannot rely on themselves. They need to rely on chemical and food from the factory. So, the taste it’s bad, we don’t have a good quality of food anymore. So, what happened now is we have no heritage to give to our next generation anymore. So, this food can be the last meal for our ancestor, for our era. Because we ruined everything, we ruined our food. That’s mean we ruined our life, we ruined our next generation. We have nothing. That’s why I feel like we need to save seed now because seed is life, seed is our next generation, freedom, happiness. If you have no seed, you’ll have nothing.
What we can do now is we come back to the farm, come back to this place we called PunPun. We started it 7 years ago. So, we start to grow our own food here, we start to save seed, collect seed from all over the place and grow up here and we can enjoy our life. We save seed and networking with another group and try to share seed together, we try to