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Let’s germinate Reclaim the Seeds!

Reclaim the Seeds (RtS) began as a protest against the new EU seed legislation in 2010. Since then, every year around February and March Reclaim the Seeds happened initially rotating in different cities and during the last years more decentralized having different Reclaim the Seeds events in several locations.

Sadly, as we announced a few weeks ago, the event had to be canceled because of Corona (check here the ASEED statement about Corona). After discussing different options about postponing or canceling the different Reclaim the Seeds, the decision lamentably was to not celebrate them. One of the main reasons is that RtS, besides being a place of networking, exchanging information, attending workshops and talks combined with political discussion, etc. it is a seeds exchange festival and this makes sense to do it ends of winter/beginning of spring. This decision was taken for the reason just mentioned and also for not overlapping with other events that will happen further in the calendar. 

We would like to encourage everyone to keep exchanging seeds and knowledge and, to the extent possible, save some space in the future events and festivals for a seeds swap!!

Within the ASEED team we’ve been thinking on how we could give continuity to RtS even though this is not happening. This applies not only to the festival itself but also to keeping educating ourself about seeds, opening discussion and giving critical opinion on new GMO regulations, raising awareness about these topics and identifying key needs aspects and priorities for seeds in Europe and beyond.

 

                                 

Furthemore, during the lasts week we’ve been in touch with different collectives and organizations working on this topic. Some of them were supposed to take part of this year Reclaim the Seed edition and others are long term ASEED partners also involved in the seeds struggle. By contacting some of the participants of Reclaim the Seed we also want to share some information about their collectives and give more visibility to their project and  topics they were planning to present at Reclaim the Seeds.

Our aim is to create network, exchange information and keep building up a seed community for having more sovereignty in our food. We want to provide access to new information on  seeds and give some updates about new struggles and new regulations.

Some of the collectives and organizations we are working together in those articles are  Agroecology Now & Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resource, Seed Sovereignty UK and Ireland Programme – Gaia Foundation, GRAIN, CEO, Stichting Zaadgoed, Eco-PB and Liveseed, the Northern Seed Network, etc

 

In the coming weeks we’ll keep in touch with all of them and we’ll publish several articles in our web site; stay tuned!