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The most basic needs of humans -- we learn in grade school -- are food, clothing and shelter. Despite the current national hysteria over oil, it's the privatization of basic food sources -- seeds and water -- that should worry us the most. A lot of it is happening under the radar.

Seeds -- with Monsanto being one of the biggest culprits -- are rapidly becoming patented due to genetic modification. And patented seeds are being aggressively marketed by corporations to squeeze open market seeds out of the market place for many essential fruits and vegetables.

More menacing is that courts are granting absurd patent right extensions to GM seed ownership, to the point that farmers are responsible for NOT harvesting any GM crops whose seeds might have been blown onto their fields!

This book is a fair, balanced look at the threat that GM products pose to us in terms of industry control of the food supply chain and GM seeds.

Grist.com says of the book: "In her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, Claire Hope Cummings marches through the middle of these often reflexive con and pro positions in search of a more nuanced big-picture view. An environmental lawyer for 20 years, including four spent with the USDA, Cummings now reports regularly on agriculture and the environment. She has also farmed in California and in Vietnam. These experiences inform her book, which chronicles how transgenic seeds came to market; how their corporate backing has affected farmers, biodiversity, and agricultural sovereignty; and what their unfettered spread may mean for humankind.

It's not a happy picture. Just as Rachel Carson opened Silent Spring with the allegory of a town that woke up to find all the birds gone silent, Cummings said she considered starting Uncertain Peril with a scene in which everyone goes out to check their spring gardens, only to find that nothing has grown."

"With Uncertain Peril, Claire Hope Cummings offers an indispensable contribution to the debate over biotechnology. She rightly focuses our attention on the seed, and what its privatization and manipulation may mean for the future of food."

--Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore's Dilemma

Publisher's Weekly:

Former environmental lawyer and one-time farmer Cummings offers a persuasive account of a lesser-known but potentially apocalyptic threat to the world's ecology and food supply—the privatization of the Earth's seed stock. For almost a century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided seeds at no cost to farmers who then saved seeds from one harvest to another, eventually developing strains best suited to local or regional climates. But Cummings also tells how seeds became lucrative, patentable private properties for some of the nation's most powerful agribusinesses. Cummings bemoans the plague of sameness intensified by the advent of such fitfully regulated companies as Monsanto, which now not only own genetically modified seed varieties, but also sue farmers when wind inevitably blows seeds onto their neighboring fields. According to Cummings, this tyranny of the technological[ly]elite threatens agricultural diversity and taints food sources. Among the author's many startling statistics is that 97% of 75 vegetables whose seeds were once available from the USDA are now extinct. Cummings heralds plans for a Doomsday Vault to shelter existing natural seed stock, and finds comfort in organic farming's growth, but her authoritative portrait of another way in which our planet is at peril provides stark food for thought.

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BUZZFLASH REVIEWS