Our history

Save Our Seeds was found­ed in 2002 as the Berlin office of the Foun­da­tion on Future Farm­ing, a branch of GLS Treu­hand e.V.

Zero tolerance for GMO contamination

More than two decades ago, Benedikt Haer­lin, the head of our Berlin office, ini­ti­at­ed a Europe-wide cam­paign to keep seeds free from genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied organ­isms (GMOs). The Euro­pean Com­mis­sion had pro­posed that ‘adven­ti­tious and tech­ni­cal­ly unavoid­able’ con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of seeds with GMOs could be accept­able at lev­els between 0.3% and 0.7%. How­ev­er, the intro­duc­tion of such lim­its would have led to the grad­ual con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of all seeds — and, by exten­sion, our food — under­min­ing the foun­da­tion of GMO-free agri­cul­ture.

In response, Save Our Seeds became the lead­ing ‘cen­tre of exper­tise’ for civ­il soci­ety move­ments oppos­ing GMOs in Europe. We also became the key point of con­tact for politi­cians, com­pa­nies, region­al gov­ern­ments, and the media. On 14 Octo­ber 2002, we sub­mit­ted a mem­o­ran­dum to the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion.

Our call for a ‘puri­ty law for seeds’ was backed by over 300,000 indi­vid­u­als and more than 300 organ­i­sa­tions rep­re­sent­ing over 25 mil­lion mem­bers across all EU mem­ber states, as well as com­pa­nies and insti­tu­tions. Ini­tial­ly met with ridicule, the ‘zero tol­er­ance’ pol­i­cy we cham­pi­oned has since become the offi­cial pol­i­cy of the EU and its mem­ber states.

Further activities

Over the years, Save Our Seeds has expand­ed its work to include a wide range of ini­tia­tives relat­ed to genet­ic engi­neer­ing, GMO-free agri­cul­ture, seeds, sus­tain­able farm­ing, and food sov­er­eign­ty. Notable efforts include the Ban­tam maize cam­paign and the estab­lish­ment of an infor­ma­tion plat­form on GMO issues, Infor­ma­tions­di­enst Gen­tech­nik.

Since 2009, Save Our Seeds has also worked to raise aware­ness of the UN and World Bank’s World Agri­cul­ture Report, on whose super­vi­so­ry board Benedikt Haer­lin has served since 2003. This effort led to the cre­ation of the Meine Land­wirtschaft cam­paign in 2011, which aimed to reform the Euro­pean Union’s Com­mon Agri­cul­tur­al Pol­i­cy and its Europe-wide coun­ter­part, the Agri­cul­tur­al and Rur­al Con­ven­tion 2020 (Arc2020).

As part of the 2000m² project, Save Our Seeds explored how the 2000 square metres of arable land avail­able per per­son on Earth could be used. We con­tin­ue to coor­di­nate the inter­na­tion­al ‘Weltack­er’ move­ment.