We interviewed Rural Women\’s Assembly\’s seed saver sister Norah, based in Limpopo Province. Seed Saving is one of the tasks of Rural Women’s Assembly and today we want to educate you about the importance of seed saving. Sister Norah clearly explains the role of Seed Saving in our African communities.

Question: What is seed saving?

Norah: According to me seed saving is preserving the future. I say this because seed is life and without seed there is no life which means there is no future. Therefore, by saving seeds we guarantee future for ourselves and generations to come.

Question: What is the role of the seed savers?

Answer: We save seeds to bring our food sovereignty.  We are reversing distorted knowledge that the good seed is a treated seed because the multinationals have planted in our minds that we can’t do farming without treated seed. Therefore, as seed savers we are sticking to the untreated seeds as we believe that they are way better than treated seeds. The Multinational have planted wrong information in the minds people by implying that untreated seeds are inferior to their treated seeds yet they bring more harm than good.

Question: Why is it important to save seeds?

Norah: Like I mentioned before, it is because saving seed it\’s a guarantee for better future and we can do very well with our indigenous seeds in our communities. The other importance is that we are able to know and control what we feed our communities. When we save seeds, we are guaranteed that we are feeding our communities real and healthy food.

Question: Why are the untreated seeds the best to feed the community?

Norah: Untreated seeds don’t have side effects; hence we always say, “Let the medicine be your food”.

Question: Why did you choose to be a Seed Saver?

Norah: I believe that we cannot depend on Western countries to feed us and we can’t give them power to determine what we as Africans should eat. I am a seed saver to bring back the dignity of African communities and to instill to our youth that indigenous seed is future to food production. Without our own indigenous food, it means we must depend on Western Countries to feed us and they can decide to stop giving us food anytime. That means we don’t have future because we won’t have any food if we don\’t keep our own food. Therefore, it is very important to save our own indigenous seeds as Africans so that we don’t have to depend on Western countries for food.