Felipe Montoya is the Director of MILPA Foundation, involved in promoting the creation of living seed banks in farming comunities in Costa Rica.

The other night I ran into an acquaintance I had not seen for a while, and inquired as to his whereabouts. Willy told me he was now living on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica working as editor for a web bulletin on Linux. I had heard the name before, but really had no idea what it meant. I thought it was some kind of computer programming language. I asked him what it was all about, and very soon we became involved in a very stimulating conversation that bridged two cultures that had previously seemed so distant from each other, both in space and time. Even our languages seemed to belong to different eras. But soon enough we linked. While my friend spoke with a futuristic cyber language whose terminologies I stall can’t retain very well, I spoke with what to him seemed the language of Medieval monks. Scattered in my sentences were Latin binomials as I referred to species and varieties of different crop plants I was involved in tracking among small farmer communities in Costa Rica.

At first, when I admitted that what I knew about Linux was that it sounded suspiciously similar to Charlie Brown’s little friend, and when Willy admitted to having planted a tomato seed once upon a time in Grammar School, you can imagine how engaged our conversation promised to be. But when suddenly he mentioned something about Open Source, sharing information, and going against large companies intent on safeguarding intellectual property rights in detriment of the interests of greater humanity, we both spoke the same language.

My work with seeds is basically a struggle against transnational companies such as Monsanto, in alliance with powerful governments that seek to convert seed saving by small farmers a crime, that seek to banish a tradition that dates back over 10,000 years of selecting the best seeds from harvested crops in order to plant again. These companies are hungry for a world where any food planted must forcibly include them as the suppliers of seeds, all else being illegal and punishable with imprisonment.

It would seem that I am actually working with potential terrorists. And for these enormous companies that spend vast quantities of dollars in their search for greater profit margins, what small farmers do is perceived as a threat. But what do the small farmers I work with actually do? They grow corn, beans, tomatoes, rice, onions, squash, chiles, coffee, a variety of fruits, and medicinal plants, to only mention the most obvious. With the annual crops, year in and year out they chose the best specimens of their crops and save their seeds to plant during the next growing season, as these have proven to be adapted to the conditions of their farm. That is, these farmers are not dependent on seed companies for their seeds. They are independent. But more revolutionary still, they also share these seeds with their neighbors and other farmers interested in planting crops with the characteristics selected for by that farmer. They are in effect, selecting and creating new land races or varieties of crops. But by freely sharing the fruit of their labor, by giving away their personally selected varieties, these small farmers fly in the face of the whole ideology of Intellectual Property Rights, that is being shoved down the throats of all of us by transnational companies in cahoots with nation states and their international watchdogs.

Open Source software, I gather from my conversation with Willy, works somewhat like the seeds saved by the small farmers. The basic idea behind open source is that programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, improving it and adapting it to particular needs. And with an open source community sharing and exchanging this software, the software evolves much more quickly, efficiently than the conventional closed model software controlled by such companies as Microsoft. Moreover, open source software such as Linux, is free, compared to the exorbitant prices of conventional software.

Open source software has become a movement, stirring something all too human in the hearts and minds of geeks, creating a sense of community among those I thought seemed to prefer the company of a machine with a screen, over the warmth of a fellow human. That human quality of creating and sharing, is what has created the better aspects of civilization. That is what farmers have done for millennia. But also scientists, artists, and musicians. That is what makes us part of the human family. Nerds and farmers share this humanity. Never before, however, has their coming together in a common struggle been more important than today, when the simple acts of creativity and sharing are being cornered by transnational companies. We must begin and continue to create links to safeguard our humanity against the threats of the likes of Monsanto and Microsoft.

- Felipe Montoya, Costa Rica.