In Gaza, farmers' wives save seeds under siege

According to Reporterre, which publishes a report from Beirut based on exchanges and photos sent from Gaza, Hanadi Muhanna has managed to rebuild a bank of indigenous seed varieties. Crouched in her tent in the Deir el-Balah displacement camp, she plunges her hand into heavy jute sacks filled with seeds. After three years of war and decades of blockade, the seeds of Gaza's farmers are scarce. "Seeds are life," she says. The extract we have stops there: we do not know how many varieties are preserved, how they are distributed, or what resources the bank has. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the report.

A farmer's seed is autonomy in a sack. You replant it, you swap it, you select it year after year so that it suits the soil and climate of the place. A bought seed, by contrast, is one more input: it presupposes a supplier, hard currency, a border crossing. Yet in Gaza, the border is held by others. When the blockade decides what comes in and what goes out, depending on imported seed amounts to handing your jailer the key to the larder.

This is where the old concept of dependency sheds light on the scene. Economies placed in a subordinate position are not merely "behind": they are organised so that what matters most, here food, production and markets, is decided elsewhere. A territory whose agriculture is strangled becomes a captive market and a recipient of aid, rarely a producer. Keeping one's own varieties means loosening that constraint, on the scale of a jute sack. When Hanadi Muhanna speaks of resistance, it is not a press-release metaphor: it is political economy at ground level.

Note, too, who carries this work. In Reporterre's headline, it is "elles" ("they", the women) who fight. The care of living things, the sorting, the memory of varieties, work that is rarely paid or counted in statistics, often rests on women. The global agricultural capitalism, for its part, has always preferred uniform, patentable seeds bought back every season. Marx spoke of a rift in the metabolism between society and nature; the standardisation of varieties is a very concrete version of it. Saving local varieties means preserving a diversity that neither war nor the market has managed to protect.

We should not romanticise. A seed bank under canvas replaces neither the land, nor the water, nor peace, nor the freedom to move. Nor does it tell us what can be planted, or where. But it reminds us of something capitals like to forget: you can destroy fields, but not so easily the memory of what grew in them. The question remains whether that memory will one day have soil in which to take root.