By Kay Campbell, Religion News Service, November 21, 2008
DUTTON--Michael White, who farms near Scottsboro, keeps a Mason jar full of wheat grains next to his well-worn Bible.
Capped with an antique zinc lid, the jar was filled by his grandfather decades before anyone dreamed of genetically altering plants or animals.
The jar reminds him of what he considers God's first earthly gift to humanity: seeds.
It's a gift that is in danger of being eradicated, White says, through increased genetic manipulation of plant genes, hybridization and the patenting of living genes by large corporations. God's gift of seeds, given the day after he separated dry land from water and the day before he hung the sun, moon and stars, according to Genesis, is not something that should be taken away from a farmer. To forbid a farmer or gardener from gathering his own seed to replant the next year is something White sees as one of the signs of the end of time.
"The Antichrist will use seed to control nations and people," White writes in the book he published in May, "The 666's Are in the Seed," a title that refers to the traditional number of the Antichrist of Revelation. "He will also use seed to create food shortages. Patented seed will become the most prized possession of the Antichrist."
White, like many Christians, believes the years before Jesus returns to Earth will be a "time of trouble," filled with the chaos predicted in Matthew and Revelation: war, famine, pestilence, plagues and a world-wide totalitarian government. Many Christians believe a globally idolized figure, the Antichrist, will rule the world.
White has been through his own "time of trouble" over seeds. A few years ago he and his father were sued by Monsanto for patent violation--it is illegal to save seed from patented plants for re-planting. White denies he ever saved the altered seed, or that he cleaned such seed for other farmers in his seed-cleaning business. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, his retired father hadn't farmed in years.
The lawsuit against his 85-year-old father was dropped in the spring of 2006, shortly before White agreed to settle out of court with Monsanto.
White cannot comment on the details of that settlement. But who won or lost in the legal tussles he had, White says, is immaterial. What matters is that people understand that seed patents, non-reproducing hybrids and plants engineered to produce seeds that terminate a germinating seedling are part of what he considers an immoral corporate and legal control of one of God's first gifts to humankind.
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