Hi, Patrick.
My God! What on earth are we coming to? Are we slowly being taken over by a bunch of secret aliens? At the heart of the matter, which you are concerned about, is the loss of freedom for us to lead happy and harmless lives as we would wish, due to the needs of some ‘beings’ who intend to have complete control over us.
‘Big business’ and the ruling elites including, of course, ‘agribusiness’ can have a lot to offer but they also have a lot to answer for.
Of course, as you intimate, it is all so complex and slowly creeping we hardly notice what’s happening. Perhaps we dismiss most of the identifiable points as unimportant, non-threatening or as aspects of our own paranoid behaviour because we really find it difficult to engage with the problem.
There are so many social and politcal issues such as: various inequalities, powerlessness and lack of education and respect for other people, that necessarily hold our attention, it is no wonder this issue is regarded as ‘soft’ and unimportant by the ‘popular press’ news gatherers.
As western consumers we can buy only a limited range of foodstuff which has to be a particular size and shape according to ‘standards’. Flavour is usually less important: hence the ‘grow your own’ and the save some special seeds practices for some people. Now, as large and small scale seed users and producers in rich and poor regions of the world, we witness the steady decline in plant diversity due to the new-style monopoly in horticultural and agricultural seed production, all brought about by avaricious, bullying and massive scale seed producers who would deny us our rights in food (and other plants) production.
If domestic, agricultural and horticultural heirloom plant seeds are becoming banned elsewhere, what chance do we have in maintaining autonomy and diversity, in this context, in the long term?
And what is wrong with growing, selecting and saving our own ‘varieties’ of seeds, which fulfil some personal and local needs yet create wider diversity? Nothing, of course but for how long can this continue given the pace of change in this field?

Keep going.
Dave. Bilston. UK.