Nelson Mamallacta © Michelle Lowe /Progressio

'Seeds are life. We are seeds', one Ecuadorian farmer, Nelson Mamallacta, told me when I visited him recently. A seed is a powerful symbol of life around the world. Currently 10 international seed companies control just under 50 per cent of the world's commercial seed trade. This means they also control 50 per cent of the world's agricultural genetic resources and biodiversity, farming practices and people's ability to feed themselves writes Michelle Lowe.

For 12,000 years, farmers have saved some of the seeds from each harvest to sow the following year. But many farmers are now becoming increasingly dependent on buying seeds and a package of chemicals to go with them from large seed companies. The result is a loss of independence for small-scale farmers and a loss of agricultural biodiversity. Terminator seeds, which are genetically-modified to be sterile in the second generation, threaten to take this a stage further and put the power squarely in the hands of large seed companies.

In Ecuador, Progressio has recently launched a Big Lottery-funded project supporting poor communities in the Highlands to establish fair sustainable systems to manage their water, land and seeds. As part of the project Progressio's partner organisation CEA, the Ecuadorian Coordinator for Agroecology, will work with communities to promote seed-saving and seed-exchange, and to protect their natural resources.

The project will be working with small communities where people live in difficult conditions at high altitude with high levels of poverty and malnutrition. In much of the country farming is still practised on a small scale using basic techniques. Many producers still grow only to feed themselves and their families, perhaps occasionally selling the surplus.

Many farmers still rely on saving native seeds to sow each year and for some the idea of buying seeds and agricultural products to go with them is alien. Magdalena Grefa, an indigenous Kichwa farmer living in the small community of San José in the Ecuadorian Amazon, told me: 'We save our seeds to resow the next year - for everything we grow: palm, corn, cocoa, plantain, yucca, peanuts and rice. We do it so that we don't have to be buying seeds each year. Me and my sisters swap seeds and if someone doesn't have something we can get it from the others.'

Her community of 80 families lives in a collection of basic wooden houses surrounded by lush vegetation with dirt footpaths between them. They produce the majority of their own food but to make money they rely on income sent back from family members, mostly men, living away from home. Magdalena said: 'We have always saved seeds. That is just the way to produce - we have never done it any other way. It is not a new thing for us. We don't really buy any extra agricultural products because we don't use chemicals in our farming. So we buy almost nothing from outside. We don't really need to.'

Other farmers in Ecuador who are closer to bigger population centres are more connected to the marketplace. In order to produce to sell they explained to me that they have to change what they grow and start producing a wide range of vegetables which are not native. This has the advantage of diversifying people's diets but does mean that they have to buy foreign hybrid seeds which they cannot collect and resow as it is hard to produce good seed stock. For example, small-scale producers working with Progressio's partner organisation, Red Agroecológica del Austro, sell agroecological produce at markets in nearby Cuenca, Ecuador's third largest city.

While they still save native seeds such as corn, potatoes, kidney beans and broad beans they also buy hybrid seeds. Although seeds are expensive, they explained that they have to buy them in order to produce the kinds of vegetables that modern consumers expect: vegetables that look as good as those you would see on a supermarket shelf. Edmira Vangari, a producer from Octavio Cordero Province near Cuenca said: 'It's a cost to have to buy every plant. It would be great to be able to produce our own seeds by letting our plants here seed and collecting them but we can't - the plants don't produce seeds. We have to buy and sow new seeds every time because they aren't from here…On the other hand it is great for them [the companies] because they can sell, sell, sell and we have to buy again and again. This is our problem.'

To help farmers like Edmira, Magdelena and Nelson save seeds by stopping Terminator technology visit Progressio's seedsaver website.

Michelle Lowe is Progressio's advocacy and communications specialist in Ecuador and Peru. Progressio is an international development agency combining gospel and Catholic social teaching with development and human rights thinking to tackle poverty and injustice in 11 developing countries.