Food for thought: Crop diversity is dying

Food for thought: Crop diversity is dying
By Elisabeth Rosenthal International Herald
Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2005


ROME José Esquinas-Alcázar regards the corn laid
out in rows with the love and admiration that
sommeliers reserve for bottles in a fine wine cellar.
To the untrained eye, it is a collection of misshapen
ears: Long, short, blue, yellow, white, spotted,
covered in dirt.

"Look at this beauty!" he exclaims. "Some are good
for starch, some for popcorn. Some grow in the cold.
Some are good fried, some broiled. The taste for
each is completely different.

"Diversity is what makes us happy, gives us choice
and keeps us free. And it's tragic because this is
what we are losing."

Esquinas, a top official at the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization in Rome, has spent
decades campaigning to preserve plants that are
used for food, which are becoming extinct at an
alarming rate.

Last year, his efforts culminated in the adoption of
the United Nations Treaty on Plant Genetic
Resources for Food and Agriculture, which requires
countries to preserve existing crops and creates an
international system for sharing crops and plant
genes.

But much has already been lost.

Historically, humans utilized more than 7,000 plant
species to meet their basic food needs, Esquinas
says. Today, due to the limitations of modern large-
scale, mechanized farming, only 150 plant species
are under cultivation, and the majority of humans
live on only 12 plant species, according to research
by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Most types of food, for example the tomato, consist
of several different species, and each species may
contain dozens, if not hundreds, of varieties. In the
last century, dozens of varieties of corn, wheat and
potato have disappeared.

"This is not nearly as sexy as a panda going extinct,
but the losses are far more dangerous for our
survival," Esquinas said in his office on the outskirts
of Rome.

The result for humans is a more one-dimensional
diet, where tomatoes look and taste the same and
only one type of corn or potato may be available on
supermarket shelves.

The consequences are potentially dire: As species
drop out, the world loses the genetic diversity that
has allowed farmers and scientists to breed new
types of seed crops that can adapt to changing
conditions - a hotter, drier growing season, for
example, or the invasion of a new bacterial pest.

"If you have climate change or environmental
change, you need to search through those plants to
find one that is adapted to the new conditions," he
said.

The loss of food plant species is directly related to
the 20th century "green revolution," in which
farmers adopted streamlined agricultural techniques
to increase production of food. To maximize crop
yields, they chose a few high-yield, uniform crops
that grew predictably and could be planted and
harvested mechanically. With irrigation,
mechanization, fertilizers and pesticides at their
disposal, farmers in developed nations were able to
maintain control over growing conditions.

The result was plentiful food, but far less variety in
the types of seeds and foods planted - which,
occasionally, led to disastrous vulnerability. In 1970,
for example, more than half of the corn crop in the
southern United States succumbed to an unusual
fungus because the corn was all grown from one
seed type that is particularly susceptible to that
disease.

While modern farmers tend to favor a few crops,
traditional small-scale farmers took the opposite
approach: maintaining and growing a wide variety of
crops and seeds in order to survive, since they had
little control over things like soil, weather, and pests.
To ensure there was food on the table, their best bet
was to plant a range of crops - some that thrived in
heat and others that could withstand cold, for
example.

Their storehouses and fields were (and are) the
world's gold mine of plant genetic resources. Indeed,
after the unusual fungus damaged the U.S. corn crop
in 1970, scientists modified the U.S. corn seed with a
gene borrowed from a type of African maize that was
resistant to the fungus.

But this kind of resource is being lost as land is
urbanized and as traditional farming practices in
Latin America and Africa fall by the wayside.

Esquinas ticks off crops that have disappeared from
the world's fields: Of the nearly 8,000 varieties of
apple that grew in the United States at the turn of
the century, more than 95 percent no longer exist. In
Mexico, only 20 percent of the corn types recorded
in 1930 can now be found. Only 10 percent of the
10,000 wheat varieties grown in China in 1949
remain in use.

Paying homage to the bounty and variety of nature
has been a lifelong obsession for Esquinas, who grew
up in a Spanish family that had farmed for
generations. In the late 1960s, he did his doctoral
research on genetic diversity of the Spanish melon,
traveling by bus, foot and horse to collect 370
varieties of seed from small farmers all over Spain.

Later, he grew the fruits and characterized the
physical and chemical differences between melon
types, creating a melon family tree.

More recently, at the anthropological museum in
Cairo, he focused on a particular treasure from the
tomb of King Tut, one that other tourists might have
overlooked among the precious trinkets and gold: a
small partitioned box holding more than 25 varieties
of barley seed, each in its own compartment.

"They recognized that these seeds were a
treasure," Esquinas says. "My conclusion as a plant
geneticist is that he was buried with all these seeds
because he didn't know what kind of soil and
humidity or rain there would be in the underworld!"

Today, Esquinas's mission is to ensure that food
plants are protected, both in "banks" and in the
field, so that the bounty of nature - and the genetic
diversity behind it - is preserved.

Since many crops have already disappeared in the
West, farmers in the developing world must be
compensated for maintaining and sharing their plant
varieties, he says.

When Esquinas was collecting melon seeds, he
accompanied a farmer to a remote village by
donkey, where he was presented with seeds for a
melon that the farmer insisted was exceptionally
hearty.

When he analyzed the seed back in the lab, he
discovered that it was resistant to many diseases,
and genes from that melon have since been
introduced into numerous commercial fruits.

Various institutes and universities around the world
maintain seed collections. The French National
Institute for Agricultural Research, for example,
maintains 4,000 lines of maize. But Esquinas says
that a more systematic effort is needed.

Maintaining diversity in food is not just about
survival, but also about the quality of life, and people
must be taught to appreciate it, he said.

In the past two decades, "People have learned to
drink wine - to notice the distinctions: this one is
smoky or sweet and that one aromatic," he said.
"But all food has variety - rice has it, potatoes have
it. You don't know a good wine the first time you
drink. We need to develop our taste for foods like
these, too."






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