Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher and Sue Edwards
Needless to say, crop genetic diversity has not been evenly distributed throughout the cultivated parts of the world—it cannot exist in noncultivated areas except in the trivial sense of it having been taken there to be consumed or stored. Owing to inherent environmental diversity in particular parts of the world, coupled with the history of agricultural development in relation to those areas, there have been hot spots of crop domestication and genetic diversification. These crop genetic diversity hot spots have come to be called Vavilov Centers, to honor the Russian scientist who first identified eight of them. Subsequent scientists have tended to think that, though such centers can indeed be identified, there are more than eight and that, more importantly, crop domestication and diversification have been more diffuse geographically than initially thought.1 Many complex reasons are now causing a fast reduction in crop genetic diversity even in the Vavilov Centers.
The accelerating increase in communication is mixing ideas, technologies, cultures, and even people throughout the world, a process that seems to be taking us toward one homogeneous global culture. However complex this evolving global culture might turn out to be, it is inevitable that we will have lost much of the content of our erstwhile diversity in the process of achieving it. We have already witnessed a high level of attrition in our crop genetic diversity,2 and yet, the very process of globalization is changing the world’s environment, thereby increasing the need for such diversity to adapt agriculture to changing farm conditions. If human survival into the indefinite future is to be assured, therefore, globalizing humanity has to put all its efforts into increasing crop genetic diversity, rather than fatalistically accepting the accelerating decline.
Southern Europe constitutes a part of the Mediterranean Vavilov Center, that part of the industrialized world referred to as the Global North. The rest of the industrialized world is relatively unimportant as a source of crop genetic diversity. All the other important Vavilov Centers are in the developing world, referred to as the Global South. The problems of conserving crop genetic diversity are therefore geographically problems of the developing world, though, of course, its erosion concerns the whole of humanity. Because of these and related reasons, the difficulties in actions that are required to maintain crop genetic diversity remain intimately linked to problems of development that the South faces in this era of globalization. The fact that this globalization is led by the North while crop genetic diversity remains mostly in the South marginalizes the causes of failure to protect this diversity, and thus confounds the difficulty of taking action even when there is a global will to do so. Usually, in fact, there is insufficient national, let alone global, will to take all the action needed. And yet, the very process of globalization, which is exacerbating the erosion of crop genetic diversity, is also making that very diversity essential for the continuation of human well-being into the future. Though, like all futures, this particular one is uncertain, at least one facet is becoming clear—climate is changing,3 and a commensurate increase in crop genetic diversity is necessary for adapting to that change.
In the second half of the twentieth century, many scientists and scientific institutions realized that the world’s future food supply was endangered because of crop genetic erosion, and that something had to be done. The simplistic response was to store in gene banks that diversity that would otherwise have disappeared. There are now many gene banks globally that are trying to save as much crop genetic diversity as they can.4 But their problems are many,5 and their success has thus been limited.6 The most recent and tantalizing quick-fix arose in the form of genetic engineering that promised to synthesize any desired crop variety in the laboratory, but some of the newly synthesized varieties emerged with unforeseen problems.7 The evidence for the complication of agricultural systems—because transgenes from crops can get incorporated in the genomes of wild relatives through cross-pollination and thus, for example, make some weeds pernicious—is even more plentiful in scientific literature.8 For these reasons genetically engineered crop varieties have now become highly controversial in many parts of the world.
In Ethiopia, for example, there are vibrant farming communities that are still increasing crop genetic diversity, both through breeding new farmers’ varieties of existing crops, and through domesticating altogether new crop species.9 However, when the whole trend is considered, the erosion of crop genetic diversity is far greater than its generation, even within the developing countries in Vavilov Centers, let alone globally.
Most of the crop varieties currently under cultivation are protected by intellectual property rights and some, in fact, are patented. This makes for a one-way track of availability of crop varieties from the smallholder farmers of developing countries to companies mostly based in industrialized countries. This one-way flow makes access to crop genetic diversity from developing countries difficult, especially for those very countries that gave rise to it in the first place. This is especially true of patenting.10
Globalization has also induced a tendency toward uniformity in eating habits. A report prepared for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) states that although about seven thousand species of plants have been used as human food in the past, urbanization and marketing have drastically reduced this number—only 150 crops are now commercially important, and rice, wheat, and maize alone now account for 60 percent of the world’s food supply. The genetic diversity within each crop has also been eroding fast; for example, only nine varieties account for 50 percent of the wheat produced in the United States, and the number of varieties of rice in Sri Lanka has dropped from two thousand to less than a hundred.11
Partly as a reaction to the erosion of crop genetic diversity, but more because of a growing realization that industrial agriculture pollutes the environment and is, in the long run, unsustainable, the organic movement is now growing globally, which will help slow the erosion of crop genetic diversity. However, as far as limited current experience tells us, this movement is not making sufficient linkages with that local community farming that has not yet been swallowed up by the very process of globalization. And yet these two sectors have many commonalities and could well strengthen each other.
To be sure that agriculture can keep changing as quickly as it must, we need more crop genetic diversity than we ever had. If we stop atmospheric pollution immediately, the Earth’s climate will still change, though it would probably stabilize after some time; even if we were able to stop polluting the atmosphere immediately, therefore, we would still need as big of a crop genetic diversity as we can muster. This means it is not only necessary for us to conserve all the crop genetic diversity that we have, but also to regain in full the capacity to generate the diversity that we have partly lost in the last hundred years. We must, therefore, sufficiently fund existing gene banks and build new ones as needed for ex situ crop genetic diversity conservation in order to (1) keep all existing unique collections, ensuring that they are all always viable and accessible for breeding; (2) regenerate all existing unique collections without genetic drift changing their unique identities; and (3) make new unique collections before they disappear for good.
We must foster organic movements in order to make their agricultural production systems crop genetic diverse so as to match the environmental diversity of the land that is under cultivation. We must also foster the establishment of mutually supportive linkages between the primarily subsistence farming communities in the South and the growing commercial organic farms in the North. This is necessary for developing agricultural systems suited to the diversity of environments, so as to maximize both production and crop genetic diversity. We should consciously foster, including through subsidies when required, the in situ conservation of crop genetic resources by organic farmers, both primarily subsistence and commercial, in the North and South; and help organic farmers, both commercial and subsistence, in research and development for maximizing both crop genetic diversity and yields in the diverse environmental conditions of the changing Earth. This is required because agrochemicals are becoming more expensive with time, owing to increases in petroleum prices; industrial agriculture may soon become unaffordable.
We need to condemn as immoral the patenting of crop varieties because the process sucks in crop genetic diversity from primarily subsistence farming communities, but restricts the resulting varieties into circulating only among the rich, especially when natural cross-pollination passes patented genes from genetically modified crop varieties to nonmodified varieties.
We must declare Article 27.3(b) of TRIPS immoral; make biopharming, using food crops, a criminal offense; reduce biopharming with noncrop plants to the minimum in order to protect the environment; and even then, use it under strictly contained conditions to ensure environmental safety.
1. Kristina Plenderleith, “Traditional Agriculture and Soil Management,” in Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, ed. Darrell A. Posey (International Technology Publication, for, and on behalf of, UNEP, 2009), 317. Among many, Jack R. Harlan, J. M. J. De Wet, and Ann Stemler, “Plant Domestication and Indigenous African Agriculture,” in Origins of African Plant Domestication, eds. Jack R. Harlan et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 3–19.
2. Board on Agriculture of the National Research Council, Managing Global Genetic Resources (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1993), 36, point out that this problem was already realized in the first half of the twentieth century.
3. G. A. Meehl et al., “Global Climate Projections,” in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eds. S. Solomon et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 747–845.
4. Ibid., 85–116.
5. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “Modernization, Science and Technology, and Perturbations of Traditional Conservation of Biological Diversity” (paper presented at the Biodiversity Convention Conference, Trondheim, Norway, May 24–28, 1993). Also Board on Agriculture of the National Research Council, Managing Global Genetic Resources, 27, 153–172, 322.
6. C. Fowler and P. Mooney, in their book, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), have described in detail how much genetic erosion is occurring in gene banks.
7. For example, New Scientist, November 26, 2005, has an editorial and more detail under the title “Wheeze in a Pod,” which reports on the work of Australian scientists who developed a transgenic pea with genes from beans at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) over ten years, and abandoned it because the transgenic pea became highly allergenic to mice and would presumably also be allergenic to humans.
8. For example, reference may be made to: Anne Marie Chévre et al., “Gene Flow from Transgenic Crops,” Nature 389 (1997): 924; and Thomas R. Mikkelsen, Bente Andersen, and Rikke Bagger Jørgensen, “The Risk of Crop Transgene Spread,” Nature 380 (1996): 31.
9. For example, Impatiens tinctoria, a plant that used to be collected from the wild for cosmetic purposes, is now being planted as a crop under small-scale irrigation by many smallholder farmers on the mountain slopes of southern Tigray because of growing demand from urban women.
10. Board on Agriculture of the National Research Council, Managing Global Genetic Resources, 23–25.
11. Kristina Plenderleith, “Traditional Agriculture and Soil Management,” 287–323.