AGRICULTURE: Ancient beans, new tomatoes vie to solve food crisis

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Jun 17 1995 (IPS) - This spring, in the semi-arid desert that lies south of Tucson, Arizona, the few remaining members of the Tohono O’odham indigenous people planted tepary beans that they will harvest later this year.

Up north, by the Canadian border in Rochester, New York, a company called Fresh World is selling a new brand of tomatoes called Endless Summer that it grows in the eastern state of Florida.

New food crops like these are introduced after years of research to find better and more productive varieties. Crops like the potato are known to have some 5,000 varieties, while others, like rice, are believed to have over 100,000 varieties.

But there were major differences in the search for new bean and tomato crops. The bean-growing programme has resurrected a centuries-old practice, while the new tomatoes were designed in the ultra-modern laboratories of a company called DNA Plant Technologies.

Both plants have very significant properties. A few years ago, Native Seeds, a non-profit group in Arizona, discovered that the beans lower blood sugar levels and prevent diabetes.

The Tohono O’odham ate tepary beans for centuries in times of famine until European immigrants introduced them to pinto beans, hamburgers and instant pudding. Today half the adult population of the tribe has diabetes.

The Endless Summer tomato stays ripe for months at a time, allowing it to be kept in storage or shipped great distances before it rots. This special property was introduced through genetic engineering. Calgene, another California company, has a similar product called Flavr Savr.

Both crops are being viewed with interest by government policy makers around the world which are increasingly worried that there will not be enough food to feed the world’ growing population. Demographers say that in the next quarter century the population of the planet will increase by 50 percent to 7.5 billion.

Of special interest is the genetic engineering research performed in Manila by scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). They hope to design a “super rice” that will dramatically boost yields of a crop on which much of humanity depends for survival.

On Thursday, the World Bank-affiliated International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) concluded a three-day conference called “A 2020 vision for food, agriculture and the environment.”

The conference delegates were asked to address the challenges of ensuring that there will be enough food to feed the population of the planet in the year 2020.

One of the delegates, Patrick Webb, a policy analyst at the U.N. World Food Programme, says that, at current rates of production sub-Saharan Africa, will face a deficit of 50 million tonnes of cereals by the year 2020.

“Lack of action today could lead to social and political instability throughout many regions of the world as well as a global refugee crisis,” says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the IPFRI director general.

Shortages may be just around the corner. This week, the Washington-based WorldWatch Institute and the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted that in 1996 world stock of grains would drop to 53 days of consumption, the lowest level in 22 years.

WorldWatch says this will lead to a dramatic rise in food prices next year. The increase will affect everything from bread and beer to meat, poultry, eggs and milk.

WorldWatch says the answer lies in reducing population growth, but others, like John Gershman of the California-based group Food First, say land reform is the key because in many countries the best land is used to grow luxury crops like coffee.

But others, like the people who gathered here at IFPRI, believe new strains of crops are the best and most realistic solution.

But unlike their “Green Revolution” predecessors of the 1950s and 1960s, IFPRI now insists that researchers’ work must take into account such looming threats as water shortages in many countries and the adverse health effects of pesticides and other crop- growing chemicals.

A key factor in ensuring global food security by developing new and better varieties is the seeds of the thousands of varieties from which the tepary bean was selected and which provided the raw material needed to design the Endless Summer tomato.

A dozen international seed banks — ranging from the IRRI in Manila to the International Potato Centre in Lima — hold 500,000 seeds — or approximately 40 percent of the seed varieties that are stored around the world. The rest are held in national or commercial collections, like the small Native Seeds collection.

Next Monday the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) will convene a two-week meeting in Rome on “plant genetic resources for food and agriculture,” which is diplomatese for seeds.

The meeting is to draw up rules of ownership, royalties, and copyrights for seeds held in the international centres in ways that will reward farmers and countries for tending, cultivating, and protecting them. Those rules will then be adopted at an international conference in Germany in July, 1996.

The seeds are coveted by companies like Fresh World. They spend millions of dollars in research and facilities to breed new varieties. Because of the expense, these same companies often refuse to sell the newly developed seeds, preferring instead to grow the crops under contract.

Not all the research groups are quite as close-fisted. Native Seeds has given tepary bean seed to Seeds of Change, a non-profit company in New Mexico, which sells seed packets at less than two dollars a throw. The two groups believe poor farmers, in particular, should be able to afford the seeds.

Activists like Henk Hobbelink of Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN) in Barcelona, Spain, are demanding that the Rome meeting protect the rights of non-governmental groups, farmers and peoples organisations which have given seeds free to neighbours and safeguarded seed collections for future generations.

“Our focus should be to address the needs and benefits of poor Third World farmers and local communities,” he wrote in a recent alert to other activists about the upcoming negotiations.

Proposals for rewarding farmers for their work — through a tax on profits or production of food — were drawn up by the FAO in November, 1991, but governments have yet to act on them.

Other groups, like the Massachusetts-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), warn that the new, genetically engineered crops may not turn out to be such a good idea.

UCS scientists say the laboratory-designed varieties could worsen the food deficit by introducing new plant diseases or by wiping out traditional varieties through competition.

For example, mutant forms of the Endless Summer tomato could run amok among traditional varities of tomatoes in an agricultural version of “Frankenstein,” they warn.

Or genetically engineered bean varieties could vanquish the tepary bean just as European adventurers wiped out ancient indigenous civilisations like the Tohono O’odham when they invaded the Americas.