WORLD FOOD DAY: Perilous Crop Uniformity

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 16 2004 (IPS) - The Irish famine of 1846-1850 claimed as many as one million lives and drove millions to emigrate. It began with a blight of the potato crop, which led to total crop failure.
     The vulnerability of the world’s biodiversity and food security is the theme for this year’s World Food Day, Oct. 16.

The Irish famine of 1846-1850 claimed as many as one million lives and drove millions to emigrate. It began with a blight of the potato crop, which led to total crop failure.

The famine is just one of history’s illustrations of the risks that humanity could face if it continues to destroy the world’s biological diversity. In Ireland, only a few strains of potatoes – which originally came from the Andes mountains in South America – were planted, which facilitated the spread of the black rot.

Genetic diversity is indispensable in reducing the vulnerability of crops to pests, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) theme for this year’s World Food Day, commemorated Oct. 16, is “Biodiversity for Food Security”.

But the trend over the past five centuries has been towards crop uniformity, with the consequent impoverishment of the diversity of food crops, known as “genetic erosion”.

Throughout history, humanity has used an estimated 10,000 species of plants and vegetables for food or for feeding livestock. But today only around 150 different crops are planted worldwide.

That situation has been brought about by the wide migration of plant species in the past few centuries. “Food globalisation” occurred long before economic globalisation, which is the focus of so much international attention, giving the impression that cross-border movements are a recent phenomenon.

In Brazil, potatoes were known as “English” until a few decades ago, even though they were originally taken to Europe from Peru.

Native species are used in very few cases in agriculture today. Countries depend on genetic strains that originally came from abroad in 90 percent of cases, said José Esquinas, secretary of the FAO Commission on Genetic Resources.

Corn spread throughout the world from Mexico, although it was already present in many parts of the Americas five centuries ago, when the Spaniards reached the “New World”. Wheat comes from central Asia, and rice originated in east Asia.

Brazil is the world’s leading producer of coffee and sugar cane, which came from Ethiopia and southeast Asia, respectively.

Vegetable species tend to become more productive in areas far away from where they originated, once they adapt to the climate, because they do not find the same pests as in their places of origin, Paulo Kageyama, director of Brazil’s National Programme for Conservation of Biodiversity, commented to IPS.

Thus the Hevea brasiliensis tree, whose sap is used to produce natural rubber, became much more productive in Malaysia, to the extent that it destroyed the very foundation of the prosperity of Brazil’s Amazon region, where the tree originally came from, in the early 20th century, when the automobile industry began to develop and demand for tires boomed.

But the importation of new food crops also had a downside. Tarwi or Andean lupine (Lupinus mutabilis), a native legume that is rich in protein, fell into oblivion when wheat was brought to Peru by the Spanish colonialists, even though wheat was doomed to much lower productivity levels in the soil and climate of the Andes mountains, said Esquinas.

Meanwhile, modern-day agriculture’s trend towards monoculture is leading to a rise in productivity, which is accompanied, however, by a dangerous reduction of biological diversity, warns FAO.

Genetic uniformity within each species, or the loss of variability, is another risk.

That variability, as well as the diversity of species, are required for the genetic improvement that increases productivity and resistance to pests.

Biodiversity is a great treasure that is mainly concentrated in poor, tropical countries.

In the past, the migration of plant and animal species, generally driven by the colonial powers, occurred without restrictions, to the point that in cities in Brazil – and in most of Latin America – a majority of the trees and bushes planted in public spaces are exotic.

However, biodiversity has been gaining in commercial value, and is beginning to be preserved. The concept of biopiracy (the appropriation of genetic material or knowledge of its properties for profit) emerged, and there are new laws for bringing those found guilty of this new offence to justice.

This year, scientific researchers in the southern Brazilian city of Campinas, 100 km from Sao Paulo, discovered that three coffee bushes brought from Ethiopia produced naturally decaffeinated coffee.

Ethiopia alleged that the plants had been illegally removed from the country, but Brazil said they were part of a stock of 3,000 plants brought to this country in the mid-1960s, the product of a legal expedition carried out under FAO auspices.

Today it would be very difficult or even impossible to obtain that genetic material, María Bernardete Silvarolla with the Agronomic Institute of Campinas, who led the research, told IPS.