Page 272 - Environment: The Science Behind the Stories

in the appearance of fruits and vegetables: Commercial food
processors prefer items to be uniform in size and shape for
convenience, and consumers are often wary of unusual-
looking food products. However, now that local and organic
agriculture are gaining appeal in affluent societies, consumer
preferences for diversity (including rare “heirloom varieties”
of fruits and vegetables) are increasing.

Seed banks are living museums

Protecting areas and cultures that maintain a wealth of crop
diversity is one way to preserve genetic assets for our agri-
culture. Another is to collect and store seeds from diverse
(a) Traditional food plants of the Desert Southwest crop varieties. This is the work of seed banks, institutions
that preserve seed types as a kind of living museum of
genetic diversity (Figure 10.15). These facilities keep seed
samples in cold, dry conditions to encourage long-term via-
bility, and they plant and harvest them periodically to renew
the stocks.
Major seed banks include the Royal Botanic Garden’s Mil-
lennium Seed Bank in Britain, the U.S. National Seed Storage
Laboratory at Colorado State University, Seed Savers Exchange
in Iowa, and the Wheat and Maize Improvement Center in
Mexico. In total, 1400 such facilities house 1–2 million distinct
types of seeds worldwide.
The most renowned seed bank is the so-called dooms-
day seed vault established in 2008 on the island of Spitsber-
gen in Arctic Norway. The internationally funded Svalbard
Global Seed Vault (Figure 10.16) is storing millions of seeds
from around the world (spare sets from other seed banks) as a
safeguard against global agricultural calamity—“an insurance
(b) Pollination by hand
policy for the world’s food supply.” This secured, refrigerated
Figure 10.15 Seed banks safeguard the genetic diversity of facility is built deep into a mountain in an area of permanently
crop plants. Native Seeds/SEARCH of Tucson, Arizona, preserves frozen ground. The site has no tectonic activity, little natural
seeds of food plants important in traditional diets of Native Ameri- radiation or humidity, and is high enough above sea level to
cans of the Southwest (a), including chiles, squashes, gourds, stay dry even if climate change melts all the planet’s ice. The
maize, lentils, mesquite flour, prickly pear pads, tepary beans, doomsday seed vault is an admirable effort, but we would be
and cholla cactus buds. At the farm where seeds are grown (b),
varieties are carefully pollinated by hand to protect their genetic well advised not to rely on it to save us. Far better to manage
distinctiveness. our agriculture wisely and sustainably so that we never need
to break into the vault!

ancestor of maize. For this reason, too, it imposed a national CHAPTER 10 • A g R i C ulT u RE , Bi o TECH nology, A nd THE Fu T u RE o F Food
moratorium in 1998 on the planting of transgenic corn. How- Figure 10.16 The “doomsday seed vault” in arctic Norway
ever, this ban was lifted in 2009 as multinational agribusiness stores seed samples as insurance against global agricultural
corporations were allowed to begin experimental plantings catastrophe.
in northern Mexico. A Mexican government agency also
disburses grain to farmers that includes millions of tons of
U.S. corn (one-third of it transgenic), and farmers can also
acquire U.S. seed on their own. Given global trade and the
increasing use of genetically modified corn worldwide, gene
flow between transgenic corn and Mexico’s native landraces
would seem inevitable at some point.
Worldwide, we have already lost a great deal of genetic
diversity in crops in the past century. Only 30% of the maize
varieties that grew in Mexico in the 1930s exist today. The
number of wheat varieties in China dropped from 10,000 in
1949 to 1000 by the 1970s. In the United States, many fruit
and vegetable crops have decreased in diversity by 90% in
less than a century. Market forces have discouraged diversity 271

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