Saving the Seed

Genetic diversity and European agriculture

Renee Vellve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849710206
• eBook ISBN: 9781134063376
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

Genetic diversity is essential to the security of agriculture. Without the availability of a wide range of plant varieties and the genetic resources they contain, crops cannot adapt to combat the ever-changing threats of pests, diseases and climatic change. Yet, with the increasing industrialisation of modern agriculture, farming has become a business which centres on a handful of new, genetically similar 'super seeds'. Plants must evolve in order to survive, but modern agriculture has replaced diversity with uniformity, and security with vulnerability.

Saving the Seed traces the decline of crop varieties in European farming and describes what is being done to safeguard genetic resources for the future. Conservation efforts by government and industry suffer from serious drawbacks, with wrangles over ownership and control of resources. The crucial work is being done by individuals and grassroots organisations, who largely go unrecognised and under-resourced. What is urgently needed are sound policies to promote the diversification of agriculture and an integrated strategy for safeguarding the genetic base of our food system. Saving the Seed contains the most up-to-date information available on genetic resources in Europe and on those working to save them. Renee Vellve is a researcher at GRAIN, a no-governmental organisation working to promote the sustainable conservation and use of genetic diversity, based on grassroots approaches to genetic resources management. Originally published in 1992

1: The making of a heritage

Today’s gardeners cannot possibly comprehend the
amount of history contained in their seeds, both
what has come before and what may potentially
come after their brief involvement.

Suzanne Ashworth, seed saver, 1991¹

To some, genetic diversity is a ‘genepool,’ an immense supply of raw materials to be tapped for making crops grow, like the oil wells of Saudi Arabia make cars run. To others, it is the full spectrum of all that is different, unique, vast and interesting; the range between yellow and black potatoes. To yet others, it is a living history of what their grandparents and great grandparents grew, either on the same plot of land or half a world away. Actually, genetic diversity is all of these things at once: a moving mixture of the past and the future, a source of wealth and fertility, a coloured tableau of nature’s possibilities and culture’s limits. It would seem impossible to adopt one single attitude towards the complexity of life forms and forces surrounding us. Diversity simply has no face value. Depending on whatever aspect moves you most about it, you can be nostalgic, intellectual, scientific, spiritual, profit-hungry, or simply concerned about survival.

At the bottom line, when we confront the spread and depth of the diversity of plants that have fed, housed, clothed and cured people all through our existence, we cannot escape that awesome confrontation with time and space. Over an unimaginable number of years plants have evolved and co-evolved with the people who used them; their history and ours, their destiny and ours are intertwined. The open-ended array of soils they have grown in, the hands they have been cared for by, and values they have been fashioned to serve - the diversity of our crop plants is a direct reflection of the diversity of our cultures.

One way we like to look at it is to call it a heritage. That is a word loaded with all sorts of legal, political and ethical implications. But it is also a simple and powerful one. The ancient Romans called it patrimonium, from pater (father). It was used to designate that which was inherited from your father to be transmitted to the next generation, a chain of transmission that could not be interrupted. It was used precisely to distinguish between those goods that could be exchanged for their current monetary value, and those things that had a deeper, inalienable family and community value.

Plants definitely fall into this category, although maybe we should rename it matrimonium, since in many societies throughout history saving seeds, nurturing wild plants and breeding new crop varieties was largely carried out by women. Plants are a fundamental part of the chain of life that keeps this planet going and the diversity within them is the key to their survival. Some of that diversity has evolved through the changing pressures of the environment, but much of it is the result of continuous generations of people tampering with it and passing it on. We will never be able to measure how much credit goes to ‘either side’, but there is certainly a part of both. In this sense, genetic diversity is both a natural and cultural heritage that has to be transmitted for the sake of survival. Calling genetic diversity a heritage is not only recognising the role plants play in the chain of life, but also opens up the question as to who is responsible for keeping that chain intact and extending it.

Taming the wild

People were not always farmers and gardeners. Agriculture, in fact, is a rather modern enterprise. Only about ten to fifteen thousand years ago did people start settling down and figuring out new ways to control their food supply. Before then, men and women sustained themselves and their families through gathering, hunting and fishing. Ten to fifteen thousand years might seem a long time ago, but if you consider that there have been people on this planet for perhaps five million years, it’s clear that agriculture was historically invented yesterday.

Most of our ancestors did not bother ‘growing’ plants. They picked them from their surroundings: berries, grains, vegetables, nuts and roots. Food was abundant and populations were small. Many people were nomads, roaming at their own pace to and from areas particularly rich in plant and animal diversity. Others were more sedentary fisherfolk, living on seafood and the plants that grew near watershores, estuaries and riverbanks. The move to settle down and take on the quite different task of cultivating plants did not happen overnight. It must have been a gradual process that probably took place at more or less the same time in various parts of the world: China and southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Andes and parts of Africa. In the wetter tropical zones of Asia and Latin America, the first crops to be domesticated were probably roots and tubers, such as yams or potatoes. In the arid and semi-arid regions, like southwest Asia, cereals such as barley were probably the first food crop grown.

The logic of cultivating plants around a village or settlement was in most cases probably not driven by hunger. Nor did crop cultivation totally replace the art of gathering, which remained, and still remains today, a source of food for many people. At the same time, it should be recognised that not every society has taken on sowing or hoeing at all. Various groups in Australia, Africa and the Americas still get by hunting and collecting food.

Many of the plants that people first went out of their way to nurture were useful for specific needs: religious and social ceremonies; painting, dyeing, weaving; making tools, containers and utensils; constructing fences or houses; making medicine, poison, beverages or cosmetics; extracting oils, providing animal feed, and so on. In fact, plants that could fulfil more than one purpose probably received more attention than others. Sorghum was grown early on in Africa to provide not just the dinner meal but also forage for animals, syrup for drinks, stalks to make brooms, popping seed for amusing snacks and flower heads for ornamental decorations². Cannabis, or hemp, was one of the first crops people cultivated in Eurasia. When it reached China around 2500 BC it was used for fibre, before its narcotic properties were exploited in India later on³. Over in Brazil, manioc (or cassava) was used to provide toxins to poison arrowheads for game hunting and to kill fish in streams before people figured out how to detoxify it and cook it⁴. In Europe, many of the cereals we grow for bread or fodder today were first venerated as sacred plants associated with the gods Demeter and Ceres, and had a primary role in medicine⁵.

But nurturing a plant is not the same thing as domesticating it. Many plants are ‘cultivated’ without being fully ‘domesticated’. They may be weeds, wild plants, or crops undergoing adaptation towards domestication. They may be simply tolerated, actively protected or actually sown and harvested. Small-scale farmers and household gardeners ‘work with’ wild and semi-domesticated plants in many ways, even today. Truly domesticated plants are those that have been so severely pressured and harnessed to fit a habitat and production system, that many of them could not survive outside of that context. For example, maize and triticale are generally considered human creations. No wild form of maize has ever been found, although perennial relatives exist in Mexico, and the crop is dependent upon people to survive. Triticale is a forced combination of rye and wheat, that probably never would have crossed in nature.

In fact, while all of our crops were developed from wild plants, most passed through the phase of being a weed before they were harnessed as a crop. Rice was probably a weed in the flooded taro fields of southeast Asia before it was domesticated and grown for its nourishing grain. Wild oats were introduced into Africa and the Mediterranean as a weed associated with other cereals before they were harnessed for food and fodder. The same holds for rye in Central Europe. Potatoes, carrots and onions all have weed forms that occupy territories where there is little competition.

The differences between wild and domesticated forms of crops are often spectacular. By selecting plants and improving them through cropping techniques, farmers and gardeners have forced evolution and brought on radical changes in plants. One thing they did was focus their attention on the big and beautiful, enhancing that part of the plant that interested them most. For example, wild sunflowers look like overgrown daisies while the cultivated types we know of have the huge ‘faces’ loaded with rich seeds for oil or eating. Another thing they did was diversify the crop. Potatoes were selected to produce a vast range of different shaped and coloured tubers. By contrast, wild potatoes are almost invariably small, brown and nearly identical looking⁶.

But perhaps most important, for the sake of being able to grow crops on any reasonable scale, people overcame two important characteristics that are typical of wild species. The first is the tendency of wild plants to ‘shatter’, whereby mature fruits and seeds are released very easily into the wind or onto the ground to propagate further individuals. This is great for ensuring the plant’s survival through scattered dissemination, but a nightmare for someone who wants to fill a basket and harvest the goods. So farmers had to select carefully those plants that shattered least and keep selecting and multiplying them until they could stabilise a crop that did not fall apart on them any more.

The second major characteristic of wild plants that had to be tamed for rational cultivation was their tendency to germinate erratically. This makes it easier for some individual plants to succeed and grow if others get wiped out by cold or drought, but results in a very uneven harvest. Again, selective pressures brought these irregular germination rates under some form of control. There is a whole range of other characteristics that people focused on when harnessing wild plants for crop production. Together, they make up what is called the domestication syndrome or complex.

But domestication, a big step in itself, was only the striking of the match that unleashed a veritable fire of crop diversification and the development of agriculture. Ever since you could rightly call a farmer a farmer, or a gardener a gardener, people have been choosing, selecting, fashioning and creating a tremendous array of different varieties of crops to suit different needs and fancies. They may not have known what ‘genes’ were, but they certainly took tremendous advantage of the versatility of plants and their capacity to adapt to a very wide range of environments, climates and cultures.

The geography of diversity

Agriculture was introduced into Europe sometime around 3-4,000 BC, as waves of migrants came in from Anatolia and the Middle East through to Central Europe, and from North Africa up the Iberian peninsula and into France and southern England. These people brought with them their ingenuity and know-how in, among other things, constructing tools, making pottery, raising livestock and cultivating crops. Later, the Mediterranean coastline was colonised from the east by people practising the earliest farming systems we know of in Europe, revolving around barley, sheep and goats. Wheat and rye are also early grains that were introduced into central and northern Europe from the Mediterranean southeast.

Just as agriculture was imported into Europe, so were most of the crops we have ever grown here. Many of our cereals come from the Middle East and southwest Asia, and most of our fruits from as far away as China. Very few vegetables are actually indigenous to Europe: lettuce, onions and asparagus figure among them (see Table 1.1). In fact, the history of agriculture and the history of crop evolution shows that farming spread out from just a few regions of the world, often areas where crop diversity is really intense. Not that the two always coincide. Crops have been travelling as long as people have, whether they were conquering lands, fleeing wars or simply out exploring.

Grown in Western Europe since prehistoric times:
Turnips, certain non-heading cabbages, faba bean, lentils and peas.

Arrivals during the Greco-Roman times:
Large radish, melons, cucumbers, gourds, onions, chard, parsnip, carrots and black-eyed peas (cowpea).

Introduced by Arabs and Jews between the 10th and 15th centuries:
Aubergine, cauliflower, watermelon, spinach, artichoke and okra.

Brought over from the Americas after 1492:
Tomato, potatoes, sweet potato, common beans, squashes and peppers.

From Asia:
Certain vegetables were already introduced through the Arabs while others couldn’t adapt to our climates; the Japanese artichoke, yam, asparagus-lettuce and Chinese cabbage did not arrive until the 19th and 20th centuries.

Vegetables developed or improved in Italy:
Bitter chicories, lettuces, head cabbage, Milan cabbage, cauliflowers and broccoli, radishes, fennel and beet.

Vegetables that came from central and northern Europe:
Horseradish, rutabaga (or swede turnip), angelica and watercress.

Recently developed vegetables:
Corn salad (17th c), Brussels sprouts (18th c), dandelion (19th c.) and endive (19th c).

Table 1.1 Origins of Western Europe’s vegetables

Source: Michel Chauvet, ‘L’histoire des légumes’ in La diversité des plantes légumières: hier, aujourd’hui et demain, JATBA, Paris, 1986, p. 10.

As far as we know, the systematic tracking down of the origin of our crops is a 19th century phenomenon. Alexander von Humboldt was probably the first to write about it in his Essay on the Geography of Plants, published in 1807. He said:

The origin, the first home of the plants most useful to man and which have accompanied him from remotest epochs, is a secret as impenetrable as the dwellings of all our domestic animals. We do not know what region produced spontaneously wheat, barley, oats and rye. The plants which constitute the natural riches of all inhabitants of the tropics, the banana, the pawpaw, the cassava, and maize have never been found in wild state⁷ .

Von Humboldt’s pessimistic curiosity was followed later on by several studies by the Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle, including his book The Origin of Cultivated Plants (1882). De Candolle, using botany, linguistics and archaeology, reasoned that our crops were probably domesticated in a few areas: China, tropical Asia, southwest Asia and Egypt.

This scholarly interest in geobotany, prevalent in the days of Darwin, gave rise to yet another concern towards the end of the century: the value of the world’s crop diversity for plant breeding and the need to conserve these resources. Two German scientists - Emanuel Ritter von Proskowetz and Franz Schindler — sounded the first alarm at the International Agricultural and Forestry Congress in Vienna in 1890. They spoke out at that gathering about the usefulness of local cultivars (‘landraces’) and warned of the danger that losing them would pose to future crop improvements. Von Proskowetz had already carried out extensive collecting of barley landraces in Moravia. He was moved not only by his conviction of their importance for breeding new varieties, but also by his concern that if no action were taken they could disappear forever⁸. Von Proskowetz was certainly something of a prophet.

Then came Vavilov. Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a Russian...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Title1
• Volume
• Title
• Copyright
• Title3
• Grain
• Title2
• Copyright1
• Contents
• Tables, graphs and boxes
• List of acronyms
• About this book
• Foreword by Jaap Hardon, Director, CGN Netherlands
• Introduction
• 1. The making of a heritage
• 2. Diversity’s decline
• 3. Genebank or bust
• 4. Salvaging in silence
• 5. Diversifying the future
• 1.The genes in the bank
• 2.Addresses and contacts
• 3.Selected reading
• Notes
• Index