"a bi-monthly journal of environmental news and commentary..."

Food Security Starts with the Seed

by Caitlin Moore

Discussions around food security are usually framed within the context of political economy. For instance: commodities speculators were responsible for 80 percent of the increase in food prices experienced in 2008. It's a fact that famine happens in countries without food shortages. These are obvious consequences of a broken system that needs to be remade if we're to achieve equal access to food for all. Yet, there is something else missing that's not being widely discussed.

The idea that a community can't achieve food security without starting with seed security became clear to me while preparing to teach a group of eager Olympia community members how to plan for and save seed. This idea isn't revolutionary, but it has been marginalized in the face of much more publicized problems with our food system. Yet it deserves consideration because without seed, there is frankly, no food.

Seeds are little packages of nourishment and information. The seed has all of the genetic information it needs in order to fulfill its life's function - to sprout, grow, reproduce, and die. It's this information (genotype), and how it is expressed (phenotype), that we're at great risk of losing. This loss is a result of many things, but for purposes of this discussion the focus is on one element, plant breeding.

Plant breeding refers to industry or research-based university breeding. This excludes the farm-based breeding that occurred during the last 10,000 to 12,000 years that agriculture has been around. Most people would say that modern plant breeding has had positive results on our food production system because we've bred vegetables that offer increased yields, time-limited disease resistance, and unique industrial applications.

However, the danger is that much of the genetic diversity that is our collective heritage is lost when new "improved" varieties are released. This happens for a number of reasons, not just because of evil corporations unleashing irreversible genetic pollution. Negative impacts occur as the improved varieties are adopted by farmers, or forced on them through structural readjustment policies. As many of the older cultivars are simply not maintained by anyone, they die out.

Additionally, breeders select for environmental and disease conditions in their own fields, which due to differences in place and space may be very different from the conditions seed consumers experience. Breeders will also select for the qualities they want in a plant - yield, size of fruit, color, days to maturity, or even unique qualities to create a new vegetable. Thus, traits are lost as they are selected out of a population, i.e,, loss of genotype. If the breeder is the only one maintaining a variety, this loss is permanent. Unfortunately for us, these are often important traits like multi-gene disease resistance or nutritional qualities.

Here is where the most important work needs to be done - communities and individuals must develop their own varieties, and maintain what is left of the land races. This is important not only so that there are multiple sources of varieties being maintained, but to preserve the genetic diversity that is inherent in a larger population as a whole. This is the first step towards achieving food security.

In order to drive this home, one need only recall the terriblie experience of the Irish. All varieties of potato being grown in Ireland before the famine were genetically related, from two introductions to Europe in 1570 and again in 1590. Therefore, there was little genetic diversity to be found in the field. All of the potatoes grown in Europe were susceptible to the same disease, so when the blight took hold it spread like a wildfire, destroying farm after farm. Essentially this is the meaning of the idea that food security starts with the seed.

If Green Pages readers believe this was a single, sad bit of history, please consider that modern agricultural history is littered with genetic bottlenecks and crop ruin.

Please contemplate what can be done. As stewards of the land, we must relearn the art of saving seed, and become stewards of the seed. The loss of genetic material that is vital to the "expert" breeder and amateur alike is one of the scariest elements of our current food system trajectory. Disease and pest resistance, and lest we forget, nutrition, is part of what's lost when we lose these old varieties. While these may not have the uniform heads of the modern hybrids, or the fruit that ripens all at once to convenience the household canner, they do have the genetic information to resist a disease even as "improved" crops are destroyed by a highly evolved vector. For this reason, our community has begun promoting the re-education of the public on seed saving and plant breeding, work that will keep our collective heritage alive. If the day comes when a single commercial grower of a favorite tomato loses his crop, it will still be growing in backyards across the country, maybe right here in Olympia.

Caitlin Moore is the founder of the Olympia Seed Exchange, and can be reached through her blog at http://www.olympiaseedexchange.org


Back to Home page.


Copyright © 2024 - All Rights Reserved
Updated 2015/01/07 21:14:22