Re: [pf] Fork in the evolution road

by Jill Taylor Bussiere

21 December 2000 16:03 UTC

Molly wrote:
> Is this far too simplistic: Farmers should plants crops that grow
> naturally where they live, with the rainfall they get?

Molly,
    That is what used to be before imperialism and the advocacy of hybrids -
well-intended by some, and advocated for reasons of self-interest by others.
For a while, the native varieties of plants that fed people - for instance,
those suited to drought, such as teff in Ethiopia, were in decline,
partially due to the Green Revolution.  Here are several paragraphs from the
book _Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity_  by
Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney:

    "Together with the Ethiopian Seed Corporation, Melaku is working to
establish as many as twelve satellite seed storage units that would allow
farmers' seed for each region to be kept in that region.  The "banks" would
not be glamorous, but they would be protection against future droughts.  In
such times farmers could get locally adapted seed from these units. In the
past, farmers have had to eat the seed that in normal times would have been
saved to plant the next crop.  This has forced many farmers to resort to aid
shipments and impported seed for planting, with often disastrous results:
the crop planted with the imported seed fails, and the old locally adapted
seed has disappeared-forever.  Melaku knows that if traditional seeds,
adapted to the Ethiopian environment, are not saved, Ethiopia will never be
able to build a self-reliant agricultural system.  The famine will become
permanent.  A request to the World Band for funding the satellite units was
turned down.  Some support from Canadian non-government and church agencies
has come forward, buyt more is needed.
    "The international community has never given Ethiopia's traditional
seeds or crops their proper due.  Statistics available on crop harvests in
the country from the late 1940's omit any reference to Ethiopia's dominant
food crop, teff, until the early 1970's.  From nowhere in 1948, teff
suddenly occupied over twenty-seven percent of the cropland in 1972.  Half a
dozen other traditional crops -all important to local diets-have also been
ignored.
    "Aside from teff's meteoric rise on the charts, the big changes in
Ethiopian agriculture are in corn, wheat and oats.  Wheat is no stranger to
the country, but by the end of the 1970's, thirty-seven percent of the wheat
land was sown to "improved" or "hih-response" cultivars.  Where hundreds if
not thousands of distinct varieties once grew, four now dominate the
landscape.  Oats production did not become a statistical factor in Ethiopia
until the mid-1970's and new cultivars are now replacing more traditional
crops in order to provide livestock feed.
    "But the real up-and-coming crop is corn.  The Portuguese likely brought
corn to Ethiopia centuries ago, but the crop was not significant until the
early days of the green revolution.  Between 1972 and 1979 alone, corn grew
from about 10% to almost 18% of the national harvest.  Today one variety is
dominant.
    "As crops like corn and oats and new cultivars of wheat spread, old
crops like teff, barley, and even sorghum have gone into decline.  The fate
of many poor people's crops is unrecorded.  Yet in 1985, when Jan Engels-a
Dutch agronomist attached to the Ethiopian gene bank-was on a trip with his
family, he passed mile after mile of what he first thought were onions.
Only when he stopped his car and got out to inspect the plants closely did
he realize that he was looking at the death of the corn crop.  The
high-response wheats suffered the same fate: they died of thirst.
    "The Ethiopian famine had many causes-overgrazing, water management
problems, plitics, the drought itself.  But unnoticed among those problems
was the pressure imposed by outside "experts" for Ethiopia to abandon its
drought-tolerant crops and cultivars in favor of green revolution varieties.
The old seeds may have been low yielding, but they didn't need much water,
they would germinate even after long periods of drought, and there was
always something to harvest at the end of the season.  Teff may or may not
be the most nutritious crop in the world (the research is so limited that
nobody knows for sure) but it must rank as one of the toughes.  In 1985,
Ethiopie's bilateral government aid donors were still talking (at least
among themselves) of pressuring the government to abondon its teff seed for
modern high-yielding corn.
    "Throughout the famine the Plant Genetic Resources Center dispatched
scientists in jeeps and on donkeys almost every day to search the fields,
bins, and hills for traditional seeds that might otherwise have become
extince.  Melaku Worede and his allies at the Ethiopian Seed Corporation
recognize that the food security of Ethiopia may depend upon the survival of
the old landraces."
        pp. 206 and 207