SUNS4514 Thursday 23 September 1999

Agriculture: Plant losses threaten food security

Washington, Sep. 21 (IPS/Danielle Knight) -- While the biotechnology industry argues that genetically-modified crops will help feed the world, a new study here warns that widespread losses of plant species and varieties are eroding the foundations of agricultural productivity.

"Biotechnology is no solution to this loss of genetic diversity," says the report, released last week by the Worldwatch Institute.

Scientists increasingly have become skilful at moving genes around in order to make crops resistant to pests or yield greater quantities, notes the report's author, John Tuxill.

Only nature, however, can create such DNA - the basic building blocks of life - he warns.

"If a plant bearing a unique gene trait disappears, there is no way to get it back," says Tuxill.

With changes in agriculture, the irreplaceable resources that plant diversity provide are slipping away, according to the report, 'Nature's Cornucopia: Our Stake in Plant Diversity.'

In China, for example, farmers were growing an estimated 10,000 wheat varieties in 1949, but this number had dropped to 1,000 by the 1970s. In Mexico, farmers today are raising only 20 percent of the corn varieties they cultivated in the 1930s.

Yet genetic diversity of cultivated plats remain essential to breeding more productive and disease resistant crop varieties worldwide, Tuxill points out.

While corporations like Monsanto, for example, have developed genetically-modified potato seeds that contain an exotic genefrom a soil bacterium that are resistant to harmful insects like the Colorado potato beetle, the biggest problem for potato farmers worldwide is not beetles by a fungal disease called late
blight.

So instead, global agricultural research institutions like the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru, have turned not to Monsanto's laboratories, but to traditional farmers high in the Andes mountains of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia to combat potato blight.

"These farmers' ancestors first domesticated potatoes roughly 7,000 years ago and today indigenous Andean communities still cultivate the world's richest array of potato varieties - sometimes as many as a hundred kinds in a single village," says the report.

Over the past three decades, CIP researchers have collected more than 3,000 potato varieties from Andean farmers' fields, along with the scraggly wild relatives of potato plants that often grow nearby.

According to Tuxill, plant breeders the world over now draw on the unique genetic traits of these traditional potatoes to breed new varieties. "Without the collections at CIP and other 'gene or seed banks', it is doubtful that potatoes could continue to be grown commercially," says Tuxill.

The effects of plant loss extend far beyond agriculture, he adds.

One in every four medicines prescribed in the US is based on a chemical compound originally found in a plant and, worldwide, some 3.5 billion people in developing countries rely on plant- based medicine for their primary health care. "Plants also furnish oils, latexes, gums, timbers, dyes, and other products we use every day." Rural residents of developing countries depend on plant resources for up to 90 percent of their total material needs.

But Tuxill warns that we now live in a time of unprecedented mass extinction. Loss of habitat, pressure from non-native species, and over-harvesting of have put one out of every eight plant species, or 15,000 species, at risk of extinction, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

It is not just obscure or seemingly unimportant plants that are in trouble, says the report.

"Those that we rely upon most heavily are declining too," says Tuxill.

Some two thirds of all rare and endangered plants in the United States are close relatives of cultivated species. This is significant because crop breeders often turn to wild relatives of crops for key traits, like disease resistance, when they cannot find those traits in cultivated varieties, the report says.

Gene banks, botanical gardens, and protected areas have been the first line of defense in maintaining the diversity of plant life.
The world's 1,600 botanical gardens, for example, collectively tend tens of thousands of plant species.

But Tuxill notes that these approaches need more support from governments and international institutions.

"Many conservation facilities must scrape by on increasingly scarce funding, particularly those run by national governments," he says.

Only 13 percent of gene-banked seeds are in well supported facilities with long-term storage capability and protected area systems in many countries are poorly developed, according to Tuxhill.

As a result, governments and grass-roots organisations have stepped into the gap by developing innovative partnerships to bring plant diversity back to the landscapes where crops are grown.

From India to Ethiopia, innovative plant breeding researchers worldwide are working directly with farmers in programmes to evaluate, select, and improve locally adapted crop varieties while maintaining robust levels of genetic diversity, says the report.

A US-based organisation called Native Seeds, for example, works to preserve traditional crops and farming methods in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico.

In addition to maintaining a seed bank of regional plant varieties, Native Seeds documents indigenous knowledge about crops and agricultural practices, and sponsors numerous local festivals and events featuring traditional foods of the region.

In the Central American nation of Belize, the government has established a rainforest reserve managed by a local association of traditional healers working to preserve the production of wild medicinal plants.

While Tuxill praises these efforts, he says additional steps need to be taken to reform policies and practices that work against plant diversity.

Whereas some international bodies like the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity require governments to develop policies for managing plant resources wisely, others like the World Trade Organisation (WTO) demand that countries dismantle these protective policies labelling them barriers to trade, says the report.

"The bottom line is that we have to share both the economic benefits of plant diversity and the obligation for protecting it," Tuxill says.

Those who garner the benefits of plant diversity, such as agribusiness and pharmaceutical consumers, should acknowledge and support those who maintain it, including indigenous cultures and national gene banks, says the report.

"Through benefit-sharing agreements, international conservation endowments and grassroots development projects attuned to the links between cultural and biological diversity, many options exist for supporting plant diversity rather than diminishing it," it concludes.