With climate change increasingly threatening food supplies, the need for greater agricultural resilience means restoring the diversity in the world’s food crops before the Earth becomes unsuitable for the crops that provide most of our calories.
According to Yale Environment 360, since World War II, we’ve created a highly productive but incredibly fragile food system. Through selective breeding and modern technology, we have removed an important safety net for our food supplies: diversity.
Actually, all of the globe’s food systems – agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and aquaculture – are failing under the stress of rising temperatures, wildfires, droughts, and floods.
Abd looking for best-case scenarios will not stop the inevitable – unless action is taken to curtail the climate crisis, and we again look to allowing more diversity in our food crops.
Our reliance on selective breeding
Over the past 100 years or so, we have relied on fewer and fewer crop varieties that can be mass-produced and shipped around the world, according to The Guardian. This has resulted in selective breeding of crops – keeping only the biggest producers.
“The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner and the public is unaware and unconcerned,” writes Dan Saladino in his book Eating to Extinction.
A good example is the story of the banana, one of the cheapest, most popular, and most traded fruits globally. While bananas are grown in 135 countries, primarily for their fruit, the world’s largest producers of bananas in 2017 were India and China, accounting for 38 percent of total global production.
The banana was first discovered in Southeast Asia and was not particularly edible, but over a period of about a thousand years, humans, animals, and mother nature selected, shared, and cultivated the fruits – making them edible and resulting in hundreds of varieties.
It was one variety, the Gros Michel, that became the best to eat, transport, and easiest to grow. And by the 1900s, it was the most popular banana in the world. However, each Gros Michel was a clone – genetically identical to the other. This meant that a threat to one banana was a threat to all the Gros Michel bananas.
They are unable to reproduce sexually – instead, being propagated via identical clones. This meant the Gros Michel was extremely vulnerable to disease, fungal outbreaks, and genetic mutation possibly leading to eventual commercial extinction.
As fate would have it, in the early 1900s, a deadly soil fungus, called Panama T, spread through the world, almost wiping out the Gros Michel banana.
To make a long story short, this incident should have been a wake-up call and an important lesson on why it is necessary to cultivate a variety of diverse food products if only to protect them from disease and pests.
Instead, growers created a quick fix and came up with the Cavendish banana we eat today. However, Tropical Race 4 (TR4), a reinvigorated strain of Panama disease, is now threatening the Cavendish.
The only known defense to TR4 is genetic resistance, and of course, the Cavendish, being a clone, has no natural immunity, nor can it fight the disease. Experts say we need to enrich banana biodiversity by producing diverse new banana varieties, not just having a focus on the Cavendish.
And it is not just bananas we need to worry about. Think about apples, tomatoes, corn, and rice. We have genetically manipulated so many food products that it is almost frightening to even think about them.
In some parts of the world, sudden food production losses caused by climate disasters compounded by decreased diet diversity have already increased malnutrition, according to the IPCC.
Like the climate crisis, the diversity crisis is manmade. History warned us, but we’ve chosen to overlook things and while history should teach us – we instead, choose to repeat the same foolish actions that got us into this mess in the first place.
