Crop Extinctions

A potato is a potato is a potato. Only, not so much.

Over thousands of years, generations of farmers have participated in a process of finding edible wild plants, cultivating them deliberately, replanting the seeds of the best of the crop and sometimes crossing very desirable plants. It would be a very long time before someone figured out the genetic mechanism that made everything work. Still, simple observation, experimentation and practice eventually yielded a host of plants so well suited as food for human beings that we take them for granted.

These crops represent a treasure trove of guided evolution. More than wheat, rice, oats, rye, grapes, apples, mangos, lentils, peas, and other common foods. In fact, each of those foods themselves has many different breeds. Each one of those breeds may differ in taste, texture, size of the edible portion of the plant, weather hardiness, demand for light, water needs and soil preferences.

As humans, it's easy to forget that other species aren't all as adaptable as we are. Most plants, and animals for that matter, are best suited for a very specific set of environmental circumstances. To have types of potatoes, a crop from a dry, high altitude region, that can thrive across so much of the human range of living is nothing short of extraordinary. It's a marvelous gift to us from the work of past generations of humans.

Yet many varieties of potatoes, of which there are hundreds, are going extinct. Their unique strengths and colors and nutritional profiles vanishing. Dr. Jeff Bentley, an agricultural anthropologist, writes about the potato and grain species under threat of extinction, giving us this very clear example of why their preservation is a survival imperative for human beings:

... West Africans domesticated a native species of rice, called Oryza glaberrima, 3,500 years ago. The grain was relative of the Asian rice Oryza sativa.

Yet 450 years ago, the Asian species reached Africa and all but displaced the native rice, which had a thinner head of grain and thus brought in a smaller harvest.

By the 1990s, native African rice was reduced to a few pockets on scattered farms.

Then in the 1990s, Sierra Leonean plant breeder Monty Jones and colleagues found a way to create a fertile hybrid between African and Asian rice. Called "Nerica" (New Rice for Africa), it could yield a bumper harvest like its Asian parent, but it was as tough as its African side, resistant to drought, pests and disease. ...

A new, patented, genetically modified strain didn't have to be created from scratch in order to produce a good crop of rice in Africa. Waste not, want not.

With the world's climate and weather patterns changing, and pests expanding their habitat, we'll have to find adaptable crops or starve. The good news is that we've probably already got the genetic reservoirs of variety needed to change our farming. The bad news is that they're getting shallower in a hurry just as the yield of crops that did well in the old conditions is beginning to plateau.

Will humans be foresighted enough protect the inheritance that could feed us in the future?