Earth Calling by Ellen Gunter

Author:Ellen Gunter [Gunter, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-781-4
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2014-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Dangers of Lost Seed Diversity

The calamity that can ensue when our rich seed diversity is lost became painfully obvious in the 1840s during the time called the Great Hunger, when Ireland lost a full third of its population to a protracted potato famine brought on by a fungus-like pathogen called “late blight.” (U.S. farmers still lose $6 billion annually to its modern, more aggressive equivalent.) Because Ireland’s agriculture depended mostly on potato varieties that were very similar, when the blight hit one strain, it quickly spread, turning much of the potato crop into shrunken, rotted mush.

Potatoes were a staple of the Irish diet, its main source of calories. It’s estimated that the average person ate as many as fourteen pounds of the tubers per day.23 Although the Irish grew a number of other crops, a majority were poor tenant farmers working for their absentee British landlords, and most of what they grew was exported to England. With no crop diversity, no other hardy or wild potato varieties to step in and fill the gap, and no new seed to plant because the crop had perished, farmers had to spend what little money they had to buy food. Many struggled with the remnants of the killed crop and replanted what they could, but the blight continued for five long years. Without money to pay rent, many were turned out of their tenant farms, and with no way to grow or buy food, they starved. Mass emigrations began (including nearly a million to the United States alone). It’s estimated that the island’s current population (6.3 million in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) is still lower than its pre-famine levels.

Ireland’s potato famine marked the first time in history that a crop had failed not just because of bad weather or the ravages of war, but because of a lack of variety. There was no Plan B. Having originated in the Andes and been brought back from the New World in the late sixteenth century, the tuber came first to Spain and later to England and Ireland; for the next two and a half centuries, all the potatoes grown in Europe were descendants of these first imported examples.

More than a century later, that lesson had to be learned again by both American and Soviet farmers, and the outcome changed agriculture and world economies in ways no one could have foreseen. In the early 1960s, southern corn leaf blight had begun to get the attention of agronomists in places as far flung as the Philippines and Mexico. By 1968 it was showing up in seeds in the Midwest. By the spring of 1970 it was in the Florida corn crop and by summer’s end, with production losses becoming obvious in the nation’s supermarkets, corn prices had skyrocketed. The cost to American agriculture exceeded a billion bushels—a full 15 percent of the nation’s most important crop—and over a billion dollars in lost revenue. The main reason for the failure? Virtually all of America’s corn crop was genetically identical.

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