The Plowboy Interview Kent Whealy

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Dr. Lawrence Hills, of Britain's Henry Doubleday Research Association, spearheaded the drive against the legal action. Six years after the legislation was passed, he finally succeeded in getting a grant of £300,000 to build a seed storage bank . . . but, by that time, many of the old varieties had already been lost. It was really a tragic situation.

Now during the six-month debate that preceded the passing of the plant patenting amendment in this country, American gardeners became concerned that a similar scenario might develop here. Well, the act passed last year—reportedly on a voice vote in the lame duck session of the Senate, when very few members were present—and many people calmed down, since it began to seem unlikely that a system of legal and illegal varieties of food crops would be established here as it was in England. But the same thing is, in effect, happening here, and that's the danger. It's just occurring very gradually . . . so slowly, in fact, that many gardeners don't realize there's a problem until they open a seed catalog and see that their favorite tomato or squash is no longer for sale.

PLOWBOY: But does the loss of, to use your example, one type of tomato really make much difference as long as more than one variety of each vegetable is available? In other words, just how dangerous is this situation?

WHEALY: I think it has reached the crisis point! As I discovered in the course of my early research, we're entering a period of rapid and drastic climate change that's placing unusual stresses on food crops. Furthermore, the heavy applications of pesticides so common to modern agribusiness are disrupting the natural predator-prey relationships among insects by causing many pests to develop tolerances to the very chemicals that are recommended for use with the new hybrid vegetables.

The loss of genetic diversity is also critical because any vegetable variety is susceptible to attack, at some point in the future, from a disease or pest that we may not even know about yet. You see, we have no idea what genes plant breeders will need to call on, say, ten—or a hundred—years from now. So the real strength of any food crop lies in diversity . . . that is, the availability of a set of genes for diverse characteristics that will allow plant researchers to selectively breed cultivars that can resist a particular disease or pest.

However, if we eliminate many of a variety's original characteristics by allowing those "peculiar" types to die out, scientists won't have a diversified gene pool to work with . . . and we could conceivably lose a threatened crop altogether. Consider green beans, for example: There's a single gene in beans that determines stringlessness, and I'd say that well over 99% of the snap beans grown in this country today are stringless. Now imagine what would happen if one disease zeroed in on that particular gene. People would be scrambling frantically to find a bean without the stringless gene . . . one of the old string varieties. And it's likely that only seed preservation programs like ours would still have those rare cultivars.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print