Sowing Seeds of Diversity

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A Narrow Food Supply

The sweet crimson peppers that hung in shapely clumps in grandfather's garden, the crisp green cucumbers that grandma cherished for her pickle jars may only be memories. Of the food crops available to our relatives in 1900, an estimated 90 percent have already disappeared. In the last decade alone, we've lost a steady average of 6 percent of traditional and heirloom varieties each year. That means our food system is based on an ever narrowing handful of crops—a mere 150, of which only 20 produce 90 percent of the world's food. Of these 20 crops, only three—wheat, corn and rice—make up half of our food supply.

The danger of this limited food base is that the more homogeneous our crops, the more susceptible they are to disease, pests, and drought. All it takes is one fungus to wipe out an entire crop. Genetically similar potato planting led to the Irish potato famine of 1845, leaving millions starving when the country's supply was all but obliterated. In 1970, a leaf blight struck a gene that plant breeders had introduced for easier harvesting and destroyed half the corn from Florida to Texas.

Hybrid Supremacy

Four major companies dominate the US. mail-order market today, according to Seeds of Change president Stephen Badger. These multi-national corporations are swiftly buying out small, family-owned businesses with continued consolidation of the seed industry occurring all the time. From 1984 to 1987, almost a quarter of the mail-order seed companies were taken over or have closed down. Many traditional collections have been replaced with more profitable hybrids, their seeds often raised with chemicals and coated with fungicides and pesticides. "The insidious part of all this is that (the companies) selling the seeds are also often selling the chemicals," says John Sabella, who represents the Rodale Institute in international training programs related to agriculture. This starts a cycle of dependency on chemical inputs necessary for the plant to grow, resist disease and pests, and basically survive.

Large seed companies breed hybrids to target their biggest customers, the commercial growers. Naturally, these varieties must meet industrial needs—uniform ripening for easier machine harvesting; firmer flesh that holds up to handling, crosscountry shipping, and storage; larger fruits in eye-popping colors to please the American aesthetic. Unfortunately, these same seeds are then sold to the home gardening market. Rather than selecting plants that provide the greatest nutrition and flavor through generations of seed saving, they develop those that will grow in many parts of the United States, appealing to large-scale farming needs rather than those of a specific region. Some of these companies have begun offering heirlooms but more for their quaint and nostalgic connotations than issues of diversity. Of the almost 5,000 non-hybrids offered in 1984, two-thirds were dropped by 1994. Those left are not so far from extinction themselves; over 50 percent of all available varieties are only offered through one mail-order company. We need to grow and circulate these single-source varieties. We must also grow the plants that are easiest to hybridize and, therefore, are disappearing the fastest. These include broccolis, cauliflowers, cabbages, onions, peas, and sweet peppers—all of which have shown at least a 25 percent decrease in varieties offered since 1981.

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