Where Our Food Comes From

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Not far from the ancient Inca Trail, a Quechuan farmer in highlands of Peru plants a dozen kinds of native potatoes, their skins purple or tan, their flesh yellow or blue, their forms gnarly or egg-shaped. He goes about his work much the way his forefathers have always done, but this year he plants these heirloom tubers in micro-climates along the mountainside different from where he had ever planted them before.

Halfway around the world along the Silk Road in Tajikistan, an Asian “Johnny Appleseed” looks up at the melting glaciers above him, then digs a few holes on a table-like plateau below sixteen-thousand foot peaks. There, he transplants a mix of fruit trees taken from other villages nearby, hoping to see which will bear fruit for years to come.

What do farmers and orchard-keepers do when their climate changes faster than they could have ever imagined? How do they respond to crop pests and diseases that suddenly show up on their farms?  If particular rural families are known to farm “traditionally,” does that necessarily mean that they are inflexible and therefore vulnerable to such unforeseen changes?

These very questions are among those I asked when embarking on a three-year field adventure known as Where Our Food Comes From, during which I visited so-called traditional farmers in eleven countries on five continents. My choices of where to visit were not random; I was retracing the routes of the greatest seed collector and farming geographer who ever lived, Nikolay Vavilov (1887-1943). He was the great Russian scientist who came up with the notion of “centers of diversity” both for wild floras and for food crops, these areas are unusually rich in plant variety, and are where most of our domesticated crops originated. Not only did he personally collect hundreds of thousands of seeds in some 64 countries, but he also interviewed hundreds of traditional, indigenous and peasant farmers growing food under conditions that ranged from tropical rainforests in the Amazon, to the highest, driest mountains in the world, in central Asia. By retracing his steps, I hoped to learn whether traditional agriculture was resilient and enduring, or as many bureaucrats have predicted, whether it is a “thing of the past,” unable to adequately adapt to the current ecological and economic pressures it is facing.

What I found by comparing my own field notes to those of Russian plant explorer Vavilov was both heartening and sobering. Yes, traditional farmers are dynamically adapting to shifting weather, soils, pests and plagues. They continue to improvise strategies in response to changing climatic and economic conditions. It is clear that many have remained resilient enough to stay afloat, despite the fact that the global food economy has seldom fully rewarded them for their fine food, traditional knowledge, hard work and ingenuity. And yet, most of the farmers I met are also facing unprecedented pressures from globalization, genetically-modified crops, and dwindling water supplies (worsened by pumping to burgeoning cities or mining industries). These stresses make traditional farming more challenging than ever before. Let me offer you a few stories from the field as examples of what I mean.

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