The Threatened Gene FOOD, POLITICS, AND THE LOSS OF GENETIC DIVERSITY CARY FOWLER AND PAT MOONEY THE LUTTERWORTH PRESS CAMBRIDGE The Lutterworth Press P.O. Box 60 Cambridge CB12NT British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Fowler, Cary The threatened gene 1 . Agriculture. Use of genetic engineering I. Title II. Mooney, Pat 631.523 ISBN 0-7188-2830-5 Copyright ©1990 The Arizona Board of Regents First published in the United States by the University of Arizona Press All Rights Reserved . No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Ltd, Worcester To the next generation Robin, Kate, Sarah, Jeff, Nick, Morgan, and Joel C O N T E N T S Introduction ix A Word About Varieties xv Part One LEGACY OF DIVERSITY r Origins of Agriculture 3 z Development of Diversity 19 3 Value of Diversity 42 4 Genetic Erosion: Losing Diversity 54 S Tropical Forests 9o Part Two GENETIC TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS 6 Rise of the Genetics Supply Industry 115 Enter Biotechnology 140 8 Global Conservation Begins 147 Politics of Genetic Resource Control 1174 io Responsibility and Commitment 2oi Part Three REFERENCE MATERIAL Notes 225 Acknowledgments 257 Index 259 I N T R O D U C T 1 O N While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental catastrophe in human history is unfolding in the garden . While all are rightly concerned about the pos- sibility of nuclear war, an equally devastating time bomb is ticking away in the fields of farmers all over the world. Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture-silent, rapid, inexorable-is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction-to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world to- gether. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious. It is life at the end of the limb. That is the subject of this book. Agronomists in the Philippines warned of what became known as southern corn leaf blight in 1960 The disease was reported in Mexico not long after. In the summer of z968, the first faint hint that the blight was in the United States came from seed growers in the Midwest. The danger was ignored. By the spring of 1970, the disease had taken hold in the Florida corn crop. But it was not until corn prices leapt thirty cents a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade that the world took notice; by then it was August-and too late. By the close of the year, Americans had lost fifteen percent of their most important crop-more than a billion bushels. Some southern states lost half their harvest and many of their farmers. While consumers suffered in the grocery stores, producers were out a billion dollars in lost yield. And the disaster was not solely domestic. U.S. seed exports may have spread the blight to Africa, Latin America and Asia.2 X INTRODUCTION The real culprit was not the disease but crop uniformity. As a U.S. National Academy of Sciences publication later recalled, "from Maine to Miami; from Mobile to Moline" virtually all commercial corn varieties were genetically identical in at least one respect .3 When one genetic component of most varieties became susceptible to the new blight, the whole American crop was vulnerable. In the autumn of 1971, farmers in the Ukraine settled into the Russian winter comfortable in the knowledge that their fields were seeded with Besostaja, the highest-yielding wheat the region had ever seen. As January temperatures slid lower and the much needed snow cover failed to materialize, fears of winter kill spread. When the spring rains also failed, farmers and politicians alike knew the July harvest would be poor. In April, 11972, about the time the National Academy was wrapping up a landmark study on southern corn blight and the genetic vulnerability of other crops, American Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz was in the Ukraine touring the wheat fields. Although members of the delegation were aware of the shortage of rain, their attention was on the larger spring crop, not the winter growth. Based on what they saw, U.S. officials concluded that the Soviets would not be big buyers of grain that year. Georgina Vitonova thought otherwise. Back in January, the Ottawa- based economist had penned a report to the Canadian Wheat Board arguing that the Russians were in for a disaster. She had been monitoring the Soviet press-especially the weather reports-and she was aware that the Besostaja, highly responsive to inputs, occupied forty million hec- tares from Kuban to the Ukraine. She reasoned that it would never survive such a harsh winter. Vitonova estimated that between thirty and forty percent of the winter wheat crop4-at least twenty million tons-was lost.s Faced with losing their immense herds of cows and hogs, Russian politicians opted to buy their way out of the crop failure. By February, the Canadian Wheat Board had cut a secret deal on grain imports.6 In July Russian traders at the Manhattan Hilton were well on their way to having purchased twenty-seven million tons of grain. The world has never been the same since.' Grain and bread prices soared. Between Butz's April Ukrainian sojourn and October the same year, the Rotterdam price for a metric ton of wheat jumped from under sixty-five dollars to ninety.8 North American farmers thought they had died and gone to heaven. Before they came to, a generation of farmers took up Butz's challenge to INTRODUCTION XI "get big or get out" and raced enthusiastically into debt buying more land, bigger combines and all the fertilizers, center-pivot irrigation pumps, and pesticides their land could absorb . If, at first, this was good news for farmers, it was bad news for the world's hungry, who were unable to buy their way out of the same drought that had devastated the Russian harvest. They could not compete with Soviet cows for the high-priced wheat. Between i97z and 1973, Third World grain imports rose twenty-five percent, but their cost doubled to six billion dollars.9 The triple blows of Russian crop failure, Sahelian drought and international oil crisis-(aided and abetted by U.S. sabre- rattling about the "food weapon," as Butz termed American agricultural abundance in a world of food shortages)-propelled world leaders into food politics in earnest. The full and final effects of the Besostaja wheat's collapse-the hunger in the Third World and the engineered boom and bust in the industrialized countries-are still reverberating in world agriculture today. Why did the Russian wheat fail? Just as with the American corn crop two years earlier, the underlying problem was genetic uniformity. Forty million hectares of Soviet soil had been sown to a single variety. High-yielding in the mild winters of Kuban, it was incapable of surviving the sometimes harsh winters of the Ukraine.' o American corns, by contrast, were vulnerable to a different type of stress-the blight disease. The epidemics of the early 1970s served to underline a simple but humbling point: although the "North" (meaning most northern in- dustrialized countries) is grain-rich, it is gene-poor. Wherever the Garden of Eden might have been, the Horn of Plenty is definitely in the tropical and subtropical southern latitudes. Maximum genetic diversity is found in the tropical latitudes. While the vegetative assets of the temperate zones were literally frozen during the ice ages, botanical diversity flourished in the warmer tropics. As people later moved from the tropics, they took their seeds with them. Those who first crossed the oceans packed a lunch. The genetic "homes" of the thirty crop plants that, in aggregate, give humanity 95 percent of its nutritional requirements are all to be found in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Were one to list the top five crop species for every country, only 130 crop species would be named, virtually all originating in the Third World. Despite popular misconceptions, corn did not originate in the United States, but in Mexico. The solution to the southern corn leaf blight-other Xil INTRODUCTION than through a wider breeding program in general-was finally found in Mayorbala maize from Africa (though it too must have originated in Central America). Similarly, the Russian search for winter hardy wheats took them from the Fertile Crescent to the Himalayas. Seeds are unique in that the means of production-seed-is often also the end product for consumption. The rapid replacement of old "farmer" varieties with new "scientist" varieties can hasten the demise of the old genes. Modern plant breeding began in the twentieth century. By the end of World War II, almost all of the enormous number of wheats grown in Greece had been replaced by a handful of new varieties. As the mid- i 970S were reached, three-quarters of Europe's traditional vegetable seed stood on the verge of extinction. By that time scientists were beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel-in this case the gene pool-in search of genetic resistance to an ever growing list of virulent diseases and menacing pests attacking the world's most important crops. Although modern breeding had led to a "green revolution" in the North and a massive boom in yield, it had also eroded the genetic base for future breeding.