The Origins of some basic mistakes about genebanks

I’m not sure how we missed it, but Origins, “a project of the Public History Initiative and eHistory in the History Department at The Ohio State University,” had a longish piece called “Conserving Diversity at the Dinner Table: Plants, Food Security and Gene Banks” last month. You can read it, or listen to it. The author is Nurcan Atalan-Helicke Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.

It’s a pretty straightforward account of the practice and history of crop diversity conservation and use, but with a clear slant.

In the long run, the most efficient way to conserve agrobiodiversity is to maintain farmers’ cultivation of traditional varieties.

Admittedly, there’s not much evidence brought forward for this statement, which is treated almost as self-evident, but it is not made any easier to swallow by being preceded by the likes of this:

The Soviet Union was the first to establish gene banks for crops. However, Russian botanist Nikolay Vavilov’s effort to collect seeds worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s was aimed at research alone, not the protection of seed diversity.

I feel sure Vavilov would beg to differ. Or this:

Working in collaboration with hundreds of governments, civil society organizations, and private businesses around the world, CGIAR today supports 15 international centers for agricultural research and about 1,750 gene banks. Together, these gene banks contain a total of 6 million accessions of all crops and represent 95 percent of all cereal landraces worldwide. These are public or non-profit entities whose goal is to sustain “food for people.”

The bit about the CGIAR’s 1,750 genebanks will come as a bit of a shock to the CGIAR. Not to mention the 1,750 genebanks. Then there’s this:

The CGIAR gene banks are located primarily in the global South but their funding and guidance comes primarily from Northern donors. CGIAR ensures that seeds and plant germplasm are stored in duplicate and kept below freezing so that they can remain viable for decades. They are cultivated under sterile conditions with fertilizers.

Sterile conditions I suppose refers to in vitro collections. But what’s with the fertilizers? And also:

There is also a question of access. Whereas many of the CGIAR centers are open access resources, the newer ones are not. Both the Svalbard and the Millennium Seed Bank are more restrictive, with access limited to those with permission from countries that make deposits.

Well, actually, in the case of Svalbard, it is only the depositing institutes which can access the material they send up there for safe-keeping.

I could go on. Plus there’s no mention of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The mistakes and omissions are a pity because Dr Atalan-Helicke makes a couple of astute points. For example:

Many countries continue to depend on CGIAR’s gene banks to improve their agriculture, taking advantage of the CGIAR’s open access to resources for research, breeding, conservation, and training. Between 1974 and 2001, Kenya and Uganda received a total of 12,000 unique accessions from all CGIAR gene banks that were collected from other countries. In the same period, about 4,000 accessions collected from Kenya and Uganda were distributed to the world.

You rarely see this kind of statement about the value of the international collections in pieces which are trying to make the point that yes, sure, genebanks are ok, but there’s a better way to conserve crop diversity.

Anyway, if the Public History Initiative ever does another piece on agricultural biodiversity, we’d be happy to do the fact-checking.