Category: Forests & trees

Because right now, still, the planet is blind. In other words I can step into the genebank of Brazil and understand it. But 99.9999 percent of the planet cannot. And so whether you’re eating in a restaurant in New York City, whether you’re a Nigerian farmer, or whether you’re a school kid walking to school in Arizona — it doesn’t matter. You are blind; you are illiterate. And this gives you the chance to be able to read. That will change our relationship to agrobiodiversity enormously. And I feel that’s the only chance for [combating] apathy. If people can “read” agrobiodiversity, they will then, for their own reasons, find it much more valuable to be interested in it, and as a consequence, [are] much more likely to be willing to save key pieces of it… And the only way that societies will be tolerant of big genebanks is if those big genebanks are offering them something. And if you’re blind to what’s in it, you’ve suddenly cut the list of what it can offer you down very severely…

The world has 1700 different crop genebanks. Every one of those things is someone’s salary, someone’s career, someone’s motivation. And they couldn’t care less about the whole thing. They care about the pieces in their backyard. And so the outcome is that you have 1700 collections which add up to x percent of the whole genepools. Well, if you ask me, I will tell you brutally that 50 percent of those will be dead and worthless in 50 years. But that doesn’t help the guy whose job it is to protect it, to raise money for it. He wants his income now. And the fact that it’s going to die 50 years from now couldn’t matter less…

I had to give a five-minute talk in California a few months ago, and I found myself saying, “Look, the threats are fragmentation, apathy, climate change, and small size.” Those are the threats. And the solutions are endowment, bigger size, and information systems…

Well, the legendary conservationist Daniel Janzen didn’t say these things. Not quite, anyway. But I didn’t change many words, and not by much. He was talking about protected areas, but it is quite amazing how similar are the problems of ex situ conservation of crop diversity. Too bad the two things are so often seen as antithetical.