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The diplomacy of germplasm collecting

I do love a good historical counterfactual. Unfortunately, Henry A. Wallace becoming president of the USA in 1945 is not a particularly good counterfactual. You really want these things to hang on a coin toss, and it was in fact extremely unlikely that FDR would have chosen Wallace again as his vice-president running mate in 1944.

However, that didn’t stop me enjoying the recent episode of the podcast Past Present Future entitled “What If… Wallace not Truman Had Become US President in 1945?” Because of the erudition of the host David Runciman and guest Ben Steil, of course. Because Wallace was a pretty unique combination of politician, scientist and, well, mystic. But also because of a throw-away statement by Steil about half-way through to the effect that Wallace had sponsored a germplasm collecting trip to Mongolia while Secretary of Agriculture in the 1930s.

That sent me down a Nicholas Roerich-shaped rabbit hole. Roerich was also a very unusual character, “a Russian painter, writer, archaeologist, theosophist, philosopher, and public figure. In his youth he was influenced by Russian Symbolism, a movement in Russian society centered on the spiritual. He was interested in hypnosis and other spiritual practices and his paintings are said to have hypnotic expression.” Roerich undertook a number of expeditions in Asia, for example this one in 1925–1929:

The Bolsheviks assisted Roerich with logistics while he was traveling through Siberia and Mongolia. However, they did not commit themselves to his reckless project of the Sacred Union of the East, a spiritual utopia that boiled down to Roerich’s ambitious attempts to stir the Buddhist masses of inner Asia to create a highly spiritual co-operative commonwealth under the patronage of Bolshevik Russia.

That sounds plenty interesting enough, but the expedition that is most relevant here took place a few years later:

In 1934–1935, the US Department of Agriculture, then headed by the Roerich admirer Henry A. Wallace, sponsored an expedition by Roerich and its scientists H. G. MacMillan and James F. Stephens to Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and China. The expedition’s purpose was to collect seeds of plants which prevented soil erosion.

The expedition consisted of two parts. In 1934, they explored the Greater Khingan mountains and Bargan plateau in western Manchuria. In 1935, they explored parts of Inner Mongolia: the Gobi Desert, Ordos Desert, and Helan Mountains. The expedition found almost 300 species of xerophytes, collected herbs, conducted archeological studies, and found antique manuscripts of great scientific importance.

A review of Steil’s recent book The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century summarizes that adventure thus:

Wallace backed the Russian artist and intellectual Nicholas Roerich’s expedition to Mongolia with government money. Scientists from the Agriculture department accompanied the trek to collect drought-resistant plants for study. Yet Roerich had his own nation-building ambitions. Soon, Cordell Hull, FDR’s secretary of state, complained about private adventurers and people from the Department of Agriculture intruding into a delicate region over which Stalin loomed.

Before long, the expedition’s quasi-political activities were getting bad press, too. Wallace felt betrayed by Roerich, and he smashed him. Steil does not report that Wallace asked the nation’s preeminent banker, Winthrop Aldrich at Chase National, to cut off every public and private means of funding to the Russian and his team, thereby stranding the travelers in the middle of nowhere.

Wrapping up this episode, Steil shows Wallace dodging criticism by writing a letter for the record: the Roerich expedition’s purpose was to find plants, nothing more, and surely not to create a cockamamie central Asian polity. This letter underscores Wallace’s “dishonesty and moral cowardice,” says Steil.

Be that as it may, the germplasm is still there in the USDA genebanks. And Wallace did a little seed diplomacy of his own later on. The days of US secretaries of agriculture personally exchanging seeds, or indeed facilitating foreign germplasm collecting trips with the potential side-effect of establishing cockamamie polities, are long gone. But collaboration on crop diversity conservation does have a lot of potential to bring countries closer together: all countries are interdependent for crop diversity, after all. Maybe it would be good if ministers of agriculture around the world followed Wallace and took a little more of a direct interest in seeds and genebanks.

Not Your Usual Potatoes

Jeremy’s latest newsletter discusses a very humble wild potato species, which we have actually blogged about here on a number of previous occasions. Do subscribe, there’s other cool stuff in there.

Indigenous people in the southwest of North America had more of a hand in crop domestication than is often thought, according to a new paper on the Four Corners potato, Solanum jamesii. So much so, according to the press release I read, that the results “support the [uncited] assertion that the tuber is a ‘lost sister,’ joining maize, beans and squash—commonly known as the three sisters—as a staple of crops ingeniously grown across the arid landscape”.

The release explains that populations of Four Corners potato, found, naturally enough, in the areas where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet, fall into two distinct types. Some — archeological populations — grow within 300 metres of an archaeological site and are relatively small. The rest are non-archaeological and widely spread throughout the species’ range. Sampling the DNA of both types, the researchers discovered much more diversity in the non-archaeological populations than in those associated with settlements, which suggests domestication by local people.

Researchers were also able to show that specific archaeological populations were most like non-archaeological populations quite some distance away, which means that transport networks among the indigenous people were well developed. Settlement sites in the southwest of Utah were around 500 km from the nearest natural populations from which they might have been derived.

S. jamesii contains double the protein, calcium, magnesium, and iron of more familiar potatoes (S. tuberosum). The archeological populations were, however, not within the species’ central range, where the wild populations are much larger and more productive. So did people transport and grow the tubers simply to have a nourishing source of food close at hand in winter? That would be cultivation. Or were they, as seems likely, also actively selecting for things like taste, size and frost tolerance, which would put them well on the way to domestication? More detailed DNA might studies provide an answer.

A further thought. Four Corners potato, which is still grown by some Diné people (and probably others), copes well with drought and heat. Might it also have a wider market?

Funding opportunity for crop wild relatives

The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund has a small grants program and I hear they are looking for more applications targeting crop wild relatives.

The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund provides financial support in the form of small grants of less than $25,000 to conservation projects globally. These small grants are as much for the species as they are for the conservationists and organizations working so passionately to protect them.

It started with a seed 20 years ago

As the International Plant Treaty celebrates its 20th birthday, here’s a nice interview with the current Secretary, Kent Nnadozie. Want a quick summary of the Treaty’s achievements? Kent has you covered:

To begin with, we have been able to set up fully functional mechanisms out of the text of the Treaty. We have established a multilateral system for access and benefit-sharing, which is like the global pool of genetic material and seeds that facilitates the breeding of new varieties of crops, and it has enabled over 6.9 million transfers of plant genetic material, supporting global agricultural research. Another achievement is that it is the first international agreement that formally recognized farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds so that farmers’ contributions over thousands of years are fully recognized. The Treaty also strengthens the capacity of farmers and local communities, encouraging their participation in national decision-making. The other achievement deals with the funding strategy, which was established under the Treaty and has enabled the mobilization of enormous amounts of funds and resources to further support farmers in developing countries but also to support gene banks, where this material has been conserved. The Treaty, which currently has 150 Contracting Parties plus the European Union, has also been fundamental in facilitating international cooperation because it provides the platform for governments and other stakeholders to come together to negotiate and set policies for the global governance of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Additionally, it was the adoption of the Treaty that gave Norway the impetus to invest in establishing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and, since then, has continued to support the Treaty, including through yearly contributions to the Benefit-sharing Fund, based on the value of total annual seed sales in Norway.