Dwindling Diversity In The World's Food Supply?

An article from National Geographic magazine's July 2011 issue has been haunting me for the last few days.

As I also did when I was a kid, I read the magazine front to back, cover to cover the moment it hit our mailbox.

The difference these days?  We get the magazine every month, but sometimes -- due to schedule insanity, a lengthy "to do" list that won't leave me alone and other diversions -- I don't get around to reading the entire magazine until a month or two after the fact.

The science, though, is fascinating.  Still.  Every single issue.  Especially when an article highlights something in a way I'd never, ever considered before.

And in the July 2011 issue?  There was an article about the ever-dwindling amount of diversity in the world's food supply that was seriously scary and incredibly thought-provoking.  Here's just a glimpse:

But the green revolution was a mixed blessing. Over time farmers came to rely heavily on broadly adapted, high-yield crops to the exclusion of varieties adapted to local conditions. Monocropping vast fields with the same genetically uniform seeds helps boost yield and meet immediate hunger needs. Yet high-yield varieties are also genetically weaker crops that require expensive chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides. The same holds true for high-yield livestock breeds, which often require expensive feed and medicinal care to survive in foreign climates. The drive to increase production is pushing out local varieties, diluting livestock's genetic diversity in the process. As a result, the world's food supply has become largely dependent on a shrinking list of breeds designed for maximum yield: the Rhode Island Red chicken, the Large White pig, the Holstein cow. In short, in our focus on increasing the amount of food we produce today, we have accidentally put ourselves at risk for food shortages in the future.

Read the entire article -- it's an eye-opener, even for someone who has spent her whole life growing veggies with her family and having an always well-stocked pantry "just in case" being drummed into her obsessively by relatives who survived the Depression.


We still have small family farms here in WV, not to the exclusion of factory-farmed produce in the stores, but because we're still insular and rural enough to value knowing the owners of the hands that feed our tables.

Last winter, Marion Nestle, who writes about and works on food issues and their interrelationship with politics, touched on the intersection between agribusiness and microfarming in a way that really brings home where some of the bigger differences can be mapped:

We have two agricultural systems in this country, both claiming to be good for farmers and both claiming to be sustainable. One focuses on local, seasonal, organic, and sustainable in the sense of replenishing what gets taken out of the soil. The other is Monsanto, for which sustainable means selling seeds (and not letting farmers save them), patented traits developed through biotechnology, and crop protection chemicals.

This is about who gets to control the food supply and who gets to choose. Too bad the Monsanto ads don’t explain that.

We, as human beings, are so quick to allow our hubris to blot out the fact that mother nature doesn't care how mighty we may think we are. And when you add a healthy dose of chasing a larger profit margin into the mix, the questions about what is best for the entire human race in the long-term pretty much go right out the window, don't they?

This chart in the National Geographic article was particularly mind blowing.

It's definitely something to think about -- when you make choices at the grocery store, the farmer's market and beyond, when you decide what to feed your family and how you will spend your money, what, exactly are you supporting?  What happens if we all start asking better questions about all of this?  Or really understanding just how effectively we can channel our dollars from one profit margin into another one to show what we think is more important?

Will we make better choices?  Worse ones?  Fascinating stuff, isn't it?  All I know is that I am now obsessed with thoughts of a strain of mutant wheat rust, and the shortsightedness of putting the bulk of the world's bread needs into one, tenuous, monocropping nightmare of a basket all at once.


(Photo via Chiot's Run.  More about Comstock, Ferre from them here.)