Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [28]
For more information, visit www.biotech-info.net or www.organicconsumers.org.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
Monsanto sells many package deals of codependent seeds and chemicals, including so-called traitor technologies in which a crop’s disease resistance relies on many engineered genes resting in its tissues—genes that can only be turned on, as each disease arises, by the right chemical purchased from Monsanto.
It’s hardly possible to exaggerate the cynicism of this industry. In internal reports, Monsanto notes “growers who save seed from one year to the next” as significant competitors, and allocates a $10 million budget for investigating and prosecuting seed savers. Agribusinesses can patent plant varieties for the purpose of removing them from production (Seminis dropped 25 percent of its total product line in one recent year, as a “cost-cutting measure”), leaving farmers with fewer options each year. The same is true for home gardeners, who rarely suspect when placing seed orders from Johnny’s, Territorial, Nichols, Stokes, and dozens of other catalogs that they’re likely buying from Monsanto. In its 2005 annual report, Monsanto describes its creation of American Seeds Inc. as a licensing channel that “allows us to marry our technology with the high-touch, local face of regional seed companies.” The marriage got a whopping dowry that year when Monsanto acquired Seminis, a company that already controlled about 40 percent of the U.S. vegetable seed market. Garden seed inventories show that while about 5,000 nonhybrid vegetable varieties were available from catalogs in 1981, the number in 1998 was down to 600.
Jack Harlan, a twentieth-century plant geneticist and author of the classic Crops and Man, wrote about the loss of genetic diversity in no uncertain terms: “These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine…. The line between abundance and disaster is becoming thinner and thinner.”
The “resources” Harlan refers to are old varieties, heirlooms and land races—the thousands of locally adapted varieties of every crop plant important to humans (mainly but not limited to wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes), which historically have been cultivated in the region where each crop was domesticated from its wild progenitor. Peru had its multitude of potatoes, Mexico its countless kinds of corn, in the Middle East an infinity of wheats, each subtly different from the others, finely adapted to its region’s various microclimates, pests and diseases, and the needs of the humans who grew it. These land races contain a broad genetic heritage that prepares them to coevolve with the challenges of their environments.
Disease pathogens and their crop hosts, like all other predators and prey, are in a constant evolutionary dance with each other, changing and improving without cease as one evolves a slight edge over its opponent, only to have the opponent respond to this challenge by developing its own edge. Evolutionary ecologists call this the Red Queen principle (named in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen), after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who observed to Alice: “In this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.” Both predator and prey must continually change or go extinct. Thus the rabbit and fox both get faster over the generations, as their most successful offspring pass on more genes for speediness. Humans develop new and stronger medicines against our bacterial predators, while the bacteria continue to evolve antibiotic-resistant strains of themselves. (The people who don’t believe in evolution, incidentally, are just as susceptible as the rest of us to this observable occurrence of evolution. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.)
Plant diseases can