Where our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. Gary Paul Nabhan. Island Press: Washington, 2008. 214 pp., $24.95 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-59726-399-3, ISBN-10: 1-59726-399-0).
Reviewed by Rafael J. Routson, Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
In the Foodsteps of Giants:
In his latest scientific and cultural pursuit, Where Our Food Comes From, Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan tracks the footsteps of Russian seed scientist Nikolay Vavilov across five continents, tracing the centers of diversity of domesticated food crops. These two scientists, whose work reaches into three centuries, embarked upon their quests in the context of a critical race, for Vavilov a pursuit against famine in his own country and then the snarls of the communist government, and for Dr. Nabhan a race against the irreversible loss of the world's genetic food crop diversity. The stories of each scientist, spaced fifty to seventy years apart in their journeys provide a multi-tiered study of past and current tapestries of seeds, fruits, roots, and tubers, as well as the farms, farmers, seed collectors, and seed protectors in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. This book emerges at a pivotal time in agricultural history, as economic and political factors severely threaten the future of food diversity and food security around the globe. In the times of Nikolay Vavilov, nation-wide famines propelled the young scientist to seek strains of crops from around the world to locate genes resistant to pests, disease, and unpredictable weather conditions. Dr. Nabhan follows the routes of the Russian scientist, tracing the centers of seed diversity, and noting shifts in the agricultural practices and traditions as well as the climatic, social, and political changes that have occurred in the previous half century, to place their combined searches in an international political ecology context, the findings not just for the benefit of one nation, but for the long-term health and survival of humanity and global agrobiodiversity.
As a lifelong goal, the Russian seed scientist Nikolay Vavilov sought to locate the centers of origin and diversity of cultivated plants and to collect the entire range of seed diversity on five continents. Vavilov not only gathered the seeds, but he took extensive field notes regarding cultivation, harvesting, preparation, farm and topographical characteristics, the vernacular names, uses, and lore. He was conversant in fifteen languages and traced the linguistic and cultural histories of the seeds as well as the genetic origins. Nikolay Vavilov founded an extensive seed bank and research center, and was also a proponent of in-situ conservation, of seeds remaining in the hands of the farmers world-wide and continuing to evolve in the myriad environments of the farmers' fields. Vavilov noted diminishing seed diversity, a phenomenon later known as genetic erosion, and he promoted agrobiodiversity as a cornerstone of food security. The Russian scientist is both championed and criticized for his extensive seed collecting efforts, and he himself knew that collecting seeds from one country for use in another is never ethically or politically neutral (147).
K. B. Wilson, in the introduction to Where our Food Comes From, writes that virtually no crops have been domesticated in modern times, and that science has failed to develop any new crops at all (xiv); even with the extensive work in hybridization and genetic engineering, the true breadth of seed diversity stems from millennia of isolated and interrelated farmers, tribes, and villages selecting and reproducing the crops that sustained, and still sustain all of humanity. The web of agrobiodiversity includes interactions among plant, animals, and cultures, a dynamic process of interchange and multi-directional influences. Wild relatives along field edges cross and backcross in reticulate evolution with domesticated plants and animals to increase pest tolerance and exchange the genes of survival necessary for specific ecosystems. These wild and domesticated biota shape and are shaped by cultures, blurring the boundaries between human and wild, revealing a millennial-length collective adaptation as a dynamic, living entity.
Shifting economic and political tendencies and implementation of new agricultural and industrial technologies have triggered a dramatic decrease in seed diversity around the globe. These changes are hard to measure because early documentation of intricate farmer-field-environment interactions is virtually non-existent. The techniques of measuring genetic erosion emerged with the technology of creating genetic fingerprints for plant and animal varieties, but even this knowledge has come late in the process; much of the world's seed diversity has already disappeared. Funding pours in for biotechnology but not the protection and promotion of seed, cultural, and biological diversity. In the current cultural and political climate of starvation, international seed companies merging with pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical companies, seed patenting, and outcries for seed sovereignty, Dr. Nabhan follows a delicate and acute line, seeking the vein and pulse of these issues. Add to this a physical climate changing at a rate that is already forcing extinctions; even domesticated crops once grown at one altitude can no longer survive in the areas in which they evolved. Dr. Nabhan travels, not as a seed collector, but as a witness, using Vavilov's detailed and meticulous field notes to assess the changing nature of the world's agrobiodiversity.
In his early explorations, Nikolay Vavilov developed and pursued the idea of a correlation among cradles of cultural and biological diversity. A greater richness in seed diversity, he hypothesized, could be found in mountainous areas more than in the fertile, agricultural plains. In the mountains, the climatic, elevation, topographic, vegetation, and soil gradients would foster isolated communities associated with greater language and species richness. Vavilov developed the term "nuclear centers of diversity" that later scientists such as Carl Sauer used when mapping the centers of origin for crop plants and Norman Myers and the World Wildlife Fund correlated later with biological "hotspots of biodiversity" (18). The nuclear centers mapped by Vavilov, cover only 1/5 of the world's landmass, but hold a high percentage of wild and domesticated species diversity. These places are also rich in indigenous knowledge and integrated practices of managing both the wild and the cultivated for maximal landscape potential. These centers of biodiversity now drive conservation planning and dictate the funneling of conservation dollars, however, scientists and policy makers have been slow to acknowledge the integrated nature of cultures in these centers of biodiversity. They have excluded many indigenous groups from the "protected" areas, aggravating an already declining state of cultural and biotic erosion.
Vavilov began his international seed-questing travels in the Middle East and Asia in 1916. He was delayed, detained, and interrogated by local and international police suspect of his purpose. He survived political harassment and the inherent difficulties of traveling to the far reaches of the world by vehicle, train, mule, horse, camel, and caravan, crossing mountain ranges, fording rivers, and pursuing paths into the interiors of continents to find his coveted seeds. He first collected seeds in Persia, and continued into Kyrgystan, Mongolia, and Tajikistan, locating one of his nuclear centers in the Pamir Mountain Range in Central Asia. The Pamirs are third highest mountain landscape in the world, rising above five thousand meters, with cold desert valleys between glacier covered peaks. The extreme conditions, rugged landscape, and long history of human habitation have provided a natural laboratory for crop evolution and resilience (46). Vavilov took precise notes that can still be used to assess the climate and crop correlations, pressure readings for elevation, and he described geographic patterns in crop diversity. Dr. Nabhan, on his own journey to the Pamirs in 2003, documented a dynamic cultural and physical landscape. Dr. Nabhan writes that climate change is accelerating glacier melt in the high altitudes, leading to a changing upper limit of wheat, rye, oat, and potato crops and livestock grazing, while the cold rivers of glacier runoff decreased the temperatures in the valleys (56). Farmers struggle to move their crops higher up the mountains slopes, even planting orchards at unprecedented elevations with the foresight that the climate will be suitable by the time the trees are old enough to bear fruit. The traditional farmers have ever-dynamic practices, adapting to the variations presented by topography, climate, and social and political pressures, but the accelerated rate of climate change presents unprecedented challenges to the adaptation of food crops and farming methods.
Changing political regimes, trade agreements, and national boundaries affect seed diversity in localities and the exchange of seeds between localities. Dr. Nabhan traced the Russian scientist's work to his own Nabhan family roots in the Levant in Greater Syria. Gary Paul Nabhan's great-grandfather emigrated from Lebanon following political turmoil in the 1860s when traditional agricultural crops were abandoned for silkworm production, leading to half a century of a food crisis, disease, and massive starvation. Both scientists arrived in the Fertile Crescent in the midst of political and social turmoil to seek wheat varieties in Lebanon, Syria, and Bekaa.
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