How Great the Loss?

Adams' apple is extinct. And his beans are gone too. Both apple and bean varieties bearing the name of an early president of the United States have vanished. In fact, of the 7100 named varieties of apples growing in the U.S. in the 1800s, some 6800 are probably now extinct. Ninety-five percent of almost 600 garden bean varieties, 95% of more than 500 cabbage varieties, and 81% of 400 tomato varieties have also disappeared.

Simply to say that they have disappeared fails to convey the finality of the situation. "Death is one thing; an end to birth is something else," as biologists Soule and Wilcox once pointed out. For the Ansault pear, described by the leading fruit expert of the early 20th century as having flesh more "buttery" than any other pear and possessing a "rich sweet flavor, and a distinct but delicate perfume," there is no more birth. It's extinct.

Given the business the Trust is in, we are used to fielding one very natural but difficult question, "How much diversity has been lost?"

Percentages such as those just provided cannot give an accurate portrayal of the loss of crop diversity, or the loss of potentially important traits. The Adams apple may be extinct, but it was not the only red apple in the world. Red didn't disappear. Many - theoretically even all - the individual genes found in Adams apple could still exist, spread amongst the still-surviving varieties.

All plants are biologically related. Rice, wheat, and maize, for example, are grasses and as such are closely related. Darwin explained such connections with his theory of "common descent". We're all cousins. Indeed, chickens, as we just discovered, are related to the long-gone Tyrannosaurus rex. And you and I share genes with rice, wheat and the potted plant by the window. Perhaps as many as 50%. If this estimate is roughly accurate, then 50% of the genetic diversity of a crop will continue to exist no matter how many varieties are lost, as long as you and I are still alive.

So there's one admittedly mischievous answer to the question. No one seriously fears losing the ubiquitous genes shared by cabbages and kings, however. Losing genes associated with unique and potentially important characteristics in crops is an entirely different matter. This is the diversity that will enable crops to adapt to the challenges already present as well as to new and unknown threats that will inevitably arise.

In the 1900s, the commercialization and increasing globalization of agriculture, as well as the marketing and distribution of seeds by commercial and government agencies, combined to produce motive and method for the replacement of numerous diverse crop varieties with a smaller number of more genetically homogeneous, scientifically-bred varieties. Garrison Wilkes likened the process to "taking stones from the foundation in order to repair the roof." The new varieties unintentionally undermined the biological basis upon which they were built. Production leapt forward, but much crop diversity was lost, as noted by ample anecdotal accounts. But "because no one can say exactly how much diversity once existed, no one can say exactly how much has been lost historically," as FAO's first global assessment of the state of crop diversity pointed out,

Likewise we cannot say with precision how much has been saved. Three independent surveys of scientists undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s each concluded, however, that a high percentage of existing diversity of major crops has been collected and is in genebanks - as much as 95% for wheat, rice, maize and potato. Other crops are less well represented. Perhaps a fifth of sorghum diversity and up to half of sweet potato diversity remains to be collected and formally conserved.

Genebanks contain thousands of varieties that can no longer be found on anyone's farm. The social and environmental conditions that gave rise to them in the first place are quickly disappearing and are unlikely to reappear. It is fortunate that many varieties were collected and placed in managed collections, otherwise the extent of genetic erosion would have been far, far greater.

For the same reasons that so much diversity was lost in the last century, the remaining diversity found on farms today and not in genebanks would have to be considered seriously endangered. Only now, there is a new threat: climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a gloomy picture where up to 30% of earth's species will be at an increased risk of extinction as global temperatures rise. Profound climatic shifts will unavoidably exert pressure on the remaining crop diversity not yet safeguarded in genebanks, including the "wild relatives" of domesticated crops that have been an important source of disease and pest resistance and have even salvaged a number of our major crops.

The time has come to acknowledge both the old and familiar threats to crop diversity as well as the new challenges, collect samples of the remaining diversity, safeguard all of it in genebanks, and guard those banks.

Lost and Found

The honest answer to the question of how much diversity has been lost is "we just don't know". There was never a complete inventory of what there was "in the first place". The word "gene" has only been around since 1900; clearly we have no quantitative measures of the genetic diversity that existed before that.

We live in a world of wounds, as the ecologist Aldo Leopold once remarked. Both Adams apple and Tyrannosaurus rex have departed. But apple varieties are not the same as dinosaurs and therein lies a distinction worth pondering. The diversity of apples and other crops can be saved in a secure and lasting manner. The global system the Trust is helping develop will do just that, protecting the diversity that will enable crops to adapt to and survive future changes in the environment. Dinosaurs didn't have such a system, and they didn't stand a chance.

The important question is therefore not how much crop diversity has been lost - we'll never know - but how much still exists and what we are going to do about it. We can decide to get serious about conserving what's left, or follow the lead of T. rex and take our chances.

The Trust has received the largest grant ever for the conservation of crop diversity!

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $30 million to a partnership of the UN Foundation and the Trust for an unprecedented global initiative to rescue threatened, high-priority collections of crop diversity in developing countries and to support information systems to improve their conservation and availability. The grant will also enable developing countries and international agricultural research centres to place seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for safety purposes.

Jane Toll and Luigi Guarino, internationally prominent figures in our field for more than two decades, have joined the Trust staff to lead this programme.

$7.5 million of the grant was earmarked for the Trust's endowment and contingent on our finding a donor willing to match it. We are extremely grateful to Norway for volunteering to do so and in the process becoming the largest country donor to the Trust, taking their total given so far to over $15 million.

The International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Trust have announced an historic partnership and financial arrangement that will ensure the permanent conservation and availability of the world's largest and most important rice collection. See our website for details.

Our new Executive Board has just met, and what a board it is! Dr. Margaret Catley-Carlson, current chair of the Global Water Partnership, former deputy head of UNICEF and former head of CIDA, Canada's development assistance agency, was elected to chair the board. Prof. Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and head of Kenya's Greenbelt Movement, was elected vice-chair. Lewis Coleman, President of Dreamworks Animation, founding president of the Moore Foundation and former Vice Chairman and CFO of the Bank of America, was appointed to chair the Trust's Finance and Investment Committee. We bid a warm farewell to our wonderful interim board, headed by Ambassador Fernando Gerbasi, under whose leadership the Trust was firmly established.