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Fresh out of diversity

“Blueberries are a great example of agriculture as high-tech industry,” argues Daniel Hulls, the boss of AgDevCo, an investment fund. Driscoll’s, an American agribusiness giant, supplies seeds to farmers in Zimbabwe that are the result of years of cross-pollination. Polyethylene covers protect bushes. Storage rooms have optical sorting machines. To maximise profits, firms time production for the summer, after American supply dwindles but before Peru’s picks up.

According to a recent article in The Economist, quoted above, blueberries are just one of an increasing number of examples of Africa’s “industrialisation of fresh,” a concept developed by Christopher Cramer at SOAS with colleagues John Sender and Jonathan Di John. The article suggests that, if it is implemented properly, “there is huge potential for African agriculture to play the sort of role long envisioned for manufacturing.”

It’s a striking phrase. “Fresh” sounds like the very opposite of industrial. Fresh food is perishable, seasonal and associated with local production. Yet, increasingly, fresh fruit and vegetables are being made to behave like industrial commodities. Agribusiness is using breeding, controlled production, refrigeration, packaging, logistics and retail systems to make perishable foods standardized, predictable and available almost anywhere, anytime.

Think of a supermarket apple. It needs to look right, travel well, resist bruising, ripen predictably and remain edible in storage for months. The tomato needs to survive harvesting, packing and a long journey without losing its appearance. The strawberry needs a shelf life that would have seemed miraculous a generation ago. “Fresh” has become something that can be engineered.

There are obvious benefits. Longer shelf lives can reduce waste, extend markets and make nutritious foods available far beyond their traditional growing seasons. Even foods based on so-called neglected and underutilized species — making them truly “opportunity crops.” That could be good for agrobiodiversity.

But there is a less visible consequence that is not so good: the characteristics that make a crop useful to an industrial fresh-food system can also narrow the range of diversity that gets grown.

Industrialized fresh-produce chains tend to reward uniformity. Grading standards, packing-line specifications, and retailer contracts all push toward a narrow set of varieties that perform consistently — the right size, the right shelf life, the right appearance under fluorescent light. That’s efficient for the production process Cramer et al. and The Economist extol, but it’s also potentially a quiet mechanism of genetic erosion: the traits that make a variety a good fit for industrial handling are not necessarily the traits that make it resilient, nutritious, or adapted to marginal land. A diverse production landscape can narrow disastrously once it’s plugged into export-oriented industrial supply chains.

Uniformity is valuable. Predictability is valuable. Long shelf life is valuable. But genetic diversity is valuable too. And not always for the same reasons.

Genebanks maintain thousands of crop varieties that may not meet the specifications of industrial supply chains. At least now. Some may have unusual flavours or colours; others may be poorly suited to long-distance transport. But they may also contain genes for disease resistance, heat tolerance, drought adaptation, nutritional quality, novel textures or other traits that could become valuable as production conditions and consumer preferences change.

The paradox — or is it the conundrum — is that the more successfully we industrialize “fresh”, the more important it will become to conserve the diversity that industrial systems tend to leave behind.

The fresh food in the supermarket may look reassuringly abundant. The genetic diversity behind it is another matter. The Economist could have pointed out that the industrialisation of fresh selects for what works now. For the system to be sustainable, you need genebanks to preserve what might work next.

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A Babel of agrobiodiversity

“The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene” by Blasi, Hamilton, Gray & Bowern, published in Science last month, does something I really love. It complicates a standard narrative.

The received story of language diversity is that it has been declining steadily for centuries, largely driven by colonialism and globalization. But direct evidence is scarce and recent: writing only reliably takes us back about 6,000 years. So the team combined ethnographic data from 171 hunter-gatherer and fisher societies, paleodemographic estimates of global population, and statistical and social-computational modelling to reconstruct plausible trajectories of global language diversity over the 12,000 years of the Holocene, which began after the last major ice age, triggering the birth of agriculture.

At the beginning of this period, they estimate there were roughly 4,500–6,200 languages. That’s actually fewer than the roughly 7,500 languages spoken today. Language diversity then increased through most of the Holocene, driven by the population growth engendered by agriculture, reaching a peak between about 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when the models suggest that tens of thousands of languages may have existed. That’s an order of magnitude more than today.

Then came a major collapse. The authors argue that the decline in linguistic diversity began with the expansion of large states and empires, long before European colonialism. Expanding populations and their languages, cultures and institutions displaced smaller ones. Today’s languages are therefore “survivors of a massive and highly selective historical bottleneck.” They persist because the populations speaking them expanded. Extinction, the authors argue, has shaped linguistic and cultural diversity far more — and for longer — than we have appreciated.

Now, there are obvious caveats. The authors are modelling linguistic diversity, not measuring it. Their estimates depend on heroic assumptions about early ethnolinguistic group sizes, global population and the relationship between population and language number. Regional histories could have been very different, and the model can’t reconstruct individual episodes of extinction caused by war, disease or environmental change.

But the paper provides a provocative template for thinking about diversity more generally. It suggests that population growth can initially generate diversity; but expanding societies can subsequently erase it through homogenization.

And that makes me wonder about agricultural biodiversity. You saw that coming, I’m sure.

I’m not suggesting that crop diversity followed the same pattern as language diversity through the Holocene. We simply don’t have the evidence to say that, though it’s an intriguing thought. But could we borrow the methodology? Could we reconstruct plausible trajectories of crop or agricultural-system diversity from fragmentary archaeological, ethnobotanical, genetic and demographic evidence?

Rather than assuming that agricultural diversity was vast and stable in the distant past, happy in its Vavilovian centres, and has been declining recently, perhaps we might end up complicating the familiar genetic erosion narrative too. That would be worthwhile. And fun.

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The accessions in Spain fall mainly everywhere

My ex-colleagues at the Crop Trust have a very nice animation on the Genesys blog-type thing showing the progress of landrace collecting around the world over the past 125 years.

Do please read the post for the details of how it was done, and some observations on the results.

Here I just wanted to highlight something that has always intrigued me: how did Spain get so heavily collected? It’s really striking how in any global map of collecting localities, Spain looks like a solid carpet, with genebank accessions from practically every nook and cranny. More so than most neighbouring countries, I would say.

Well, it’s a little difficult to be sure because there’s no slider on the animation to take it backwards and forwards at will, but it looks like a burst of collecting first in the 40s, and then some filling in of gaps in the 80s, are responsible for the blanket coverage.

Maybe someone more familiar with the history of germplasm collecting in Spain can explain more.

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Brainfood: Avocado history, Brazil commuity seedbanks, Citizen science, Agroecology double, Indigenous knowledge, Turkish seeds, Swiss biodiversity

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Smelling the heirloom coffee

Yet more on agrobiodiversity marketing in Kenya. This time it’s coffee.

Spring Valley Coffee gives out nifty little cards on all its products, providing information on the varietal composition of different blends, and where the beans that go into each are grown.

This decaf from Guji in Ethiopia caught my eye in particular…

…because the variety involved is a heirloom. But also because if you’re going to those lengths, why not quote its local name?

Anyway, still a pretty nice idea.