Genetically Engineered Foods Archives

native seeds

I saw this article today on a science website. http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/98/notes/profile

It is a wonderful article about saving native seeds for the future and the effect of mass commercial production of products on the diet and health of Native Americans. (The seeds can even be ordered on-line.)

Saving Seeds, Saving Cultures

by Jay Withgott

Posted March 16, 2001 · Issue 98

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Abstract

A one-of-a-kind seed bank reconnects Native Americans to their cultural heritage while preserving the genetic diversity of southwestern crops.

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Our modern age of industrial agriculture has produced more food for people than at any other time in history, but it's come at a cost. Our large-scale monocultures are dependent on a life-support system of pesticides, fertilizer, and irrigation, and the small number of crops we've come to rely upon are so highly inbred that our biggest controversy has become their genetic modification. In contrast, before the industrialization of agriculture, humans as a species were growing a huge number of genetically and nutritionally diverse crops, most of which were well adapted to local growing conditions.

(www.nativeseeds.org)

Native Seeds preserves the heritage of traditional crops.
In the American Southwest desert, one organization has taken it upon itself to preserve the genetic heritage of traditional crops. In so doing, they hope also to preserve something of the cultural heritage that gave people connections to the land. Native Seeds/SEARCH (Southwestern Endangered Arid-land Resource Clearing House), a Tucson, Arizona based nonprofit organization, is truly unique. As a seed bank, it preserves seeds of endangered crop varieties in frozen storage. It then grows them out on a farm filled with edibles like maize, amaranth, squash, and gourds, and all manner of beans and chiles.

But it's much more than just a storehouse for seeds. Native Seeds/SEARCH also sells seeds and plant products, and donates seeds to Native American farmers. It promotes protection of wild relatives of crops in nature. It encourages small-scale sustainable agriculture, and is building a record of information about traditional Native American farming techniques to prevent history from being lost. In the process, it is helping to preserve cultural ties to the land among people native to the Southwest deserts and is helping them to rediscover their culture through traditional foods. In many cases, Native Seeds/SEARCH has returned crops to elderly Native Americans that they remember from their youth and that would otherwise have permanently disappeared from their culture. And, by encouraging a return to traditional diets, it is helping Native Americans battle the diabetes that is so rampant in many of their communities.

"We have a very unique mission," executive director Michael McDonald says. "There aren't many groups doing both biological conservation and cultural conservation in combination like we are."

Not many groups do both biological and cultural conservation.
One of very few private regional seed banks, Native Seeds/SEARCH possesses roughly 2,000 seed collections of 99 species of plant from squashes to lentils to lemon basil to devil's claw used in weaving baskets. It also safeguards seeds of many wild crop relatives that hail from the Southwest, including corn, beans, cotton, and gourds. It covers a region stretching "from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Las Vegas, New Mexico, and from Durango, Colorado, to Durango, Durango," as organization members like to say; it's binational and spans both sides of the continental divide.

Founded in 1983 by four people with $400 between them - Mahina Drees, Barney Burns, Karen Reichhardt, and noted ethnobotanist and author Gary Nabhan - Native Seeds/SEARCH arose after Drees and Nabhan had worked for a hunger-relief organization on a gardening project on the Tohono O'odham reservation west of Tucson. As Burns relates it, the O'odham told them, "You know, it's real nice of you folks to offer us radishes and broccoli, but what we're really looking for are the plants that our grandmothers and grandfathers used to grow. Where are those now?"

So Nabhan started asking around the reservation and found a few beans here, a few gourd seeds there. Soon he and Drees had accrued a small collection, grew out some of the seeds, and returned new seeds to the O'odham who'd asked for them. When the freezer they were using at the hunger organization filled up, they struck out on their own. Today Native Seeds/SEARCH has a catalog mailing list of 20,000 and a membership of 4,500, nearly 800 of whom are Native Americans who are provided free seed.

Returning to traditional diets helps Native Americans battle diabetes.
The O'odham's desire for native foods wasn't simply nostalgia for old customs that were slipping away. It was also a matter of health and survival. O'odham communities, like those of many Native American people, are afflicted with widespread diabetes. Research has pinned the blame on the highly processed foods of westernized culture. Many desert-adapted crops contain fibrous or gelatinous substances that help hold water for the plants and also slow digestion when eaten by humans. When people whose digestive systems evolved with a diet of such plants suddenly shift to processed foods, metabolism is sped up and sugar floods the bloodstream, outpacing insulin production and often leading to diabetes.

Many traditional foods such as tepary beans, chia seeds, mesquite flour (ground from pods of the tree), prickly pear pads, and cholla (cactus) buds have low glycemic index values. Nabhan and others realized early on that encouraging and enabling the O'odham to return to such traditional foods would improve their health.

Traditional crops are thousands of years old.
These foods are "more natural . . . they're what's been with us for thousands of years," says Native Seeds/SEARCH Diabetes project director Felipe Molina. In his travels among Native American communities, Molina says he is often thanked by diabetic Native Americans who feel their conditions have improved since adopting a more traditional diet.

Native Seeds/SEARCH staff travel extensively in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico to collect seeds. Burns and Drees have been visiting some native communities for 20 years. By buying crafts from the Tarahumara, Mayo, Pima, and other groups and selling them in the United States, they make a living while enabling the craftsmen to do the same. "We decided that this was one of the ways we could help traditional farmers stay on their land [and] add value to their natural resources," Burns says. For instance, they've shown Native Americans in Mexico that by using a few mesquite trunks to produce carved wooden dishware, crafts, and furniture, rather than chopping down huge numbers to turn into charcoal, they can make much more money, while also conserving their forests.

Redistribution has saved some crops from local extinction.
Drees and Burns have redistributed a lot of seed over the years, saving certain crops from localized extinction. For example, they visited a Mayo village that had lost its chapalote corn (a sweet-tasting variety with small ears, used to make the drink piñole). Drees and Burns located some chapalote in a distant village in Sinaloa and brought back kernels to the Mayo village.

Native Seeds/SEARCH has "probably preserved a lot of crops that might have completely vanished," says Clayton Brascoupe, director of Santa Fe's Traditional Native American Farmers' Association (TNAFA).

Besides their cultural importance, Brascoupe says, many crops may have economic value for tribal communities, providing "commercial venues for Native farmers, because of their uniqueness. If a market was created, they'd be in on the ground floor for its commercial development." TNAFA works with Native farmers to help them realize such economic gains, while Native Seeds/SEARCH often supplies the seeds, Brascoupe says. "They are the artist's palette and the farmers are the artists."

Many crops may have hidden economic value.
Amaranth is one example of a local crop the rest of the world is now discovering. This high-protein grain, traditionally grown in the Southwest, was collected and promoted by Native Seeds/SEARCH. Today, its value is widely recognized, and it is used in an increasing number of food products on both sides of the border.

One blockbuster traditional crop that has yet to realize its potential, Burns says, is Panicum sonorum, a grass native to northwest Mexico. This plant's seeds contain more protein than soybeans and more of the amino acid lysine than any known crop seed. Twenty years ago, Burns and Nabhan ventured 65 miles by mule through the Sierra Madre in order to collect some seeds from Guarijío farmers. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture is intent on breeding the crop to enlarge the tiny seeds so they can be harvested mechanically. It's "a real sleeper," Burns says, that could eventually "have a major impact on world crop production."

Three crops provide over 50% of the world's food.
Currently, a mere nine crops supply 75 percent of the world's food, with three of them providing over 50 percent. Putting all our eggs in so few baskets is risky business, proponents of crop diversity maintain. When major crops fail, whole societies are affected (think of the Irish potato famine), and restoration of the crop may depend on a fresh infusion of genetic material from related varieties - often wild ones naturally selected to resist disease and other threats.

We know next to nothing about most traditional crops, McDonald points out. Many may have valuable nutritional properties that are unknown; traditional varieties are vanishing fast as multinational agribusinesses and biotechnology homogenize the world's crops. For example, Burns says, a century ago, the United States boasted 6,000 named varieties of apples; today there are 2,000 left. "So 75 percent of the genetic diversity has been lost in 100 years," he says. "That's a catastrophic winnowing down of what was there before. And it's probably happened with many other crops, but we simply don't have the data."

Multinational companies homogenize the world's crops.
Crop diversity proponents also take issue with the way homogenization of the world's food sources deprives ordinary people of choices. Native Seeds/SEARCH "advocates for a more democratic distribution and access to our biological heritage and the world's abundance," McDonald says. "If it's all under the control of corporations and not at people's fingertips, there's something wrong there. [Crops are] a shared heritage that people have and should not be just in the hands of big agribusiness."

In addition, the commercial monocultures established by agribusiness are often viewed as nonsustainable. Locally based agriculture by small farmers, using techniques adapted to local conditions, is seen as the desirable model. In northern Mexico, this Jeffersonian ideal has been dealt a blow by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Burns argues. The Mexican government estimated that NAFTA would drive 2 million small farm families off their farms, Burns says, unable to compete with the lower prices of crops from the United Sates - a scenario averted thanks only to the collapse of the peso. Today Mexico, the ancestral home of corn and beans, imports these crops.

Seed banks hold the key to our past and our future.
Native Seeds/SEARCH now has its own small farm - a 60-acre plot adjacent to Nature Conservancy land along scenic Sonoita Creek in southeastern Arizona. The farm is needed because collecting seeds and sticking them in a freezer is only the first step in seed conservation. Seeds don't remain viable forever, so they must be planted to produce a new generation of plants that produce seed to renew the collection. One rule of thumb is to plant a given seed type every ten years.

Seeds don't remain viable forever.
"It's a bit of a juggling act," says Suzanne Nelson, Native Seeds/SEARCH's director of conservation and seed bank curator. The longer one waits, the fewer seeds remain viable. But the more frequently they're planted, the greater the risk of losing them to weather, pathogens, or predators. And, she adds, the faster your sample might evolve on you or lose some of its genetic diversity.

While seed conservation is its primary focus, Native Seeds/SEARCH runs a number of diverse and creative projects. Staff travel widely to Native American communities to educate people about diabetes and diet. They assist Native Americans in practicing sustainable farming methods. Recently, the group helped establish a special preserve area with the USDA Forest Service that protects the only spot in the United States harboring chiletepines - the wild ancestor of most of the chile varieties we eat.

"Cultural memory banks" preserve the history and folklore of crops.
Native Seeds/SEARCH is also establishing a "cultural memory bank" - CD-ROMs full of information compiled from interviews with Native American elders. They've recorded all kinds of information relating to farming and crops - songs, stories, ceremonies, recipes, and instructions for planting (for example, how should one plant Hopi corn?). Such data is not merely interesting cultural trivia; it's information potentially vital for planting and tending the plants effectively, since many crops, over the centuries, have adapted to particular agricultural practices. The first such CD-ROM covers Navajo agriculture and will be distributed in Navajo Nation schools, Nelson says. "We're combining the concern for genetic diversity with this other concern for history and folklore," she says, "and that's fairly unique to Native Seeds/SEARCH."

Finally, Native Seeds/SEARCH distributes seed to small farmers who request it. Last year, it gave away 4,000 packets of seed to Native Americans, while selling 20,000 to paying customers. The goal is "not just to stick seeds into a freezer for a rainy day, but also to get them back out there for people to use," Nelson says.

Get the seeds out there for people to use.
Indeed, more and more people are using them, and in the process are helping give agriculture a little more room to maneuver in coming decades. Against the backdrop of global crop homogenization and loss of genetic diversity, seed banks like Native Seeds/SEARCH play a crucial role. Not only do these biological libraries hold open the door to the past, but they may hold the keys to solutions for the future.

Jay Withgott is a science writer in San Francisco. His interests range widely from evolution to ecology to behavior to natural history.
Julia Kuhl has done illustrations for the New Yorker and the New York Times, among others. She now lives in Heidelberg, Germany, with her neurobiologist husband and is working on a comic book - a Fulika atra (coot) version of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

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