This is raw material for the geneticist, not just raw material for the bread maker.
The world is losing the raw material of its major crops, the genetic diversity plant breeders
use to create new and better crops for the future.
We can never get this genetic diversity back.
Once it's lost, if we can't go back into the wild and collect it, it's gone.
But while our existing crops may be threatened, there are thousands of other edible plants
in the world that could one day help to feed us.
It tastes like toasted popcorn, toasty flavored popcorn, but it's much more nutritious.
What will we eat in the future?
What will be the seeds of tomorrow?
Next on NOVA.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations
nationwide.
Additional funding was provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies, supplying health
care products worldwide.
And Allied Corporation, a world leader in advanced technology products for the aerospace,
automotive, chemicals and electronics industries.
Ethiopia, June 1985.
With the rainy season about to begin, it is time to plant.
These women are gleaning every last kernel of grain from the corn cobs to use as seed.
But north from here, where the African drought is at its most devastating, people desperate
with hunger have eaten their seed grain.
By doing so, they've broken a chain that reaches back 10,000 years.
In the town of Nazareth, still largely unscathed by the drought, a team of Ethiopian scientists
is on a mission to rescue this link with the past.
For the grain in this market, wheat, corn, sorghum, is one of the world's great genetic
treasures.
Millions of peasant farmers have fashioned in these seeds a diversity of genetic traits
so rich that plant breeders from all over the world have come here to collect it.
But because starving people are eating their seed grain instead of planting it, this irreplaceable
genetic heritage is being wiped out.
If the seeds can't be saved, the world will have lost a resource of incalculable worth,
the raw material for the seeds of tomorrow.
The foods of today, the produce in this Los Angeles supermarket, owe their existence too
to seeds once collected in lands as distant as Ethiopia.
Almost nothing here is a native.
We asked Noel Wietmeyer of the National Academy of Sciences to fill his basket with foods
that are genuinely North American in origin.
Well, I've made a good start.
We have cranberry, blueberry, and the concord grape.
Now let's see what else.
Bell peppers, no, they're from South America.
Squash, well, we think of these as American, and they were here when the pilgrims arrived,
but actually they'd been traded up by the Indians in previous generations from central
and South America.
Eggplant, no, that's from Southeast Asia.
Carrots and cucumbers are from Central Asia, and Europe, there's our cabbage, and corn,
this we think of as quintessentially American, but in actual fact, like the squash, this
comes from central and South America.
Onions originated in Central Asia, the sweet potato in the Caribbean.
Rice, as you'd expect, is a native of Southeast Asia, while the potato's home is in the South
American Andes.
The major bread grains, wheat and rye, grew first in the Eastern Mediterranean, as did
other important cereals like barley and oats.
Noel Wietmeyer's all-American meal was proving elusive.
Oh, here it lasts, some American natives.
Sunflower seeds, black walnuts, wild rice, it's a seed of a North American native grass,
Jerusalem artichoke, it's the root of a sunflower from the Midwest, and pecans.
Well, there it is, that's the meal, not much.
We can't even finish it off with a good cup of coffee.
Coffee's from Ethiopia.
This film is about the genetic heritage of our foods, and how their continued existence
is crucially dependent still on the survival of their ancestors and relatives growing mainly
in the third world, in what are called centers of crop diversity.
In Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and Northeast Africa, and Central and South America, one
of the richest centers is in Peru.
Rugged terrain, isolated communities, a harsh, unforgiving climate, all typical of the centers
of crop diversity.
Long before the arrival of man, the plants that grew here evolved fat seeds and plump
roots, energy stores to make it through the times when growing is hard.
When people arrived 10,000 years ago or more, they turned to these same plants for food.
The energy stored in its tubers by the ancestors of today's potatoes fed the ancestors of
today's Peruvian Indians.
Ever since, the potato, often supplemented by other root crops, has remained central
to the diet of the Andean people, including the great Incan civilization of the 16th century.
And it was then the potato began its travels, first to Europe.
The Spanish took it there on the galleons.
It was the food for the sailors on the treasure galleons.
But it took 200 years for Europeans to accept it.
It was accused of causing syphilis and scrofula and leprosy.
It was accused of being an aphrodisiac that would send countries' populations mad with
lust.
It was accused of being poisonous.
And in fact, most parts of the potato plant are poisonous, except the tuber.
And even in the face of starvation, while people were dying by the millions, they refused
to plant potatoes.
The potato's image problems continued into the 19th century.
In 1861, Millet was criticized for painting the potato planters, an unwanted reminder
of the desperation of the peasantry.
The gloomy theme was echoed in Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters.
But by now, the potato had become a staple of much of Europe's poor, and nowhere more
so than in Ireland.
The potatoes grown by the landless Irish peasantry were all the descendants of one or two plants
originally taken from Peru.
So the Irish fields were crammed with plants as alike as peas in a pod.
Then came the cold, damp summer of 1841.
A strange smell came from the potato fields, a smell that soon thickened into the stench
of death.
A million died from famine, as blight swept through the fields like a prairie fire.
A million more emigrated before the potato blight ran its course in the mid-1840s.
A social upheaval due directly to the fact that every Irish potato was like every other.
A disease that could kill one plant killed them all.
Here in the potato's ancestral Andean home, there aren't just one or two varieties of
potato, but uncounted thousands.
The potato fields span elevations of thousands of feet.
Millions of generations of farmers have saved from each field the choicest potatoes to plant
again next year.
The result has been the precise tailoring, almost to individual plots of land, of so
many varieties it is hard to believe they are all related.
How different are these varieties that a sweeping blight on the Irish scale is impossible here?
A disease that killed one variety may only damage another and leave another unaffected
entirely.
And growing many different potato varieties gives the farmer other advantages.
Some of them will flower early, some of them flower late, some of them will produce at
a colder temperature, some at a hotter temperature.
So having this breadth of diversity gives him an insurance policy that he can't get
otherwise.
Most people are entirely dependent on what they produce themselves.
It's not like us.
They can't rely on someone to bring them food or to go to a store to buy food.
What they produce here in the fall is what is going to help them survive for the rest
of the year.
But the old traditions are disappearing.
If the ox drawn plow hasn't changed, the potatoes being harvested have.
Don Vincenti is here gathering a new variety of potato, developed not by his father and
father's father, but by modern science.
The father of this potato is Dr. Carlos Ochoa, whose whole career has been dedicated to developing
new improved potato varieties that give higher yields.
I have been breeding in this country for 25 years, and I raise more than 20 different
new varieties for the potato crop in this country.
But I'm very sorry to say this has been a kind of destruction for the native Indian
potatoes.
There is a tragic but simple paradox here.
Ochoa created his new improved varieties by crossing and recrossing the old varieties,
selecting from the immense genetic diversity available in the old potatoes the characters
he wanted in the new.
Yet now the very success of the new varieties is wiping out the genetic material they were
fashioned from.
Today Don Vincenti is being visited by anthropologists from the International Potato Center in Lima,
who are trying to find out how quickly the new varieties are displacing the old.
What varieties are you sowing, what varieties do you have?
Well, varieties are this white potato, renaissance.
Among these potatoes there are three varieties, like the white house, renaissance, and manta.
These are native varieties, of which there is a difference that this one has white eyes.
Were there the same number of native varieties or more?
More, more.
And now they are dissapearing.
Don Vincenti, unlike most farmers in the area, still grows some native varieties.
Many people come to work for him and they ask to be paid with this native variety because
they look for this very much all over and they can't find them.
So he is one of the few ones who still grow more native than improved varieties, everybody
knows him, so they want to work with him.
Carlos Ochoa has done his own surveys of the displacement of traditional varieties by his
new improved potatoes.
Even if I compare the list of the native varieties of the beginning with the ones that we have
now in the same places, it's almost none.
It's so destructive, the introduction of new varieties.
Peru is not the only center of diversity to be affected by the revolution in crop breeding
that's taken place in the last 20 years, the Green Revolution.
In Southeast Asia, where once thousands of varieties of rice were grown, scientists have
selected and recombined genetic traits to produce new varieties that perform dazzlingly well
under modern agricultural conditions.
Their success too has meant the displacement of the poorer but heartier old varieties that
were the newcomers' ancestors.
New varieties are really important, but there's one danger with them and that is that the
people may cast off their traditional varieties, sort of like last year's automobile model.
And with that goes 10,000 years of breeding and selection of human ingenuity.
It can all disappear in one bowl of porridge.
Why should we care?
After all, the modern varieties are prodigies of productivity.
Here in the United States, what was once a patchwork of hundreds of local varieties of
corn has in the last 50 years been replaced by a rich blanket of genetically similar hybrid
corn.
In U.S. agriculture, diversity is a disadvantage.
A predictable uniform crop is essential to modern agribusiness.
What did it matter that by 1970, every corn plant grown in the United States was the virtual
identical twin of every other?
In 1970, the corn farmers of the South learned why.
That summer, a blight swept through the corn fields from Florida to Texas with the same
uninhibited speed and ease as that other blight which destroyed the Irish potato fields over
a century earlier.
50% of the crop in the affected states was destroyed in a matter of days.
The lesson had been learned.
Modern high-yielding, genetically uniform crops like this wheat are vulnerable to epidemic
disease.
And their widespread adoption is wiping out the genetic foundations they were built on,
the only place breeders can turn to find resistance to disease.
Wheat has been grown for millennia in southern Greece.
Once these plains supported a huge variety of wheats.
Now they are planted with a few modern high-yielding wheat varieties.
In the early 1970s, in the wake of the U.S. corn blight, plant geneticists began a crash
program to rescue as many of the traditional crop varieties as could still be found from
the encroaching tide of the Green Revolution.
Erna Bennett, then working for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
was a leader in this effort to preserve the world's genetic resources.
Genetic resources represent a base of security against diseases, a base of security against
climatic changes.
If we want to look far enough ahead, these are certainly going to come.
A base of security against all sorts of unforeseen situations.
Without genetic resources, it's quite impossible ever to consider adding these characteristics
to those food crops that exist.
From farmers, Erna Bennett learned firsthand of the sweeping introductions of the new varieties
and collected as many samples as she could of the old varieties that remained.
Expeditions like this to the world's centers of diversity had been conducted for decades
by geneticists seeking out raw materials for their breeding programs, especially to find
natural resistance to plant diseases.
What was different about the collecting of the early 1970s was that the seeds being found
were close to extinction.
The seeds gathered in during this international effort were sent to institutions like this
one in Fort Collins, Colorado.
This is the United States' Fort Knox for seeds, where samples are cleaned, weighed, bagged
and sent for storage in refrigerated vaults.
At Fort Collins and in similar gene banks around the world now repose tens of thousands
of samples and millions upon millions of seeds.
Farm crops like the potato cannot easily be stored as seed.
For these, a special sanctuary must be sought.
Here at Juan Cayo, 12,000 feet up in the Andes, the International Potato Center maintains
a living collection of thousands of potato varieties.
Every year, samples of each tuber are planted, grown and harvested to maintain unbroken
the plant breeders' link to the genetic diversity of the past.
Rome was the focus of this effort to preserve the world's genetic resources through an international
board housed within the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Today, there is controversy about the adequacy of the decade-long collecting effort.
Berna Bennett, now retired from the FAO, has long been a critic of the international board
and of its director, Trevor Williams.
We've already predicted that by the middle of the 1980s, much of the genetic variability
of the major crops will be in collections.
So this means we can slow down.
And we should realize there's a tremendous amount of emotionalism about genetic erosion
and loss of material.
Anybody who tries to quantify how much of the genetic diversity of the world we've got
is on a losing wicket, because we don't know how much there is or was.
We do know how much there is this year, and that is less than there was last year, and
that was less than there was the year before.
Well, at the present time, there's more material available in collections for plant breeders
than there ever has been in the history of man.
And there's certainly sufficient material for all foreseeable breeding needs for all
major staple food crops.
But that's not the sign to stop, not by a long way.
It's not even the sign that that material that we have in collections is fit for breeding.
This is the central question.
Here at Fort Collins, the samples must be regularly tested to see how well they are
surviving.
Even if storage conditions were ideal, the seeds would slowly deteriorate, and chronic
underfunding has meant that conditions have often been much less than ideal.
When a sample is in such poor shape that many of the seeds won't germinate, some of the
sample is sent out to be grown so that fresh seed can be harvested.
But the system has a fatal flaw.
The problem with the way we store seeds today is that germination does decline after a period
of years, and thus we have to regenerate the seed by a field growout.
As we can see, we have a sample with a lot of genetic diversity to start with, but after
several generations of regrowing, we start to lose some of this genetic variability.
A few more generations, more variability is lost.
Eventually, only those seeds that survive the artificial conditions of storage and regrowth
remain.
The original diversity is gone.
It's lost.
It's gone forever.
We can never get this genetic diversity back.
Once it's lost, if we can't go back into the wild and collect it, it's gone.
Inevitably then, the world's genetic inheritance is slowly wasting away.
Given that there are dangers in conservation in gene banks, given that we know that there
is attrition, given that we know there are losses of many kinds, given all these uncertainties
to start talking at this particular time of the completion of germplasm collections is
sheer lunacy.
Erna Bennett's claim that collecting should continue received an unexpected boost from
a visit she made at NOVA's request to this remote mountain area of southern Greece.
Our plan was to show how the new high-yielding varieties had pushed even into the most remote
farming villages, but instead there was a surprise in store.
Far from now growing the new varieties, the villagers seem to have returned to one of
their traditional wheats.
Erna Bennett's first impression was confirmed by the owner of the threshing machine that
goes from village to village.
I'm surprised particularly because I've been through these fields, not in this area, but
in this kind of village all the way through Greece, and I noticed even ten years ago that
the new varieties were taking the place of the old varieties, yet here we have a scene
where the vast majority of that wheat being thrashed now consists of old varieties.
And they're very proud of it too.
We had come across what seemed to be a sort of counter-green revolution.
Here in these villages at least, the advantages of the high-yielding new varieties, which
require heavy inputs of agricultural chemicals, were outweighed by the low-cost hardiness
of the old variety.
The importance is quite clearly its genetic capacity to adapt to soils of this sort.
As the man said when we were talking to him, the new varieties don't grow on this sort
of soil, the old varieties do.
So we've got another reason to think of these as genetically important, if we are trying
to improve other varieties, this is raw material for the geneticist, not just raw material
for the bread maker.
And in that particular sense, this kind of discovery that these old varieties still exist
and exist in large numbers, and exist in good clean crops, is a very important discovery.
It means that we've got to go and find it, and make available this material for new breeding
programs that need them.
In fact, we ought to think perhaps a bit more about breeding varieties that are capable
of growing in poor soils.
Few soils are poorer than those in Dronstrick in Africa.
But here in Ethiopia, it's not modern varieties that pose the major threat to the survival
of one of the world's richest centers of genetic diversity.
The relief trucks bringing grain up from the coast are daily reminders of the drought which
has laid waste to Ethiopia's indigenous agriculture.
This truck is on a mission to rescue what remains.
Before the drought, Ethiopia was a favorite center for plant breeders, seeking out genetic
diversity for several major crops like wheat and barley.
Its small farms, rugged terrain, and climatic extremes make it a classic center of diversity.
This region of Ethiopia, in the south of the country, has so far only been brushed by the
drought.
Here, farmers have followed the traditional course of saving their best grain from last
year's harvest for planting this year.
In the drought-stricken north, the storage bins are empty, every last grain consumed.
This team of scientists from Ethiopia's Plant Genetics Resources Center is collecting samples
of whatever old varieties they can still find.
In charge of the effort is Dr. Malaka Waredi.
If the farmer ends up eating his own seed and uses some seed that has been given to
him, then that would be a disaster because the farmer is going to lose all the original
source of variability that was there for thousands of years.
It's a natural heritage which has to be maintained and utilized in the future for years to come.
Unless we save it now, it will be gone forever.
The seed samples come here to Ethiopia's gene bank.
The country is especially rich in wheat and barley varieties, many containing valuable
genetic traits for nutritional quality and disease resistance.
The scale and effectiveness of Ethiopia's efforts to save this resource, financed largely
with West German aid, makes the United States Seed Bank look antiquated by comparison.
If Ethiopian agriculture is ever to recover from the drought, these seed samples containing
genetic adaptations to the local conditions will be vital in creating the crops that will
grow here tomorrow.
The designers of plants to grow in the drought-prone lands of Africa have already begun to look
elsewhere for a source of genetic adaptation to heat and aridity.
This is a remote canyon a few miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona.
One of the world's major centers of diversity, centered in Mexico, overlaps in the U.S. territory
here and contains a plant remarkably well adapted to its desert home, the tepary bean.
Once the tepary was widely cultivated here, nowadays only a few Pima and Papago Indian
farmers still grow it.
But with water in the southwest scarce, it has begun once more to demonstrate its remarkable
ability to grow green and lush, even under withering conditions.
I've measured it growing successfully in conditions where Pinot beans failed and the air temperatures
were up between 115 and 119 Fahrenheit.
The ground temperatures were over 170 degrees.
I've seen it survive on less than two and a half inches of rainfall under extremely
arid conditions.
It's just plain ornery in part, it refuses to die.
The tepary bean is an excellent source of protein and is simmered along with corn into
a dish which is appetizing to the Pima, but to different people with different tastes
may have limited appeal.
Here in the market of Machakos in Kenya, for instance, one of the most popular food items
is also the bean, but here the big sellers are very different from the tepary bean.
The tepary bean would probably grow very well here in Africa, but that alone wouldn't make
it a success.
From the University of California, Barbara Webster.
If the crop doesn't look like and grow like something they used to, the acceptance rate
will be very low.
If the seed is not like what is ordinarily found in the marketplace, like the Canadian
Wonder, or like this, or like this, then it probably will not sell in the marketplace.
It doesn't look like, it doesn't feel like, it doesn't taste like, and it doesn't cook
like what the Kenyans are accustomed to.
Barbara Webster is collaborating with Giles Waynes, also of the University of California,
in a project to develop a bean that looks and tastes like an African bean, but grows
like the tepary.
This is how most plant breeders begin, removing the pollen producing pistils from the living
flower of one parent, then fertilizing it with pollen from the other variety.
Plant breeders have been crossing varieties like this for centuries, but this cross now
requires a high-tech component.
So distantly related are the two parent beans that their first generation offspring is infertile.
Once planted, these beans wouldn't grow.
But inside each bean, as in every fertilized seed, is an embryo, and the embryo is viable.
If only it can be rescued from the useless seed in which it is imprisoned.
The rescued embryo can then be grown in test tubes, the rich jello-like medium providing
the nutrients it would normally get from the seed.
The goal is to produce a bean that is as good as the tepary and tolerating drought and heat,
but which will otherwise look and taste as much as possible like the beans already grown
in Kenya.
Here in an experimental plot outside Nairobi are growing some of the first offspring of
the tepary common bean hybrids.
This is a result of the embryo crosses, which Giles Wayne's made at Riverside, and these
have been planted now out here at Katamani.
They're quite different from the teparies and not quite what you'd like to see in the
common bean, but the color is good, there's some variation in the color, so that in additional
crosses we hope that we can increase the size, which we need to do, and get a color range
approximating some of these which are commonly found in the marketplace.
So African beans may one day grow where they couldn't before, thanks to a transplant of
North American genes, but the effort may take years.
Imagine how much easier it would be if the genes that give the tepary its drought resistance
could simply be snipped out and inserted directly into the African bean.
That's a dream of plant breeders fast approaching reality.
This is Winston Brill, Vice President of Agricitis, a company whose goal is to genetically engineer
plants to order.
He's going to demonstrate how soybean genes could in principle be transplanted into tobacco.
First a soybean leaf is blended to release its genes.
These can be wound up as long, sticky strands like cotton candy.
Now the soybean genes must be packaged for delivery.
Here's where a turnip comes in handy, if it has these tumor-like growths.
The growths are caused by a bacterium which invades the cells of the turnip and injects
them with this little ring of genes called a plasmid.
It's this plasmid the genetic engineer is going to co-opt, first by snipping out the
tumor-causing genes, so disarming the plasmid, then substituting the soybean genes he wants
to transplant.
Now all is ready for the transplant itself.
That involves preparing the tobacco plant to receive its new genes.
A tobacco leaf is broken up into its individual cells.
These are then incubated with the bacterium carrying the soybean genes.
The plasmid finds its way into the genetic material of the tobacco cells and there tucks
itself in, soybean genes and all.
Now all that remains is to grow the cells back into whole plants.
With tobacco this is now routine, which is why it's a favorite with genetic engineers.
The cells divide, forming small clumps.
These slowly grow into what's at first an undifferentiated mass, which later develops
shoots and leaves.
Had our experiment been for real, this tobacco plant would now contain several soybean genes.
And experiments like this are now real enough for a giant chemical company like Monsanto
to invest 150 million dollars in a new laboratory to carry them out.
With one major difference, Monsanto's bioengineers like practicing their skills not on tobacco
plants, but on petunias.
Many of these plants contain foreign genes, and they're the first step toward what the
company sees as an entirely new line of products, genetically engineered crops like wheat or
corn.
Monsanto would recoup its huge investment by selling the seeds of these new improved
crops.
Howard Schneiderman.
Now the kind of products that I think will make our investment back, in fact they better
make our investment back, would be a family of products in which basically Monsanto will
have shifted the whole thrust of plant protection from treatment to prevention.
Instead of treating a crop with a pesticide, an insecticide or a fungicide, one will in
fact plant new kinds of seeds which are resistant to attack by insects or by other plant pests.
It's a big gamble for Monsanto because the company presently makes a lot of money by
selling chemicals to protect crops.
One of its biggest sellers is the herbicide Roundup.
Despite Monsanto's goal of switching from selling chemicals to seeds that don't need
chemicals, one of the first genetically engineered plants to be made would actually increase
the sales of Monsanto's Roundup.
Roundup kills every plant it falls on, so once the crop comes up, its use is limited.
But what if the crop were given a gene which protects it from Roundup?
Then spraying for weed control could continue even as the crop was growing.
It wasn't Monsanto that set out to design such a plant, but a Davis, California company
Calgene.
The task involved first finding a gene that conferred resistance to Roundup.
Calgene scientists grew billions of bacteria in the presence of the chemical, searching
for the occasional mutant that survived.
The gene responsible was then fished out and transferred to tobacco plants, which are now
able to tolerate a soaking with Roundup that would kill any ordinary plant.
Calgene's herbicide-tolerant seeds aren't yet on the market, but when they are, Monsanto's
Roundup should get a nice boost in sales.
Next door to Calgene, Plant Genetics Inc. is devising ways to manufacture artificial
seeds by encapsulating plant embryos in gelatin.
The method can also encapsulate seeds themselves, meaning that one day companies like Monsanto
will be able to sell seeds and chemicals.
This particular encapsulation technology will enable us to deliver, along with the seed,
all kinds of components, fertilizers, chemicals, such as insecticides and fungicides that can
assist the farmer in the performance of the crop.
The farmer would provide his labor and his land, and Monsanto could provide him with
the system, which would be seeds and chemicals and perhaps microorganisms.
The end result would be on each acre or hectare greater productivity.
The barrier to this brave new world of genetically engineered crop systems is no longer the technology
for moving genes around.
Indeed, several companies, Calgene included, are already experimenting with microscopic
needles to directly inject genes from one plant into the cell of another.
No, the problem isn't moving genes, but finding genes to move.
Where will the plant engineer turn for genes to make wheat resistant to disease or able
to tolerate salty soils, or corn grow with less water?
There is, of course, only one place now that most of the world's natural pools of genes
are drying up, the genetic storehouses, where seeds shaped by generations of peasant farmers
still contain almost every gene imaginable.
Bioengineering frees genes from their own species and makes them available to work in
any other.
So seeds that were once merely valuable now become genetic treasure troves for the bioengineer.
Monsanto isn't the only chemical company to spot the potential profits to be made by getting
into the seed business, and through genetic engineering create new seeds with traits the
farmer is willing to pay for.
These companies are also looking for ways to protect their investment.
Protection of the proprietary nature of our products is absolutely essential to justify
an enormous investment.
I mean to produce, to spend $100 million of share owners' money and then have somebody
else reap the benefits would certainly be unattractive.
Happily, I think there are many ways in which we can protect it.
Techniques to fingerprint genes so that they can be traced and identified are among the
ways companies are exploring to ensure that what the genetic engineer creates, he owns.
Research like this implies a radical and historic shift in the ownership of the world's genetic
resources and is causing concern in the countries that traditionally have harbored the world's
genetic diversity.
The concerns surfaced in March 1985 at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization in
Rome.
An international commission, mainly of countries in the centers of diversity, tried to get
nations to agree in writing to what until now has been a loose, informal agreement to
exchange genetic resources freely.
The United States and several other nations with major commercial seed interests refused,
arguing that companies which had invested money in developing new varieties couldn't
be expected to give them away to whoever wanted them.
Prominent in arguing the third world's cause were activists Pat Mooney and Carrie Fowler.
The genetic resources that you find in developing countries are there because of the hard work,
the selection and the care that your ancestors and mine exercised over thousands of years.
And after thousands of years of breeding these land races, primitive varieties, what the
third world is seeing, what they're hearing from the industrialized world is, you give
us these materials that you have taken care of and bred for 10,000 years and we'll freely
exchange those, but when it comes to newer varieties that have been bred in a laboratory
for 10 years, no, that's the proprietary rights of a particular company.
What third world countries are saying is recognize that those land races are also the product
of human genius, recognize that we have contributed something to this and let's find some way
together to make sure that the exchange is equal, that we get something, that there's
some benefit to us of this genetic raw material.
What can be done about it?
Well, perhaps a few things.
We need to begin to look at ways where we can guarantee that genetic resources, which
are the foundation of agriculture, not become controlled or monopolized by multinational
corporations.
That's one of the fights that's going on in the United Nations system is to guarantee
free access and free availability to genetic resources to prevent that kind of monopoly
control.
Give us this day our daily bread should not be a prayer to shallow out.
But despite the third world's fears, it's one of their own that's gone furthest in trying
to monopolize a genetic resource.
In southern Ethiopia are forests whose canopies hide a genetic resource of incalculable worth.
Coffee plants containing virtually all the world's available supply of coffee genes.
The Ethiopian government is well aware of the fact that coffee originated in these forests
and that they still contain virtually all the useful breeding material that exists for
the crop.
A major effort is now underway, directed by Dr. Mesfena Mehe, to preserve this genetic
diversity, and especially one of its most precious characteristics, resistance against
coffee's number one enemy.
This is what we call coffee rust.
It's a rust caused by the fungus Himalaya vastatrix.
It's one of the major disease these days that the world is facing because, as you remember,
this disease wiped out all the coffee that Ceylon used to grow way back some 80, 90 years
ago.
Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was a major supplier of coffee to Britain in the early 19th century.
Its plantations contained hundreds of acres of genetically identical plants.
In the late 1860s, coffee rust wiped out the plantations.
The island switched to tea instead, and Britain became confirmed as a nation of tea drinkers.
Today, Ethiopia's economic rivals in the production and export of coffee, notably Columbia
and Brazil, still grow plantations of largely genetically identical coffee plants.
We think we have enough genetic varieties that would probably help the world in the
future if, say, the biggest coffee producer, Brazil, turns out to be highly affected by
rust.
This is the only place where you can get resistance again.
Ethiopia has banned the export of its coffee germplasm to its South American rivals, seeking
to derive an advantage from its monopoly on sources of resistance to disease.
But the irony is that the Ethiopian government is itself presently threatening to destroy
the source of its monopoly.
Its controversial plan to move drought victims from the north of the country and resettle
them in the south is centered on precisely the forested hills that shelter the nation's
last remaining wild coffee plants.
But not all the world's plant genetic resources are threatened.
Some have been barely touched.
In Pisac, an ancient Incan town in the Peruvian Andes, Noel Wietmeyer is once again shopping
for produce.
What do these taste like?
It is bitter.
This is bitter.
Bitter?
Yes.
And it's better to put under the sun.
And after it's been under the sun in a sweet to eat?
No sweet, but you can eat.
Wietmeyer's job is to seek out and promote research on the underutilized resources of
nature, including little known crop plants.
His special interest here is in the foods that never became known outside the Andes,
unlike the potato.
There's about 20,000 edible plants in the world, and yet only about 100 of them have
been developed as significant food crops.
And out of that 100, a mere 22 feed the world.
That's a tiny larder from which to feed a whole planet.
That means there's thousands of species still there waiting to be discovered.
And some of those could become major contributors to the world.
Michael went with Wietmeyer on a hunt for some of the foods that supported the Incas,
foods that have been left behind, but which, if properly exploited, could have an impact
far beyond the Andes.
This is quinoa, also known as Inca wheat.
It's one of the most ancient and most nutritious of all crops.
It's almost twice the protein of corn, and yet outside these valleys here, it's unknown.
Many crops are discriminated against because of the people that eat them, the people that
use them most, either they're poor or a certain ethnic group.
And unfortunately, the plant gets discriminated against, no matter how good tasting it is
or how nutritious it is.
There are many examples of plants being discriminated against.
The soybean, for instance, was once regarded in America as an odd plant used only by the
Chinese to make a strange black sauce.
Today it's a major provider of protein and oil in the United States.
And this plant, too, could have a similar future.
This is an ancient Inca crop called tarwee.
The seeds in here have a virtually identical composition to those of the soybean.
The soybean is the premier protein crop of the world.
Tarwee has the potential, given some research, to rival it.
And the potato was not the only root crop the Andes has to offer.
This is oca.
It's the second most important root crop in the Andes.
The peasants like it because it gives a higher yield than potatoes and has far fewer diseases.
It's also delicious.
It has a sweet, lovely sweet flavor to it that potato doesn't have.
But of all the ancient foods of the Andes, Wietmeyer has a special affection for this
plant.
Known in Peru as cahuicha, but elsewhere as amaranth.
This is one plant that has already begun a journey into the world's larders.
Amaranth is one of the oldest crops of the New World.
It's been around for 10,000 years or so.
There's rich leaves that are rich in nutrients.
You can eat them like spinach.
And in these seed heads, there's a grain which is just about the most nutritious grain known
to mankind.
Once amaranth was grown widely in the New World.
Not only by the Incas, but also by the Aztecs in Mexico.
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they found that the Aztecs used the grain from this in
some very gory ceremonies.
They made little figurines, some of which were the glue that bound them together was
human blood.
And they ate these in pagan ceremonies.
And the Spanish, of course, couldn't stand, couldn't abide that.
And so they banned the crop.
They're around burning the fields.
And there's some reports that perhaps they even cut off the hands of the people who kept
eating it.
So for that cultural and political reason, amaranth disappeared.
But not entirely.
The plant survived in the mountains of Peru amongst the Indians there, who have continued
to grow and prepare it in traditional ways, including popping the tiny seeds like popcorn.
Wietmeyer has been promoting amaranth for several years, and has done such a good job
he's already had a variety named after him.
Oh, this is the variety, no, the Wietmeyer.
This is one of our varieties of the highest promise for its high yield, its high resistance
to diseases, to insects, and because it gives a grain that is very good for making flour,
and also to put it in the canyon.
He likes this one because it pops good, yields well, it's tall and it's upright.
It's gotta be good if it's got my name on it.
It's better to be good.
As a special treat, some Noel Wietmeyer amaranth is going to be popped for him in a large and
somewhat intimidating gun.
It belongs to this amaranth research station, run by Dr. Luis Sumar.
Good tasting.
It tastes like toasted popcorn, toasty flavored popcorn, but it's much more nutritious.
Also visiting Dr. Sumar is Jess Martinow, a commercial plant breeder from the United
States with a great interest in amaranth.
Working materials that we work with as plant breeders are the genes, and unless they're
there to begin with, it's very difficult to make any progress, and this crop represents
a wide variation and a lot of genes available to work with from the wild pool and from the
half domesticated pool that the Incas have developed already.
Tall ones, short ones, dwarf types, any color, any shape, it's very variable, very plastic
unlike some domesticated crops like corn, there's any number of genes that we can use
and essentially genetically engineer a new crop from it.
One reason Martinow is here is to collect seed samples for a program to develop amaranth
as a forage crop in the United States.
Here's a breeder from the developed world collecting seed from a third world center
of diversity.
Not a scene much witnessed anymore.
He's collected it all over Peru and the neighboring countries, and it's just something that I
couldn't come get myself, but it's available to me through him, so it's invaluable to me.
Noel Wietmeyer is such a distinguished guest here that a special feast of Incan foods has
been prepared.
These are the foods of the Incas.
Look at the salad.
What's in it?
Turmeric?
Tomato?
Wietmeyer's goal is one day to see foods like this on North American tables.
This is a cake made from toasted amaranth flour.
Ten years ago, an American supermarket carried an average of 65 produce items.
Today it's 140.
That's because people are looking for new taste sensations, new shapes, colors, something
different to serve.
You know, there's sort of an adventure in foods.
Let's taste it.
We call these ice cream beans because they taste like ice cream.
But it isn't just for the yuppie market that Wietmeyer sees a future in the world's underexploited
foods.
Unlike our present major crops, whose genetic diversity has been reduced by their own success,
crops like this still have immense genetic potential.
And this one is Uyuko, and look at the different genetic variability we have here.
If we can get the world focused on some of these very nutritious, very important foods,
even though they're now localized, that can have a feedback of immense proportions that
will help the nutrition of the people right here.
But the nutrition of most of us still depends on the major crops like wheat, whose vanishing
genetic heritage threatens our ability to adapt it to the future.
Even the gene engineers can only move genes, not yet design and build them.
There is literally no end to the potential for satisfying human needs that exists if
we think in terms of the diversity of which the plant world is capable.
If instead we lose that diversity, all that's gone.
There is no future for plant breeding.
There is no story of future change for our interests or for the plant's interest.
It's all gone.
We've cleaned out.
That's what the end of diversity means.
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