Joining the dots on food plant diversity

We have never had access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly changing world, an unusually broad review by Colin Khoury (very much friend of the blog) and colleagues. It has all the latest data, but it also does several other things that make it more than a conventional state-of-the-art paper.

For one, it brings together diversity at several levels that are too often discussed separately: species, varieties and genes, of course, but also the diversity of diets, farming systems, foodways and the knowledge associated with them. It traces the extraordinary expansion and movement of food plants over the past 12,000 years alongside the much more recent trend towards homogenisation. The result is the weird world we have today: more kinds of crops available globally, but less difference between what people in different places eat.

Colin and friends also take a hard look at what we don’t know. We have surprisingly little systematic evidence for how much food-plant diversity has actually been lost, how vulnerable today’s production systems are because of increasing uniformity, or what is happening to less visible forms of diversity, such as nutritional and chemical variation. There’s a call for better monitoring, including an early-warning system for crop vulnerability. Now where have I heard that before?

And the paper connects the dots between conservation approaches that have tended to live in separate boxes: genebanks, botanic gardens, community seed banks, on-farm initiatives, protected areas, breeding programmes and markets. Genebanks are all well and good, but diversity also needs to keep going in fields, landscapes, cuisines and communities. Again, not particularly new, but it’s good to have it repeated, brought up to date, and placed in the broadest possible context.

A couple of those dots are discussed in a companion opinion paper, Enhance food plant diversity conservation and use through greater coordination between genebanks and botanic gardens, which asks what might become possible if two of the world’s major plant conservation communities worked a bit more closely together. Which should be possible because they are nicely complementary, so neither shold fear the competition.

The review paper maps the problem. The opinion piece explores a possible route towards a more joined-up conservation system. Which leaves us with its own small paradox: conserving diversity requires bringing a remarkably diverse conservation community together.