An Edible History of Humanity (26 page)

Farmers and environmental groups in developed countries also convinced donors to reduce funding for agricultural development
in the developing world. The farmers regarded developing countries as valuable export markets, and did not want their governments
to fund potential competitors. And environmental groups highlighted the pollution caused by chemically intensive agriculture,
and managed to discredit the green revolution in the eyes of many donors. In the 1980s, when Norman Borlaug began a campaign
to extend the green revolution to Africa, where it had had little impact, he found that attitudes were changing. Environmental
lobby groups had persuaded the World Bank and the Ford Foundation that promoting the use of chemical fertilizers in Africa
was a bad idea.

The emergence of the Chinese and Indian middle classes, who could afford to eat more meat-rich, Western-style diets, increased
demand for cereal grains for use as animal feed, raising prices. And the diversion of food crops into biofuel production also
increased prices, though exactly how much impact this had on world prices is uncertain. Higher oil prices also contributed
to higher food prices, by increasing production and transport costs and by raising the price of fertilizer (since the price
of natural gas, from which fertilizer is made, is pegged to the price of oil). In short, although the supply of food continued
to grow, the rate of growth declined (to 1 to 2 percent a year since the mid-1990s) and was unable to keep pace with the growth
in demand (at around 2 percent a year). Tellingly, India started importing wheat again in 2006. Like many countries, India
also banned the export of many foodstuffs in an effort to maintain supplies for the domestic population. Such export bans
further increased international food prices, by reducing the amount of food available on global markets.

If nothing else, the food crisis has put agriculture back on the international development agenda, after years of neglect.
In the short term, the appropriate response to the crisis is a rapid increase in humanitarian food aid. Policies promoting
biofuels made from food crops must also be reconsidered. But in the medium term, shipping large quantities of food from rich
to poor countries makes things worse, because it undermines the market for local producers. The long-term answer is to embark
upon a new effort to increase agricultural production in the developing world, by placing renewed emphasis on agricultural
research and the development of new seed varieties, investment in the rural infrastructure needed to support farmers, greater
access to credit, the introduction of new crop-insurance schemes, and so on. All of this may sound rather familiar, because
it is, in essence, a call for a second “green revolution.”

Inevitably, this has revived the arguments about the pros and cons of the original green revolution. Some advocates of a second
green revolution emphasize the potential of genetically modified seeds, now under development, that produce their own pesticides
or are designed to make more efficient use of water and fertilizer. (This has been referred to as a “doubly green revolution.”)
Advocates of organic farming, meanwhile, regard the food crisis as an ideal opportunity to promote greater use of organic
methods, particularly in Africa where yields are low. In much of Africa, raising yields even to the level of pre-fertilizer
agriculture in other countries would be a valuable achievement.

Clearly, any new green revolution should take into account the lessons learned since the 1960s. There are many new techniques
to draw upon that can improve yields while minimizing environmental problems. Some are low-tech, such as burying precisely
measured pellets of fertilizer to minimize runoff, or using particular beetles and spiders to keep pests at bay. Seeds can
be coated with fungicides or pesticides directly, reducing the need to spray chemicals. And a particularly promising approach
is “conservation agriculture” (also known as “no till” or “conservation tillage” farming), a set of techniques developed since
the 1970s that minimize the tilling of the soil, or even eliminate it altogether.

Farmers practicing conservation agriculture leave crop residues on their fields after harvest, rather than plowing them in
or burning them off. Cover crops are then planted to protect the soil. (Planting legumes as cover crops helps to increase
soil nitrogen.) In the spring, the cover crop and any weeds are either killed using a herbicide, or chopped up on the surface
using special machinery. Planting of the main crop is then done using machines that guide seeds into slots in the soil below
the protective layer of residue. All this helps to reduce soil erosion, since covered, unplowed soil is less likely to be
washed or blown away. Water is used more efficiently because the soil’s ability to hold water increases, and less water is
lost to runoff or evaporation. Conservation agriculture also saves fuel and reduces energy consumption, since about half as
many passes over the field using machinery are required. Less fertilizer is usually needed because less nitrogen is lost to
the environment; this also reduces nitrogen pollution of waterways. Conservation agriculture is most widely used in North
and South America, where it was first developed, but it still accounts for only a small proportion (around 6 percent) of cultivated
land worldwide, so there is much potential to expand its use.

It is possible that new genetically modified seeds will deliver on their promise of more efficient nitrogen uptake and water
use. New seeds are also being engineered to grow in soils that are too salty for traditional varieties. The development of
such seeds will take several more years, and it is too early to say how successful they will be. It is certainly overstating
the case to suggest that genetic modification is a “silver bullet” that will fix the world’s various food problems. But it
would be foolish to rule out its use altogether. At the same time, there may be organic techniques that can be more widely
applied, particularly when it comes to biological pest control and growing crops in arid areas. Some studies show that organic
methods may produce higher yields for some crops in dry conditions, for example.

To ensure an adequate supply of food as the world population heads toward its peak and climate change shifts long-established
patterns of agriculture, it will be necessary to assemble the largest possible toolbox of agricultural techniques. Different
methods will be the most appropriate in different regions. It may make sense to grow staple crops using chemically intensive
methods in some parts of the world, and to trade them for specialist crops grown using traditional methods elsewhere, for
example. It is far too simplistic to suggest that the world faces a choice between organic fundamentalism on the one hand
and blind faith in biotechnology on the other. The future of food production, and of mankind, surely lies in the wide and
fertile middle ground in between.

On a remote island in the Arctic circle, seven hundred miles from the North Pole, an incongruous concrete wedge protrudes
from the snow on the side of a mountain. Reflective steel, mirrors, and prisms, built into an aperture on its outside face,
reflect the polar light during the summer months, making the building gleam like a gem set into the landscape. In the dark
of the winter it glows with an eerie white, green, and turquoise light from two hundred optical fibers, ensuring that the
building remains visible for miles around. Behind its heavy steel entrance doors, a reinforced-concrete tunnel extends 125
meters (410 feet) into the bedrock. And behind another set of doors and two airlocks are three vaults, each 27 meters long,
6 meters tall, and 10 meters wide (89 by 20 by 33 feet). These vaults will not store gold, works of art, secret blueprints,
or high-tech weaponry. Instead they will store something far more valuable—something that is arguably mankind’s greatest treasure.
The vaults will be filled with billions of seeds.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, on the Norwegian island of Spits-bergen, is the world’s largest and safest seed-storage facility.
The seeds it contains are stored inside gray four-ply envelopes made of polyethylene and aluminum, packed into sealed boxes,
and stacked on shelves in the three vaults. Each envelope holds an average of five hundred seeds, and the total capacity of
the vault is 4.5 million envelopes, or more than two billion seeds. This is far larger than any existing seed bank: When the
first vault is only half full, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will be the world’s largest collection of seeds.

The vault’s careful design and positioning should also make it the world’s safest collection. There are about 1,400 seed banks
worldwide, but many of them are vulnerable to wars, natural disasters, or a lack of secure funding. In 2001, Taliban fighters
wiped out a seed bank in Afghanistan that contained ancient types of walnut, almond, peach, and other fruits. In 2003, during
the American invasion of Iraq, a seed bank in Abu Ghraib was destroyed by looters, and rare varieties of wheat, lentils, and
chickpeas were lost. Much of the collection at the national seed bank in the Philippines was lost in 2006 when it was swamped
by muddy water during a typhoon. A Latin American seed bank almost lost its collection of potatoes when its refrigerators
broke down. Malawi’s seed bank is a freezer in the corner of a wooden shack. Physical dangers aside, the funding for many
seed banks is also precarious. Kenya’s entire seed bank was almost lost because its administrators could not afford to pay
the electricity bill. The Svalbard facility, which will act as a backup for all of these national seed banks, has been designed
to minimize both man-made and natural risks, and its running costs will be paid by the Norwegian government, which also paid
for its construction.

As well as being built in one of the most remote places on earth, the Svalbard vault is tightly secured with steel doors and
coded locks, is monitored from Sweden by video-link, and is protected by motion detectors set up around the site. (Polar bears
provide a further deterrent to intruders: People in the region are advised to carry a high-powered rifle whenever they venture
outside a settlement.) The structure is built into a mountain that is geologically stable and has a low level of background
radiation. And it is 130 meters (426 feet) above sea level, so it will remain untouched even under the most pessimistic scenarios
for rising sea levels in the future. The vault’s refrigeration system, powered by locally mined coal, will keep the seeds
at-18 degrees Celsius (-0.3 degrees Fahrenheit). Even if the refrigeration system fails, the vault’s position, deep below
the permafrost, ensures that the inside temperature will never exceed-3.5 degrees Celsius (25.7 degrees Fahrenheit), which
is cold enough to protect most of the seeds for many years. In normal operation, a few seeds from each sample will be withdrawn
from time to time and planted, so that fresh seeds can be harvested. (Some seeds, such as lettuce seeds, can only be stored
for about fifty years.) In this way, the thousands of varieties of seeds can be perpetuated almost indefinitely.

The purpose of the Svalbard vault is to provide an insurance policy against both a short-term threat and a long-term one.
The short-term threat—the disruption of global agriculture by climate change—seems likely to be the next way in which food
will influence the course of human progress. In many countries, climate change could mean that the coolest years in the late
twenty-first century will be warmer than the hottest years of the twentieth century. The conditions in which today’s common
crop varieties were developed will no longer apply. William Cline, an expert on the economic impact of global warming at the
Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., predicts that climate change will reduce agricultural output by 10 to 25
percent by 2080 in developing countries unless action is taken. In some cases the impact is far more dramatic: India’s food
output could fall by 30 to 40 percent. Agricultural output in some developed countries, by contrast, which typically have
lower average temperatures, may increase slightly as temperatures rise. The worst-case scenario is that there could be wars
over food, as global shifts in agricultural production lead to widespread droughts and food shortages and provoke conflict
over access to agricultural land and water supplies.

The more optimistic scenario is that agriculture can adapt to changes in the climate, which are inevitable to some degree
even if mankind manages to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases dramatically during the course of the twenty-first century.
As formerly rich agricultural land becomes too arid for farming and previously cold, damp areas become more suitable for agriculture,
seeds with new characteristics will be needed. And that is where the Svalbard seed bank comes in. The spread of high-yield
seed varieties, in the wake of the green revolution, means that many traditional crop varieties are no longer being planted,
and are being lost. Of the 7,100 types of apple that were being grown in America in the nineteenth century, for example, 6,800
are now extinct. Globally, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that around 75 percent of crop
varieties were lost during the twentieth century, and further varieties are being lost at the rate of one a day. These traditional
varieties very often produce lower yields than modern varieties, but collectively they represent a valuable genetic resource
that must be preserved for use in the future.

Consider the case of a variety of wheat known as PI 178383. It was dismissed as “a hopelessly useless wheat” by Jack Harlan,
an American botanist, when he collected a sample of it in Turkey in 1948. It did badly in cold winters, had a long, weak stalk
that made it fall over easily, and was susceptible to a disease called leaf rust. But in 1963, when plant breeders were looking
for a way to make American wheat resistant to another disease, called stripe rust, the supposedly useless Turkish wheat turned
out to be invaluable. Tests showed that it was immune to four kinds of stripe rust and forty-seven other wheat diseases. It
was crossbred with local varieties, and today nearly all the wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest is descended from it. Harlan’s
seed collecting trips, in which he traveled simply, often on a donkey, had gathered priceless gene tic material. There is,
in short, no way to tell which varieties will turn out to be useful in the future for their drought tolerance, immunity to
disease, or pest resistance. So the logical thing to do is to conserve as many seeds as possible as securely as possible—which
is what the Svalbard facility is designed to do.

It also provides insurance against a longer-term threat. Someday a nuclear war, an asteroid striking the earth, or some other
global calamity might make it necessary to rebuild human civilization from scratch, starting with its deepest foundation:
agriculture. Some of the seeds being stored at Svalbard are capable of surviving for millennia, even if its refrigeration
systems fail. Wheat seeds can last 1,700 years, barley seeds for 2,000 years, and sorghum seeds for 20,000 years. Perhaps,
hundreds of years from now, an intrepid band of explorers will head to Svalbard to retrieve the crucial ingredients needed
to restart the process that first began in the Neolithic period, some 10,000 years ago.

Despite the Svalbard seed bank’s futuristic design and high-tech features, there is an echo of the Neolithic in its purpose:
to store seeds safely. It was the ability to store seeds as an insurance policy against future food shortages that first led
people to take a particular interest in cereal crops. This started them down the path to domestication, farming, and all the
other consequences that have been described in this book. From the dawn of agriculture to the green revolution, food has been
an essential ingredient in human history. And whether the seeds stored at Svalbard prove to be a useful gene tic resource
in the short term, or the seeds that enable mankind to get back on its feet after a catastrophe, food is certain to be a vital
ingredient of humanity’s future.