Cary Fowler: When it comes to food, we’re all in this together | Grist

Cary Fowler is executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which funds the operation and managment of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that has been in the media. The group also recently announced grant awards for scientists to explore crop genebanks around the world for "climate-ready crops" (pdf).

Fowler has a guest post in Grist.

Current food supplies and future food security, as well as our fragile environment are all dependent on crop diversity.

Take a good look at any country: the comparatively small amount of diversity held in its national genebank or its farmers’ fields is clearly inadequate by itself to ensure agricultural productivity, much less the adaptation of its agricultural system to dramatically new climates. Assertions of independence, however passionate, cannot alter this simple biological fact.

It is self-evident that our common future depends not on our particular country’s “national” collection, but on our collective success in fashioning a viable global system for conserving crop diversity for use by plant breeders everywhere.

We come full circle. Sovereignty and independence play well in certain political circles and amongst many teenagers, but are out of place in the biological sciences. In the real world of agriculture and crop diversity, we are hitched. “We are,” in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”