Science, Space and Technology News 2024
Industrial agriculture has reshaped plant evolution to prioritize high yields, often overlooking environmental adaptability and resilience. University of Vermont researchers emphasize the importance of smallholder farmers’ diverse, locally adapted crops for future food security in a climate-changing world, advocating for policies that value and integrate these traditional seeds and farming insights for sustainable agriculture.
In selecting these landraces, smallholder farmers provide evosystem services—the benefits we gain from biodiversity, developed through evolutionary processes, Chen, a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment, explains. These services include crops’ adaptation to stresses including drought, salinity, and pests, which, she adds, are expected to increase as the climate warms, noting such services are crucial for the future of sustainability.
Of course, humans guiding crops’ evolution is nothing new, Chen says. Similar to interactions between plants and ecosystems, selective crop breeding by humans shapes crops for the places and climates where they’re planted. Conversely, depending on crops with high yields but no connection to their environment is a tradeoff. One-size-fits-all agriculture is quickly becoming an untenable prospect under the extreme heat or drought that many agricultural areas anticipate.
But the issue isn’t just genetics, and Chen, an insect evolutionary ecologist, works with an interdisciplinary team including sociologists and plant geneticists. In modern agriculture, Chen sees “neocolonial ideas around who gets to decide what is important.” The farmers who’ve developed landraces are often smallholders in historically colonized places, their work unvalued in industrial agriculture or academic research.
Instead, Chen and her colleagues are creating a policy brief to share their knowledge with policymakers. Their goal is to establish practices that promote benefit-sharing to properly support smallholder farmers for the seed diversity they’ve created. A concurrent goal is finding ways to incorporate these farmers’ knowledge so this seed diversity can be utilized for the next generation of large-scale crops.
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