Surprise! Farmers Grow Hearty Crops to Survive War

by Katherine Gustafson

categories: Gene Modification, International, Rural Affairs

Published November 07, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

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Subsistence farmers in African war zones keep themselves alive in dangerous circumstances by leaning on intuition and age-old farming logic that goes like this: when in tough conditions, reuse whatever field you've got, grow the hardiest plants and when fleeing, take the hardiest seeds with you. Doing this allows farmers to create the crops best adapted to their needs; a surprise stroke of agricultural genius that apparently leaves scientists reeling.

A new study reports the unexpected emergence of hybrid rice in West African countries like Gambia, Ghana, Senegal and Togo, whose African and Asian rice varieties (Oryza glaberrima Steud and Oryza sativa L.) have only previously been interbred in a lab and there produced sterile offspring, according to SciDevNet.

The authors of the study, which appears in this month's issue of PLoS ONE, report that these two species of rice are interbreeding in the fields in part because of disruptions caused by war.

The researchers say that war and similar disasters tend to speed up the selection and spread of hybrids because farmers desiring the safety of dense forest cover reuse their fields to the point where only the hardiest seeds can grow instead of slashing more forest to create more fertile land. Additionally, farmers who must flee their lands will take only the seeds of the hardiest varieties with them.

Farmers in these regions, therefore, are actively engaged in selecting and improving the varieties, whether consciously or not.

"Suppose a farmer sees a hybrid in the field: he'll think it's pretty useless and not harvest it," Edwin Nuijten, co-author of the study and member of the Technology and Agrarian Development Group at Netherlands' Wageningen University, told SciDevNet.

Those few seeds could drop in the field and if the farmer replants the field they could germinate and then pollinate the surrounding normal plants. After a few generations a plant that has full fertility could develop. The farmer may then select such plants and plant them separately to test whether they would do well as a new variety.

This conclusion lends credence to the criticisms of corporately controlled genetically engineered seed varieties; such intellectual property restriction prevents this type of spontaneous innovation, which can mean the difference between eating and starving for farmers in difficult conditions.

"The discovery shows that it is important to involve farmers in plant-breeding — so far they have generally been passive testers of scientists' inventions," the SciDevNet article concludes.

As alert reader Dawn Gifford pointed out in a comment on another post, crop varieties bred in labs and held closely by agribusiness "close the circle on the farmer’s knowledge, finally eliminating, after 10,000 years, the farmer’s role in the genetics of agriculture."

And preserving farmers' ability to control their own crop genetics may well mean the difference between life and death in a war zone.

Photo courtesy of IRRI Images via flickr