NPCC News: Native Plants Essential to Our Food Supply

There are many reasons to conserve native plants in the wild! Wild plants are beautiful, support diverse and important wildlife, support pollinators, mitigate climate change, buffer storms and floods, filter and protect our water supply, and even convert sunlight into the oxygen we breathe. In short, they run the ecosystems that support us all better than non-native plants.

Now, a threat to the world’s banana crop reminds us of one of the less recognized reasons to conserve native plants: wild plants stabilize our food supply.

Bananas are the world’s most popular fruit crop and are a staple in the diets of many indigenous and impoverished peoples.

Unfortunately, like many agricultural species, much of the world’s banana crop is genetically identical. This leaves bananas extremely vulnerable to pests, diseases, climate change and other threats.

And such a threat has recently arisen. Two fungal diseases - Black Sigatoka and a Fusarium species - are working their way through the world’s banana plantations. Farmers have so far fought back mainly with heavy use of fungicides. This not only harms the environment and plantation workers, but also selects for resistant strains of the fungi, making the diseases more difficult to fight.

Fortunately, there is another way to maintain this essential food crop – stop reliance on monocultures and diversify the crop using wild banana relatives.

Wild plant communities are irreplaceable reservoirs of genetic as well as species diversity. Historically, farmers have tended to ignore this and relied heavily on monocultures, because it seems easier, is traditional, they are promoted by large agricultural suppliers, or because they offer predictable, uniform crops.

However, monocultures have produced hardship and tragedy. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s devastated that country when a fungus attacked their genetically homogeneous potato crop. When the U.S. corn crop was attacked by another fungus in 1970, the prevalence of a single corn variety contributed to the loss of over $1 billion worth of food. In the 1980s, dependence upon a single type of grape root forced California growers to replant approximately two million acres of vines when a new insect pest appeared.

In the 1950 and 60s, a global pandemic swept banana plantations. The Panama fungus brought the global banana export industry to the brink of collapse. Unfortunately, all that was done was to convert the bulk of plantations to monocultures of a different, single banana variety. Ninety-nine of bananas exported to developing countries are that variety, the Cavendish. The crop therefore has remained vulnerable, and now new disease organisms are taking advantage.

However, universities and governments are establishing and protecting genetic diversity storehouses for many agricultural species, such as rice, corn, potatoes - and now bananas. See the story from CNN on the work to use the more than 1,000 wild banana varieties to strengthen and diversify this staple food crop.

The best diversity reservoirs remain wild native plant communities where natural selection allows diversity to expand and adapt to local environmental variables - and to larger stresses such as climate change.

The more we conserve wild native plant communities, the more tools we will have to meet the coming challenges to our food supplies and other essential ecosystem services.