Native Plant Conservation Campaign News: Conservation of native plant diversity helps us maintain a stable food supply – a lesson that keeps being forgotten.
July 12, 2018
The world's banana crop is at risk and native plants can save it. The world's food producers and governments repeatedly overlook the relationship between wild plant diversity and a stable, secure food supply when making decisions about agriculture and land management.
The global banana crop provides a current example of this problem – and a terrible example of failing to learn from history.
The global crop, which feeds millions of mostly poor people around the world, is threatened by a fungal disease which is decimating plantations. This is happening because – inexplicably – bananas are still grown from genetically identical clones. So once a disease finds vulnerability in a single banana plant, the global crop is susceptible.
This is not even the first time around for the banana!
In the 1950 and 60s, a global fungal pandemic swept banana plantations, bringing the banana industry to the
brink of collapse. Unfortunately, all that was done was to convert plantations to a different, single banana variety. The crop therefore has remained vulnerable, and new diseases are taking advantage.
Now the search for new disease resistant varieties may be threatened because one of the most promising banana wild relatives is at risk of extinction. The banana variety, found only on the island of Madagascar, has just been added to the
red list species at risk of extinction by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (see upcoming NPCC news for more about the
most recent red list). If the species is extinct, it cannot be investigated.
This is difficult to understand since history is riddled with examples of famine and tragedy brought on by genetically identical clones being used to produce staple crops. 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.
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.
Genetic diversity is not the only way native plant communities support our food supply. They provide habitat for the birds and insects that pollinate food crops, and they maintain soil fertility by cycling and storing plant nutrients.
Diverse healthy native plant communities provide other irreplaceable and invaluable ecosystem
services to human societies and economies. These include purification and storage of water, sources of life saving medicines and other products, and protection from hurricanes and strong storms.
Learn more about plant ecosystem services:
