Study: Crop diversity myths persist in media

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.illinois.edu/news/11/1102cropdiversity_PaulHeald.html

Study: Crop diversity myths persist in media

11/2/2011 | Phil Ciciora, Business & Law Editor | 217-333-2177; [e-mail]

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The conventional wisdom that says the 20th century was a disaster for crop diversity is nothing more than a myth, according to a forthcoming study by a University of Illinois expert in intellectual property law.

…

To support their conclusions, Heald and co-author Susannah Chapman, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Georgia, studied thousands of commercially available varieties of 42 vegetable crops from 1903 to 2004, as well as varieties of apples from 1900 to 2000.

“When we began this study, we started with the assumption that every year we advanced in the 20th century there would be fewer and fewer varieties offered for sale commercially,” Heald said.

…

“There was no evident sign of decline, so we decided to step back and take a snapshot of 1903 and 2004, two years where others had collected full data on all important vegetable crops,” Heald said. “We came to this with the exact same preconceptions as everyone else, but we couldn’t ignore facts that were smacking us in the face.”

…

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1928920

[kristopher]

1. Outstanding news!

It certainly runs against accepted wisdom, doesn't it?

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Yes it does

It will be interesting to see how it bears up under scrutiny.

[provis99]

3. so choices sucked then, and they suck now too.

I'm not sure why this is good news.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. What it means (if true) is that food crop diversity is not becoming worse.

That contradicts stories like this…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/world/europe/17iht-food.html?pagewanted=all

Food for thought: Crop diversity is dying

By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Published: Thursday, August 18, 2005

ROME — José Esquinas-Alcázar regards the corn laid out in rows with the love and admiration that sommeliers reserve for bottles in a fine wine cellar. To the untrained eye, it is a collection of misshapen ears: Long, short, blue, yellow, white, spotted, covered in dirt.

"Look at this beauty!" he exclaims. "Some are good for starch, some for popcorn. Some grow in the cold. Some are good fried, some broiled. The taste for each is completely different.

"Diversity is what makes us happy, gives us choice and keeps us free. And it's tragic because this is what we are losing."

Esquinas, a top official at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, has spent decades campaigning to preserve plants that are used for food, which are becoming extinct at an alarming rate.

…

[izquierdista]

5. What a couple of tools!

"Although it took approximately fifteen hours to enter all varieties of our four target
species for the year 1900 and another fifteen hours for the year 1905, for subesquent years we
expected to add many fewer new varieties as we watched the apocalypse of diversity loss in
the twentieth century unfold. We moved on to 1910, 1915, 1920, and 1925, still adding
hundreds of new varieties every year, and..."

What, no client to bill those hours to? Is that your problem?

I don't think I can recall one single technical paper in any area of science or engineering that I have read, where the authors bitched about how many hours it took them to enter data.

These two bozos aside, the loss in crop diversity is readily apparent on any trip to the grocery store. Big agriculture has fixated on specific varieties that make the most money for them. Determinate tomatoes that only take one pass with a machine to harvest, can be sorted and packed by machine, and ripened by gassing with ethylene while in transit. How many varieties of turnips at the big chain grocery stores? One - purple top white globe. Even apples, of which there are 7500+ varieties worldwide, only have a dozen or fewer varieties at the local grocery chain. If there are more than a dozen varieties of potato, you know you are in an upscale specialty store -- in Peru, they grow 3000 varieties.

There is a loss in diversity, they just weren't looking in the right place.

[Nederland]

6. Perhaps you should publish your own paper

If you choose to do that though, I'd recommend avoiding anecdotal evidence like "any trip to the grocery store."

Just saying...