Our Crop Heritage
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Crops and Centers of Origin
The following comes from Paul Gept's course on the Evolution of Crops
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India, Indochina and the Pacific Islands as center of origin
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The Chinese center of origin
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The African center of origin
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The Near Eastern center of origin
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BIO 304. Ecology & Evolution: Biomes
Certain biomes or vegetation types may have been more conducive to domestication than others.
Agriculture and Genetic Diversity
As important a genetic diversity is to increasing yields, it is at least as important in maintaining existing productivity. For example, crop yields can be increased by introducing genetic resistance to certain insect pests, but since natural selection often helps insects quickly overcome this resistance, new genetic resistance has to be periodically introduced into the crop just to sustain the higher productivity.
What is the state of our agrobiodiversity?
Perhap's 75% of our crop varieties have been lost in the last few decades.
Here is part of the reason, in this report on the concentration of see companies in the hands of a few industry "life sciences" corporations
World Seed Conference 1999 [pdf]
Detailed chart of what seed industry giants bought up what small companies.
People working to save our crop genetic treasures:
One of the most important groups dedicated to conserving traditional crop diversity
Seed Savers
Network of seed savers in US
Primal Seeds
Primal Seeds exists as a network to actively engage in protecting biodiversity and creating local food security. It is a response to industrial agriculture and the control of the seed supply. (UK)
Over 600 varieties of 100% organic seeds for the home gardener and over 100 varieties in bulk for the market grower. Conserving this invaluable genetic resource, while contributing to the knowledge of sustainable organic agriculture and gardening techniques, is central to the mission of Seeds of Change.
Richters Herbs - Medicinal, Culinary, Aromatic - Plants & Seeds
900 varieties of culinary, medicinal and aromatic herbs. Plants, seeds, dried herbs, books, videos, software, seminars, workshops, conferences. For home gardeners and commercial growers. Shipped worldwide.
Dispersals
One theory is that agriculturalists expanded over hunter-gatherer populations, eliminating or mixing genetically with them and introducing whole crop complexes. This movement is supposedly reflected in the current distirbution of language families
Farmers and their languages [pdf]
The largest movements and replacements of human populations since the end of the Ice Ages resulted from the geographically uneven rise of food production around the world. The first farming societies thereby gained great advantages over hunter-gatherer societies. (Diamond & Bellwood 2003)
These points remain controversial and more careful consideration reveals great complexities in the movement of crops and farmers in history:
Dissemination of Crops: Main Pathways
Dispersal of crops into Europe is the best documented, evidence from Central Asia and Indian subcontinent is more fragmentary. Very scarce evidence from Africa
A substantial fraction of the World's most important crop plants:( maize, potatoes, manioc, beans, peanuts, sunflower, tomato, upland cotton and tobacco) come from the Americas. |
Processing
One piece of evidence that crops don't always disperse with the cultures that originate them is the case of maize. This grain has spread throughout the world, but the technology of the tortilla made from lime-treated corn dough did not. As a result, areas such as Africa and the southern USA, where people came to depend on maize as a staple, develope the disease called pellagra, which is virtually unknown in Mesoamerica.
See also: