먹을거리의 획일화

Close your eyes and picture a farm.

In your mind you may see a landscape with rows of different veggies, various fruit trees, and maybe a few cows or goats nibbling at the grass.

Wrong. The reality today is very different.

Over the past hundred years, the variety of seeds planted has dwindled from hundreds to just a handful. Animal diversity is suffering a similar fate. Large commercial farms that focus on specific animals or plants to maximize yields and profits have caused the variety in our food supply to plummet.

Today, only 30 crops provide 95 percent of our food, and only four crops (maize, wheat, rice and potato) account for 60 percent of what we eat. We’ve lost three-quarters of the genetic diversity of crops in only 100 years. Now 1,500 of the 7,600 animal breeds are at risk of extinction.

Why should we care? Well, we need biodiversity to grow food, or in other words, to survive.

If we only grew one type of corn, a plant disease could easily wipe it out. When there are many types of corn in a field, some may be resistant to the disease. Food security depends on resilient, diverse crops and animals being able to overcome diseases and the effects of climate change.

The diversity that keeps life going also applies to things like soil microbes that carry nutrients to a variety of insects and birds, who in turn pollinate valuable crops. These are adversely affected by the chemical pesticides and herbicides that often go along with industrial farming.

Meanwhile, it is small farmers, fisher folk and herders – among the poorest people in the world – who hold much of what’s left of the world’s biodiversity in their hands. Biodiversity offers more nutritional options, opportunities to raise incomes, a reservoir of plants to use for medicine, and most importantly a safeguard for our future food supply.

Check out this biodiversity project launched by FAO in partnership with SlowFood to get a sense of what we’re missing.