Instead of urging developing countries to grow only huge amounts of staple grains, like maize, as American policy has done for decades in Africa, Fowler is promoting a return to the great variety of traditional crops that people used to grow more of, like cowpeas, cassava and a range of millets.He calls them “opportunity crops” because they’re sturdy and full of nutrients.The effort is still in its infancy, with a relatively tiny budget of $100 million. But at a time when climate shocks and rising costs are aggravating food insecurity and raising the risks of political instability, the stakes are high.
Fowler’s boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the idea could be “genuinely revolutionary.”
Traditional crops are more nourishing for people who eat them and for the soils in which they are grown, according to Fowler, and they are better at withstanding the wild weather delivered by climate change. The problem, he says, is that they’ve been ignored by plant breeders. His goal, through the new State Department initiative, is to increase the agricultural productivity of the most nutritious and climate-hardy among them.
The initial focus is on a half dozen crops in a half dozen countries in Africa.
“These crops have been grown for thousands of years in Africa, Fowler, 74, said in a recent interview. “They’re doing something right. They’re embedded in the culture. They really supply nutrition. If they have yield problems or other barriers to commercialization, frankly, by and large, it’s because we haven’t invested in them.”
Critics say that while a focus on crop diversity and soil health is welcome, breeding crops for the commercial market may do little to improve the health and well-being of small farmers in low-income countries. It’s still unclear who would produce the seeds, whether farmers would have to buy them, to what extent the new seeds need chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and whether genetically modified seeds would be included.
Fowler’s office said individual countries would set their own guidelines on what kinds of seeds would be permitted in their territories and how they would be procured.
“There are some interesting hints or nods in the right direction: the focus on crop diversity and nutrition, Indigenous knowledge, a focus on neglected crops,” said Bill Moseley, a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who has worked on agriculture programs with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World Bank. “What’s really important is that you think about a poor farmer and what are their constraints and how do you develop something that’s really useful for them.”
Food has long been part of the U.S. foreign policy arsenal.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the U.S.-led Green Revolution focused on producing more food — specifically more maize, wheat, and rice — using fertilizers, pesticides and hybrid seeds. Maize yields, for instance, soared, thanks to investments in plant breeding. In much of southern and eastern Africa, maize became the major food grain, while, in some places, cash crops for export, like cotton and tobacco, were prevalent.
A handful of countries came to dominate the production of cereals, while a handful of cereals — wheat, rice and maize — came to dominate the world’s diet. While the green revolution is credited with offering up more calories, it did little to ensure a varied, nutritious diet.
“Many countries, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, have come to rely on imports of these staple foods over the past 50 years, which has shifted people’s diets and led to less attention to traditional crops, which are often more suited to local ecologies,” said Jennifer Clapp, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, a nonprofit group.
Fowler was critical of the expansion of hybrid seeds and the industrial agricultural system that came with it. Commercial hybrid seeds, he wrote in a book with Canadian environmentalist Pat Mooney, had changed traditional farming systems, and not for the better. At global negotiations, he pushed against the U.S.-led move to patent seeds. (A company that holds a patent for a particular seed makes money by selling those seeds year after year, upending the traditional system of farmers saving seeds from each year’s harvest to sow the following year.)
Seed diversity has long been Fowler’s rallying cry.
He was an early proponent of an international seed bank, where the world’s plant genetic resources could be conserved forever. It took 20 years to come into being, and it is now housed in an underground bunker in the Arctic Ocean archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, where it is so cold that seeds will remain frozen even if the power goes out. More than 1.2 million seed samples have been brought to the vault from a variety of national and local seed banks around the world. The Crop Trust, which helps run the Seed Vault, and which Fowler once headed, describes itself as the “ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply.”
“We are losing biodiversity every day,” Fowler told The New York Times in an interview in 2008. “It’s a kind of drip, drip, drip. We need to do something about it.”
But it’s one thing to lock up seeds inside an Arctic mountain, and quite another to steer agricultural policy.
Fowler began by compiling a list of traditional crops that pack the most nutrition and then asked researchers to map which crops would grow well in the climates of the future. He roped in the African Union and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. A list of 60-odd crops emerged. For those, Fowler’s program intends to support plant breeding efforts. A handful of private companies have been recruited, including IBM to help map soils and Bayer to produce some of the seeds.
Fowler said that he was not trying to stop the promotion of staple grains but wanted to expand the range of crops that get attention and investment.
“We focused on traditional and Indigenous crops, because they haven’t gotten the focus ever before,” Fowler said. “This program is not about telling farmers when to grow or telling people what to eat. It’s about presenting options.”
His favorite of these opportunity crops are grass peas. He first saw them on a visit to Ethiopia during a bad drought. The soil was dry and caked. There were deep fissures in the earth. “And here was this beautiful little plant, flowering,” he said. “I thought, ‘What a generous little plant this is.'”
The grass pea is among the most drought and flood-tolerant legumes in the world. It can be a lifesaver when nothing else grows, according to the Crop Trust. But eat too much of certain varieties of grass pea, and they can cause neurological damage. Plant breeders are trying to develop hardy but nontoxic varieties.
Fowler is growing 48 breeding lines of it on his farm in Dutchess County, north of New York City.
