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Food Safety, Food Security: Growing Resilient Crops

25 September 2010, Just Means
URL: http://www.justmeans.com/Food-Safety-Food-Security-Growing-Resilient-Crops/31865.html

What does food safety really mean? Does it mean avoiding placing food out on the table to sit, avoiding undercooked meat, and washing the vegetables? Well, of course it does. However, at a meta level food safety also means food security. It means that people have enough to eat, when they need it, and that this food is good quality. It means that we can feel secure in our knowledge that our food supply is safe: safe and healthy, safe and secure.

What sort of foundation have we built for food safety and security? When we look at the crops that we grow, we've developed many crops that grow a lot of food or large food. We love those juicy beefsteak tomatoes that hang fat on the vines. We like high yields. We've developed GMO crops that can sustain the rigors of pesticides and continue to produce vigorously. However, some of these attributes exist at the expense of other attributes, like adaptability.

To provide a truly safe and secure food supply, crops need to be adaptive. Like the eras before it, this is an era of change. It's an era of change that particularly impacts our food supply, since the climate is changing. Wind and rain and heat and cold patterns are shifting, and food crops depend on particular weather patterns to grow. Farmers depend on these too, because they look to the climate of the years before to determine when they should plant and harvest. Unpredictability in the climate makes for a less predictable food supply.

How do we ensure food safety and security into the future? Researchers like Adugna Abdi have discovered that in marginal farming areas like the marginal croplands of Ethiopia, food security springs from the genetic diversity of crops. The more diverse the crops and the more diverse the gene pool of each crop, the better chance a crop has to sustain itself in times of climatic change.

What does this mean for business and nonprofits? It means that we have some decisions to make about how to ensure our food safety. There are a number of paths that we can follow. The path of genetic modification is one such route: it will allow humans to intervene in the genetic structure of plants to help create resistance to specific climatic conditions. But can this genetic modification build in a gene for adaptability? Nature is very good at that. Nature has created seeds that are open-pollinated, ensuring that plants mix and mingle and create new plants that will survive or die depending on their ability to adapt to the climate. The choice is ours: do we promote the inherent genetic adaptability of plants or play a guessing game, creating plants that may or may not suit the coming climate?