Two-thirds of the grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables and other crops grown and consumed around the world today originated in ancient breadbaskets in distant parts of the world, says a study of 151 crops and 177 countries. “We increasingly depend on each other’s plants,” say the 16 scientists who conducted the study in calling for a broad global effort to preserve crop diversity and mitigate the impact of climate change.
“Countries are highly interconnected … Foreign crops are used extensively in food supplies,” says the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. An estimated 60 percent of crops grown in a country have a foreign origin, and usage of them has grown significantly over the past 50 years, even in countries with a wide variety of native crops. Few countries rely on indigenous foods and when they do, it is a limited number of traditional staples.
The study was the first to quantify the level of national diets and agricultural economies are interwoven with non-native plants, said the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). The lead author of the study, Colin Khoury, works for CIAT and USDA. “It’s fascinating to see the extent to which so many plants have become synonymous with traditional diets in countries many thousands of miles from where those plants first appeared.”
In the study, scientists traced each crop back to one of 23 “primary regions of diversity” around the world, areas in which a distinct range of edible plants was first domesticated thousands of years ago,
The “global crop diaspora” that followed was so widespread the birthplace of crops may be overlooked. Potatoes were first observed by European explorers in the Andes in 1551 and were an established crop in the Canary Islands by 1567. With the homogenization of food supplies, “it is increasingly feasible to imagine not only mistakenly attributing the origin of potatoes to Ireland, tomatoes in Italy and chili peppers to Thailand, but indeed losing the connection of crops with a geographic origin entirely,” says the study.
Liugi Guarino of Global Crop Diversity Trust, a co-author of the study, said the paper showed the need to protect food crops in their natural habitats, to conserve them in seed banks and to share them as a way to make the food system more resilient to pest, disease or climate change. “Traditional crop varieties and their wild relatives found in one small part of the world could potentially be of use all over the world,” said Guarino.
For more on wild plant relatives, see FERN’s stories on sunflowers and rice.