Report by Gurpreet Kaur
New Delhi, Aug 9: In the vast Welsh woods and meadows of wildflowers exist uncommon varieties of fruits and vegetables. These fruits and vegetables have been brought back from the brink of extinction by the work of ‘Seed Detectives/Guardians’. Seed detectives are people who track down rare and endangered plants and work towards preservation of genetic diversity by cultivating their crop in a controlled environment (an environment with controlled external factors like water, soil, wind, etc.) The seed detectives identify, collect, and save seeds of rare, traditional “heirloom” varieties with the hope of putting them back in the plate.
In the last century, genetic diversity in the plant kingdom has rapidly declined. The main cause of the decline is monoculture. Monoculture is cultivating a single crop in a given area. Only about 8%-20% of the estimated 4,00,000 varieties of plants known to humankind are edible in nature. Even if we take the lower number into consideration, that leaves us with 32,000 edible varieties of plants. Yet, we depend on just 200 varieties of plant species for our consumption. To make matters worse, only 9 of these plant species account for over 66% of the world’s crop production. Diversifying the crops could give us food security, species conservation, and environmental protection in the future.
Seed banks, such as Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle, are like seed safe deposit boxes. Around the world, there are an estimated 450 seed libraries, like the Heritage seed library in the United Kingdom or Annapurna seed library in Assam. These libraries run like any other library, except instead of checking out books, people check out seeds. The seeds are planted, then harvested, and the surplus is distributed to the members. The combined effort of seed banks, seed libraries and seed detectives have conserved over 800 vegetable varieties, out of which 30 are now commercially available and need no conservation.
Adam Alexander is a self-proclaimed seed detective. Alexander has gathered a library of 493 seeds over the course of three decades, of which 96 have been grown for The Heritage Seed Library. Alexander describes himself as a pea nut who plants 15 varieties of peas every year!
