There is this Red Queen hypothesis in agriculture that begins: There is no species that is immune from parasites, predators, and the need to get food. Thus, each species is constantly running toward food and away from its demons; any step forward is temporary as the predator or parasite adapts.
Actually, it’s more of a metaphor for a common scenario in the life of agriculture. The farmer, like the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, must run twice as fast just to advance.
Ecologist Rob Dunn lets us know how that is working out for us in Never Out of Season: How having the food we want when we want it threatens our food supply and our future. It’s not a new story and the book is mostly a retelling of how we got to where we are today: global industrial monoculture farming that risks losing its diversity.
Why that is important is diversity has historically been the best defense in the Red Queen hypothesis. The Irish Famine was a monoculture disaster, while diversity was behind the miraculous Green Revolution sixty years ago as scientists drew on our agricultural diversity to create super crops through crop breeding. The same strategy is evident in transgenic crops as scientists isolate DNA from diverse sources and insert it into a new super crop. But this diversity—a rich reservoir of seeds—is at risk as the adoption of transgenic crops is saturating agriculture in the industrialized world.
One good pathogen and our genetically-engineered monoculture that millions depend on for daily nourishment could collapse and we might not have the diversity to recover.
However, this gloomy doomsday for industrial agriculture is far less interesting than what’s happening in the agriculture lab currently. Similar to what is taking place in the gut sciences, agriculture is looking at its own biome. In 2014 CRISPR arrived. It is a technology that evolved in bacteria and archaea that can store DNA from viruses that attack them and create a library that can be used to cut up the DNA of the attacker. CRISPR can edit the DNA of any organism with a sequenced genome.This system offers a radical new step in the history of crop breeding. Traditional crop breeding takes many years; using CRISPR it could take three years, and it’s getting shorter. CRISPR is cheap to use and relatively unregulated. That’s because, unlike transgenic crops, using a CRISPR does not require the DNA of a foreign organism; CRISPRS edit existing genomes. Think bio hacking.
And that’s why, says Dunn, it is so important to protect our diversity. Having CRISPR technology won’t help us if there are no seeds, ag scientists nor public institutions to protect agricultural diversity. That is something we all have to worry about.
- Stuart Logie