Intellectual Property Rights and the Politics of Food - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 380

The Evolution of Global Regimes of
Plant Genetic Resources
A good portion of the food we consume is derived from plants, directly or indirectly.
Crop plants are estimated to contribute more than 80 percent of our calories and the
edible dry weight. Most of the food humans consume is based on less than twenty spe-
cies and just three staple crops— rice, wheat, and maize—account for about 60 percent
of the calories and about 56 percent of the proteins (Lenné and Wood 2011, 9). Plant
genetic resources2 constitute the core of this agricultural biodiversity and agricultural
biodiversity itself is the outcome of continuous interaction among humans, nature,
and evolution. Humans took to farming and, since doing so, they have developed and
derived many thousands of varieties of plants. Domestication of food crops started
about 11,000 years ago, first with rice, then maize, and later wheat. Crop improvement
is a cumulative process and the plant genetic resources found in nature are modified by
humans into germplasm, which can be used for further improvement and/ or for culti-
vation. Germplasm
refers to the sum total of all hereditary material in a plant, as coded in its DNA. For
a crop, it reflects the compounding nature of sequential improvements carried out
by breeders over a long period of time, all of which, of course, is encapsulated in the
seed. (Moschini 2010, 5)
The origin and distribution of crops is a fascinating story; the introduction of crops
played an important role in spreading access to new plant varieties and thereby enabling
their use in the development of new varieties for crops and other purposes. Migration,
trade, interaction among communities, colonial expansion, and other factors ensured
that varieties bred and domesticated in one region spread to other regions.3 Newly intro-
duced plant varieties had significant advantages that went beyond enhancing diversity.
According to Kloppenburg, the crops that now dominate the agricultural economies of
the advanced industrial nations are not, for the most part, indigenous species. They have
been introduced from elsewhere, principally from what is now the Third World.
... If the United States now has a food weapon, as former Secretary of
Agriculture Earl Butz so bluntly put it, it is because nations such as Nicaragua,
Ethiopia, Iran, and China have supplied, respectively, the corn, wheat, alfalfa,
and soybean for its arsenal.4
In many countries botanical gardens were established to receive, classify, and transfer
the species received from elsewhere. Scientific breeding emerged after the rediscovery
of Mendel's law in the early twentieth century, and this helped in searching for material
on the basis of genetic features. Public-sector breeders developed pools of germplasm
based on these collections, and the relatively open system of exchange made avail-
able germplasm for varietal development without many restrictions among breeders
(Byerlee and Dubin 2010). In the early decades of the twentieth century Russian botanist