Take care with crops so that they can flourish
The Universe
(August 24, 2003)
MY MOTHER had many wise saying that were passed on from generation to generation. One of her favourites was "never put all your eggs into one basket" It seems an obvious piece of advice but you would be surprised how many people just can't accept common sense.
Today the food security of nations is endangered by voracious and aggressive pests that attack and destroy crops causing billion of pound worth of damage every year.
That orange juice you sip every morning more that likely came from Brazil. According to a recent Newsweek report, that country produces 70 per cent the world's orange juice, earns more than 1 billion a year and gives employment to as many as 400,000 people. Now their livelihood is in danger as the orange variety is under threat.
After a devastating virus attack that destroyed every orange tree in Brazil in 1940, one variety survived. This was the salvation of the industry and today 85 per cent of the nation's 200 million orange trees came from this one survivor.
But this is
mono-cropping at its most vulnerable. A virus has evolved that is
devastating that brave lone survivor. The industry is in due straits as
catastrophe looms.
While one fruit is failing, another is thriving. The two favourite fruits in
most tropical countries are the mango and the banana. Growers are strongly
advised not to mono-crop the Carabao mango- the sweetest of all.
There is growing demand for Philippine Carabao mango, especially when it's processing into soft chewy dried fruit without chemical as we do at the PREDA development center.
The project helps thousands of farmers by baying fair price and keeping price-fixing at bay. Our product are distributed by a ethical importer that brings Preda Fair Trade dried mango into Sainsbury's and Waitrose in the UK and Dunnes and Superquinn in Ireland. Soon we hope Fair Trade shop will distribute them also.
One product that is arriving in the Fair Trade shop across Europe these days is organically- grown bananas. This is great news and if you can get them, eat them. There are over 500 varieties of banana in the would but what you see in Western supermarkets is only one pale looking dry Cavendish variety.
This is the plantation banana of the multination and is a inbred that it is defenceless against an array of pests that descend on the plantation for their daily foraging. The diversity of the gene pool has long been lost. The Banana trees have to be sprayed with deadly fungicide up to 50 times a year, according to the Newsweek report. This is starting and scary. I will never eat a Cavendish again. Not only because of the huge amount of toxic pesticide used but because I am used to the Philippine wild banana. It is good that a banana ketchup we make from them is selling like wildfire.
Many believe that transgenic crops would solve the problem of pest and virus attack. This scientific process does not just mix the different genes of the same variety of crop, it take genes of the same from one crop nad puts them into another. These are banned in may countries.
Manipulated crops have their own weakness they can resist some pests but not all. The genes are the same in the whole variety with no chance of diversity, so when a new virus came along, they perish.
The one
variety of orange that survived in Brazil and saved the nation is now doomed
because the lesson wasn't learnt don't pull all your crops into one variety.
My mother would approve.
