The tangled roots of global food supply
New research suggests that most of the world relies on non-native food sources
From the grains in your breakfast cereal to the grapes in your wine, there’s a strong chance that the food you eat on a daily basis has its ancient origins thousands of miles away.
A major new study, the collaborative effort of more than a dozen researchers around the world, suggests that countries rely on crops that originally came from other parts of the globe — and the interconnections among global food systems are only continuing to grow.
It’s well known that many foods popular in certain countries didn’t actually originate there but were in fact carried over by travellers or traders at some point. The tomato, for instance — which is commonly associated with Italy — actually originated in the Americas. And the same is true of the potato, which later became a staple in Ireland.
But what’s been unclear is exactly how much moving around all of the world’s crops have done over the centuries and how heavily different countries now rely on foods that didn’t originate within their borders.
“These (plants) are actually some of the other organisms in the world that we’ve had the greatest connection to or relationship to over time,” said the new study’s lead author, Colin Khoury, a crop diversity specialist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia. “The study is really about what is the geography, the origin, of plants that we have this deep relationship to.”
It’s an important question in a world where food security is increasingly threatened by the rapidly growing population and environmental challenges like climate change.
The research, which was published earlier this month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, analyzed more than 100 crops in 177 countries, using data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization about foods supplied or produced in each location. The study aimed to compare the countries in which crops are currently eaten to the “primary regions of diversity” where they originated — hubs where certain types of crops have typically been grown for thousands of years and have branched out into a diverse array of wild and domesticated species.
The analysis found that, worldwide, about 69 per cent of all food supplied and produced was “foreign.” Looking at data from the past 50 years, the researchers also found that these interconnections have increased significantly in recent decades.
Every country included in the study relies on foreign crops to some extent. North America, Australia, New Zealand, and certain regions of Africa, Europe and the Caribbean were among those areas found to rely the most heavily on foreign crops — probably because they are located relatively far from regions where staple crops are produced.
On the other hand, countries that are closer to diversity regions tended to have a higher percentage of native crops in their food supply. Some of the world’s primary regions of diversity, home to the greatest number of popular crops, include much of Asia, southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean, and tropical South America.
“The main finding really is that everybody’s connected to everywhere else to some degree or another,” Khoury said. Even countries that maintain the least amount of foreign plants in their food supplies still don’t eat a totally native diet. Taking note of this can indicate how to best safeguard our food supply for the future.
The study’s major takeaway is the importance of protecting the diversity of global crops, Khoury said, because food that originates in one place may one day become a staple in another. Experts believe that maintaining a wide array of genetically diverse plants can help scientists breed more resilient types of crops in the future — ones that can grow in many different places, withstand extreme climatic changes and resist disease.
World leaders have started thinking about this issue. An international treaty adopted in 2001 states that countries should share the benefits of their genetic research on crops, recognizing such information’s importance to global food security.
Additionally, nations around the world have established seed banks, or safe places where seeds are stored both for research purposes and in case of disaster — whether war or a cataclysmic weather event — should seriously damage a region’s crops. And on a remote archipelago in Norway, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault serves as an international seed bank where any nation can make a deposit of seeds to be safeguarded for future generations.
These kinds of steps should be a focus area in the coming decades, the research suggests. Worldwide food supplies will be challenged by the social and environmental issues facing the planet, and it’s increasingly apparent that collaboration is the key to tackling these challenges.
“If we’re thinking long-term about our food supplies, and if we understand that we need genetic diversity as one of the main ways that we keep our food supplies resilient and strong — especially in terms of increasing problems like climate change — then we should be invested in working internationally and collaborating internationally to make sure that the resources are protected and also are accessible,” Khoury said.