Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
You may remember that a few weeks ago,
last week, I think,
many newspaper around the world came out with headlines like:
climate change, we're close to a tipping point.
I live in India,
and Indian newspapers also reported this news.
It looked to me like an ideal introduction
to what I wanted to talk about today,
namely the Earth's five biggest global problems:
water, hunger and malnutrition,
poverty, biodiversity and climate change.
We speak about these problems as they were independent;
but I actually like to think of them
as deeply intertwined,
with the seed problem at their center.
Essentially, talking about seeds means talking about health,
someone mentioned it today already.
For all the food that we eat,
actually comes, directly or indirectly, from seeds,
and I think we all agree that our health
depends on what we eat,
especially today that has been shown
that many of current diseases
actually come from food.
Back to climate change,
one of the things that's only rarely pointed out
is that we actually don't know what we're talking about,
because nobody is able to tell you today
how hotter and drier will Como be in 20 years.
Coupled with climate change problem
is the biodiversity problem,
and there's a big contradiction in modern science here,
because on one hand, if you read
the most prominent magazines, like Science and Nature,
almost every week, and certainly every month,
we're told that biodiversity
is the key for food safety;
and on the other hand there's another science,
genetic improvement, that actually makes that food,
in the last 20-30 years steered the wheel
towards uniformity, in the opposite direction.
What you buy on the market today
- cauliflowers, zucchini, tomatoes and pepperoni,
all that stuff, in order to be legally sold,
must be enlisted in a catalogue,
call catalogue of plant varieties,
and they can only be enlisted
if they're uniform, stable and recognizable.
And I imagine that the contradiction between uniformity and stability,
and the need to keep up with climate changes is patent.
At the same time, still in the last 20-30 years, maybe 40,
we gradually witnessed a consolidation
of a real monopoly
in the world's seed market,
which is worth billions of dollars
and today, for approximately 65%,
is controlled by four big international corporations.
What does it mean "control over seeds"?
It means that when the farmer goes to the market,
to buy the seeds she'll work with,
doesn't have much choice.
In United States today is basically impossible
- I've just betted 50,000 euros -
to find corn or soja seeds
that aren't genetically modified.
This limited range of choices, from the farmer's perspective,
on what she can plant
impacts on products' diversity
and on the diversity of the food we eat.
That's associated to a whole series of diseases
and makes us reconsider if we really decide what to eat.
Together with this monopoly on seed market,
a monopoly on pesticides market also took place,
someone mentioned it this morning also.
Pesticides are interestings:
according to doctors,
among the 12 world's most dangerous substances,
nine are pesticides,
and some of these international corporations
that sell seeds also sell pesticides.
So it becomes consequent to ask ourselves:
if I sell both seeds and pesticides,
why should I sell seeds that grow plants
that don't need pesticides?
And it all ends up in that dish, probably.
How did we get to this point?
The evolution of genetic improvement,
the science I was talking about before,
can help us understand.
Indeed, this morning the first speaker talked about
the Neolithic man, 10-12,000 years ago,
that, starting from Fertile Crescent,
the bow that comes from Jordania to Palestine
and Israel, Syria, Lebanon, South Turkey
all the way down to Iraq,
- that's where agriculture started.
I have been working for 30 years in an institute close to Aleppo,
and the oldest barley seeds were found inside jars
and in a village approximately 100 km far from Aleppo
today drown in Euphrates' water.
There, men domesticated
- because yes, plants can be domesticated too,
although not the way animals are:
wild plants simply drop
their seeds on the ground.
Plants get domesticated when,
one spontaneous mutation after another
they hold the seeds of a spike
and women, probably in Neolithic age,
immediately understood the significance of these strange plants
that didn't let the seeds drop to the ground.
And in that area, the Crescent Fertile,
this happened for wheat,
barley, lentil, chick pea,
fig, pistachio and other species.
This then happened in other parts of the world, for other species.
What happened then?
Starting from 9,000 years ago,
these people started to emigrate
- Turkey, Greece, Balkans -
they entered in Italy from the East, about 7,000 years ago,
and they stopped somewhere.
And this work of culture breeding
kept on for about 9,000 years,
and even today - I've seen it in Nepal, I've seen it in northern India -
they go the the field, before harvesting,
the best plants are selected,
the seed is stored in a fresh and dry corner of the house,
so it can be replanted next year,
and the rest is harvested, eaten or given to animals.
Now imagine all this work, done by thousand of farmers,
in so many places of the world, with so many different cultures.
Of course, each of them selected
for what we call specific adaptation:
they selected the best plants, in that particular field,
with their own cultural practice
and for their own use.
When you hear about old varieties, ancient cereals,
they all come from this ancestral selection work.
Then, when Mendel's laws were rediscovered,
a little more than 100 years ago,
genetic improvement underwent a big change,
because all the things that since then
had been made by many people
in so many places of the world, started being made
by relatively few people, researchers,
in relatively few places, research stations,
and there has been a big paradigm shift in the philosophy of research,
because while farmers used to select
what fit with that specific environment,
researchers couldn't select variety
for the experimental station.
They had to select for the whole world out there.
So they were trying to select varieties
that could fit for as many people as possible.
This caused, of course,
many old varieties to vanish,
it generated a massive uniformity
and paved the way
to the so called "industrial agriculture",
that cannot get rid of chemistry,
as these varieties, obviously,
couldn't belong everywhere,
and so, where they didn't grow well,
farmers treated the environment
with fertilizers, antiparasitic, pesticides, irrigation water,
so that the environment could receive that variety.
This was also good news, by the way,
for the emerging seed companies,
for it's way more profitable for seed companies
to sell many seeds of a few varieties
than little seed of many different varieties.
I tried to turn this upside down a bit,
with a genetic improvement method
based on the very same science
- indeed on the strictest scientific requirements-
could bring genetic improvement back into farmers' hands.
This model is called participant plant breeding,
I'm not the only one who does this,
and it basically introduces three changes.
First, all the work is done in farmers' fields;
farmers participate in all decisions
- when I come to a place I've never been,
I usually ask first:
what's your main problem?
And the third difference is that this model
can be applied in many different villages,
according to the resources at your disposal.
The yellow ball is where I've been working for 30 years,
blue being the experimental stations of Syrian Minister of Agriculture,
and villages are in red.
The key point, here, is that every village
is an independent selection unit:
namely, men and women only select
what's good for that village,
the method is of course very inclusive,
and it only produces varieties that are particularly suitable
to that particular place, to that particulare way of farming.
I started this model in Syria in '95,
then it got gradually implemented in Morocco,
Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt,
Ethiopia and Eritrea, Yemen, Iran,
and it can reach and be used in places
where the so called conventional genetic improvement has never gotten:
this project on barley and lentils
in Yemen's mountains - all the Yemen's agriculture
is basically on these terraces, built no less than 2,000 years ago,
that were never reached by conventional science.
Then, approximately around 2007-2008,
we noticed that this model had a flaw,
and the flaw was exactly
in the need for a collaborating institution,
because institutions, with this model
that actually brought a lot of power back in farmers' hands,
- many governments couldn't bear that,
so in 2008 I got back
to an old idea of an American researcher,
called evolutive genetic improvement,
which consists in making big blends.
The one you see here was cultivated in Sicily,
I started doing this thing in Syria in 2008,
then we left in 2011,
and that's a blend, please believe me,
of 2,000 different kinds of soft wheat,
the one you make bread with.
What happens?
It happens that in this blend some hybridations take place,
so the seed you eventually harvest
is never genetically identical to the one you planted.
Over time, the population evolves.
And in which direction does it evolve?
It becomes fitter and fitter
to that particular environment,
to that particular way of harvesting,
to biologic and biodynamic agriculture,
and mostly, if you remember what I told you at the beginning,
it will fit the climate that will be there in 20 years,
without knowing today how hotter and drier it will be,
because it has all the time to evolve.
Currently, the idea is implemented in Jordania, Ethiopia,
Iran - these populations are spreading everywhere
and in 2009-2010 also arrived in Italy.
These are three populations:
one of hard wheat, for bread;
one of soft wheat, for pasta, and one of barley.
These varieties are currently cultivated in 14-15 regions of Italy.
Iranian farmers made an interesting discovery,
that we are putting in place also in Italy:
they made the bread directly
out of this blend's flour.
And they have discovered that six months after selling this bread,
not only it was very appreciated,
because it had an extraordinary scent and aroma,
but these bakers also started to receive
calls from their customers, who asked:
what did you put in that bread?
Because in this village,
those who were suffering from food intolerances,
after they started eating that bread
improved a lot.
We're still doing this experience in Italy,
especially in Marche, where I usually go when I'm in Italy,
and so we're proving that with these blends
not only we have a technology to adapt cultures
to climate changes dynamically and inexpensively,
not only you bring biodiversity back in fields,
because of course populations evolve differently
in different places,
not only you put seed control back in farmers' hands
but you also make a more diverse food
and, as I said before,
food diversity means better health.
Thank you.
(Applause)