Doing away with 'orphan' crops vital for global food security: US envoy

Cary Fowler spent his childhood summers on his family farm in Tennessee, United States, where he watched his grandmother manage an operation that included assorted crops as well as cows, chickens, and pigs. “We didn’t put all of our eggs in one basket,” said Fowler, 73, who now serves as the U.S. special envoy for global food security. He learned from his grandmother how important it was to grow a diversity of crops and rotate them to keep the soil healthy, and remembers visiting a regional experimental farm to figure out what to grow next. “Every year we would go out there and look at all the different crops and the different varieties and that would be the time when she would choose which variety was going to be grown on the farm the following year,” Fowler said during an interview in Rome at the U.N. Food Systems Summit stocktaking. “From a very early age, I guess I just soaked up the fact that having good, improved seed varieties is pretty critical to farming. If you have bad seeds, you’re going to have a bad harvest.” He saw firsthand how vulnerable farmers are to shocks, and how the delicate balance on the farm can be upended by poor quality inputs or conditions ranging from soil quality to weather patterns. It can also be upended by war. Fowler, former executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was appointed to his current role in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has sent shock waves through the global food system. Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of grain, and the war has driven prices, particularly in low-income nations, so high that basic staples are now out of reach for millions. Last month, Russia abruptly ended a U.N.-brokered deal that had allowed Ukraine to export its grain. It also now appears to be targeting the country’s agricultural infrastructure, bombing grain silos. Both of these bode ill for the country’s farmers, Fowler said. Silos that aren’t destroyed are going to already be full with previous years’ crops. “You have to ask yourself the question of ‘well, where are the farmers in Ukraine going to put the incoming harvest? And are they going to get paid?” Fowler said. “I come from a farm family and we watched what was out in the field. It was one time a year that you got your paycheck … The farmers need to have revenue from their harvest in order to have the funds to plant next year.” The destruction in Ukraine is likely to have long-term implications because it may reduce planting next year, leading to another decreased harvest. “Russia understands this,” he said. It’s “a war against food security.” To help build resilience in African agriculture and reduce countries’ dependence on imports from places such as Ukraine, Fowler has championed a new U.S. initiative aimed at increasing investment in traditional and indigenous crops. Known by many names — orphan crops, lost crops, and minor crops, which Fowler said all sound “pejorative” — they have received such little research investment that many farmers have ceased to grow them in favor of cash crops such as wheat and maize. The Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, or VACS, will identify the most nutritious crops in each of Africa’s five subregions and what risks are posed to them by climate change. It will then seek to spur investment in agricultural research to adapt them to changing conditions, while also emphasizing the importance of soil health for successful harvests. The U.S. announced $100 million to support the initiative last month. The goal is to be able to get adapted crops out to farmers as quickly as possible. “If you want to enrich the soils, then we need more legumes for crop rotations and also adding more and more protein for the diet. There’s a lot of win-win situations embedded in these traditional crops,” Fowler said. “One of the things that really attracts me the most to this particular set of crops is they’re predominantly grown by women and they provide great nutrition for children.” Fowler doesn’t just have agriculture in his past: He and his wife have a farm in upstate New York where they do amateur crop breeding, including experimenting with the native African crop of grass pea to adapt it to the Hudson Valley. Known for being hardy enough to grow even in extremely dry conditions, grass pea is known as a “famine” crop, he said. People are forced to eat a diet entirely of the legume, which looks like a sugar snap pea when everything else dies. But the grass pea, which grows in places such as Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Somalia, contains neurotoxins that, when consumed in excess quantities, can cause paralysis. This means some people don’t want to grow or eat it, he said. “It’s a favorite crop of mine because I think that we can overcome that problem and in a way really salvage lives and improve diets and improve the soil,” Fowler said. “I’ve been in Ethiopia when there have been droughts and when the ground is so parched that it cracks open and you can put your hand down ‘til your elbow. And then on top of it would be this little grass pea plant flower. You’ve got to love something like that.” Visit Food Secured — a series that explores how to save the food system and where experts share groundbreaking solutions for a sustainable and resilient future. This is an editorially independent piece produced as part of our Food Secured series, which is funded by partners. To learn more about this series and our partners, click here.