Endangered Maize

Maize, or simply corn—as it is known in North America—is the most abundant grain in the world with over one billion tons grown every year. Yet, an overwhelming majority of the millions of hectares planted with corn, globally, are strikingly alike. This simple fact, for over a century, has had scientists, breeders, and conservationists in a frenzy to conserve the genetic diversity of corn. Helen Anne Curry's latest work documents this conservation effort and the narratives of endangerment and extinction that have been created to bolster it since the nineteenth century. In the process, Curry reveals how the process of “salvaging” local and indigenous varieties of corn before their “inevitable” conquest by modern breeders' strains—with all the overt and implicit imperialism entailed therein—has occurred at the expense of efforts to support the farmers and communities still growing those particular “primitive,” yet genetically valuable, types of corn. Implicated in this story of missed opportunities and unexamined assumptions are not only scientists and conservationists but also the very idea of the inexorable triumph of industrial agriculture. Endangered Maize is more a history of an idea than a history of a plant. Yet it is essential reading for anyone interested in crop biodiversity and its supposed erasure.The chapters are organized to reflect the very process of seed conservation: collection, classification, storage, replication, international negotiation, evaluation, and cultivation. The first two chapters trace the fieldwork of a variety of seed collectors, including United States Department of Agriculture researcher Howard Biggar, seed merchant George Will, and academics such as Hugh Cutler, collecting seeds among Indigenous farmers across the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Chapters 3 and 4 document the collaborations of well-known breeder-botanists Paul Mangelsdorf, Edwin Wellhausen, and Edgar Anderson. These men served as the architects of crop conservation in the Western Hemisphere. Working alongside nongovernmental organizations and research institutes such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, with key positions on transnational committees such as the Maize Committee, they created and managed a network of seed storage facilities from Brazil to the United States in the context of the Cold War.The heart of the argument and the most compelling section of the book, however, begins with chapter 5. Curry uncovers how the rise of agribusiness and the corn blight epidemic in the United States led to the launching of the “seed wars” at the 1981 Food and Agriculture Organization Conference. There, Mexico's delegates introduced a resolution demanding equal access to intellectual property in plant varieties, on behalf of the Global South—where most of the genetic diversity in crop seeds came from but also where farmers remained largely dependent on Western multinational firms for their seeds. Mexico's efforts were thwarted by private seed companies and their proponents at international organizations such as the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Instead of seed banks being managed by the United Nations, as per the Mexican resolution, they remained at research institutions such as the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center founded by the Rockefeller Foundation (functioning in this case as an extension of the US government and Western interests). In chapter 7, Curry emphasizes how from the very beginnings of the concern for crop diversity, farmers everywhere have resisted the so-called inevitable displacement of local “unimproved” varieties. Since the 1990s small pockets of conservators have practiced “in situ” conservation, where farmers have been encouraged to grow indigenous varieties instead of relegating them to cold storage facilities. It is the clear intention of the author to encourage such in situ efforts by expounding on the failures of the mainstream methods described in the rest of the book.A book that weaves together so many themes—conservation science, industrial agriculture, international treaties, Indigenous farmers, colonial policies, and multinational corporations—must have some gaps and weaknesses. The most significant of these is that even though Curry includes Indigenous actors in her research, mainly in the first chapter, her engagement with Indigenous perspectives is limited, especially considering her promise in the introduction “to document many displacements and effacements of indigenous knowledges and cultures” and to align with “the project of decoloniality . . . [and] indigenous food sovereignty” (11). Readers are not shown exactly how narratives of endangerment impacted farmers, Indigenous or otherwise, at the level of the individual. Finally, while the author strongly challenges the veracity of the narrative of extinction, hybrid and genetically modified seeds controlled by large corporations have—resistance notwithstanding—spread around the world, undoubtedly displacing local varieties. By the end, this central paradox of persistent resistance amid the stark reality of homogenous monocropping and widespread industrial agriculture is not quite resolved. With that said, Endangered Maize remains deeply researched and authoritative in its conclusions. It is a must-read for scholars of corn from any field as well as an important addition to histories of agricultural biodiversity and conservation

Agriculture · Agroforestry · Archaeology · Biology · Endangered species · Environmental ethics · Geography · Indigenous · Political science · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Ecology

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