Culture, Food, and Biodiversity: Shaping Crop Evolution
Pablo B. EYZAGUIRRE
Pablo Eyzaguirre is a senior scientist in anthropology and socioeconomics at Diversity for
Livelihoods Programme, International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in Rome. A citizen
of Chile, he received his PhD in anthropology (1986) from Yale University and is a
specialist in social and ecological anthropology, tropical farming systems, and agrarian
institutions. He has taught anthropology in the US, and conducted field research on ecology,
institutions, and livelihoods in West and Central Africa. Internationally, he has worked in all
major regions of the world, and has published widely on culture and environment in agrarian
societies, home gardens, ethnobotany, nutrition, agricultural research and natural resource
management in developing countries. He is the author of Agricultural and Environmental
Research in Small Countries, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK. 1996. His most recent
book is Pablo Eyzaguirre and Olga Linares, (eds), Home Gardens and Agrobiodiversity
published by Smithsonian Books, Washington, DC. 2004. Eyzaguirre is currently President
of the International Society of Ethnobiology (2004-2006).
Cultural diversity and the continuing complex engagement of cultures with the plants that
sustain them is fundamental to agricultural biodiversity. There is however a growing concern
over several factors and processes that are breaking the bonds between culture, diversity and
crop evolution. Among these factors are (a) the erosion of food cultures, (b) the exclusion of
access to biodiversity of different cultures and marginalised groups, (c) the lack of
documentation of the local community processes for managing agricultural biodiversity and its
associated knowledge, (d) economic and sociocultural changes that promote the simplification
of agricultural ecosystems with a concomitant simplification of diets.
The paper explores several practices that strengthen the link between cultures and
crops and that maintain evolutionary processes and genetic diversity within crops. Among
these are (i) the multiple uses of crops across cultures, (ii) the way people move crops into new
environments and create new patterns of crop evolution (iii) the way cultures imbue crops and
crop diversity with ritual and cultural value that maintain distinct perspectives on a plant
species (iv) the continuing use of both wild and cultivated portions of crop genepools by
traditional agrarian communities in centers of crop genetic diversity.
Among the global movements that are increasingly supportive of the local cultures
with distinctive and multiple uses of crop diversity, is the growing concern with food quality
dietary diversity and health. At the heart of this concern is food culture and the right of
peoples to know the sources of their foods and to shape it according to the values and
preferences that define food in specific cultural contexts. The links between local cultures in
centres of crop genetic diversity, the continuing ability to maintain crop evolution and shape it
in a plurality of ways are the basis of the security and quality of our global food supply. The
paper illustrates these concepts with examples from root crops including taro and yam, grain
crops including finger millet and fonio, and horticultural crops including indigenous
vegetables in Africa, Asia and Latin America.