Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity by Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney

Abstract

404 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE in winegrower families less arduous but has simultaneously reduced employment opportunities for both men and women in the vineyards and thus deprived many small growers of the part-time wages that had helped them stay afloat earlier in the century. And, most important, technological modernization has often been refracted by the persistence of local traditions and environmental factors. In the case of Lower Languedoc and Roussillon, this has resulted in the increased production of gros rouge while the market for this commod­ ity has progressively weakened. The low prices produced by this situation have prevented southern growers from sharing in the prosperity of the more specialized northern growers and has placed their future participation in viticulture in jeopardy. Far from being a uniform and generally beneficial development, the “wine revolution” in 20th-century France has been a fragmented and uneven process in which unique local variables played (and continue to play) a major role in determining success or failure. Christopher E. Guthrie Dr. Guthrie is an associate professor of history at Tarleton State University and is completing a book manuscript on the evolution of political conflict in 19th-century Narbonne, a commercial city in the heart of the viticultural region of Lower Languedoc. Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss ofGenetic Diversity. By Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 278; tables, notes, index. $24.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). In the past decade or so, environmental concerns have focused on increasingly worldwide problems, the most obvious being global warming. At first glance, Shattering, by Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney of the Rural Advancement Fund International, focuses on a seem­ ingly small and innocuous problem—the growing loss of genetic diversity in plants. But for those who suspect genetic diversity is not a major concern in a world threatened by apparently larger issues, this book will change such thinking. Fowler and Mooney are best at describing, in rich detail, what genetic diversity in plants means, and how a loss of such diversity threatens world agriculture. They explode the myth, still touted by many agricultural scientists, that the miracles of “modern agricul­ ture,” including the hybridization of staple crops throughout the world, whose success depends on capital-intensive petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, are somehow better than local, traditional varieties that have been developed over the millennium. Besides showing the scientific reasons for the importance in main­ taining a crop’s genetic diversity, Fowler and Mooney also place the problem in an appropriate social and historical context. They note, for example, that the Irish potato was the first known crop to be TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 405 devastated because of genetic uniformity. Brought to Europe by the colonial conquerers in the 16th century, the potato, a native plant of the Andes, grew with wild abandon there and in many other parts of the world. By the 19th century it had become a staple of the rural poor in Ireland. But between 1845 and 1850, the potato blight, or Phytophtora infestans, contributed to the deaths of one to two million Irish and to the migration of as many to America and England. In the Andes, such a disease would have affected only a very small percent­ age of the thousands of varieties that grow there. Most countries, including the United States, recognize this problem and have attempted to prevent further losses by maintaining seed banks. The authors discuss these efforts and show how clearly this approach has not worked because of the inevitable degeneration of stored seeds. Their answer lies in promoting local crop varieties and discouraging the continuing process of crop uniformity that has increased at an alarming rate since World War II. There are some minor problems in this study. At times, the sources cited are out-of-date without being so acknowledged. Further, refer­ ences such as “moral majority and other right-wingers” belie the subtleties involved and show that some of this material has not been reworked since the early 1980s. Nevertheless, readers cannot help but conclude that, although U.S. agriculture is currently the most productive in the world and al­ though the American consumer pays...