Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction By Helen Anne Curry. University of California Press. 2022. Pp 321. $85 (hb); $29.95 (pb). ISBN: 9780520307681(hb)/9780520307698 (pb)

Abstract

Helen Anne Curry's book Endangered Maize provides an excellent, captivating description of the origins, ideas, and motivations behind the narratives of maize as an endangered genetic resource and how these narratives have shaped the methods and tools of conservation adopted by scientists and states. The book focuses on the role of actors from the two major participants in maize development and conservation: the United States, which has largely developed and promoted industrial agriculture while also voicing much of the early concern and spurring initial actions to conserve indigenous maize varieties, and Mexico, the centre of origin and diversity of maize where this grain is the population's primary food, deeply entwined with its culture and stirring nationalistic agendas. Interwoven into these narratives are other international players, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV), and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

While the focus on maize might seem overly specific for general interest, reigning narratives of maize conservation have served as a model for other crops. Furthermore, maize continues to be one of the principal crops feeding the world, even as a large bulk is consumed as animal feed. Recounting the history of maize and the geopolitics and control of germplasm knowledge is crucial to understanding the development of modern agricultural biotechnology, characterized by increasing privatization of genetic resources and the decline of seeds as commons.

As a historian, Curry skilfully recounts the origins and evolution of narratives of extinction of indigenous landraces and conservation strategies, highlighting the complexity of preservation initiatives and the multiple actors involved and suggesting pathways for the future. A key merit of her account is a sound understanding of underlying aspects of the biology and genetics of maize and its conservation. Accordingly, Curry organizes the chapters of her book corresponding to essential tasks in conserving plant genetic resources: collection, classification, preservation, copy, [treaty] negotiation, evaluation, and cultivation. The chapters describe these functions while telling the history of relevant individuals and institutions with respect to each topic, as well as the geopolitics behind the germplasm extinction and conservation narratives.

Endangered Maize's story begins in 1916 when Howard Biggar, a US Department of Agriculture employee, set out on a research trip to collect maize landraces from indigenous reserves across the Midwest and north-western United States. He was concerned that corn varieties grown by Native Americans were nearing extinction because of the expansion of settler farming and industrial agriculture. During his travels, Biggar met Oscar Will and his son George, seed merchants based in North Dakota who notably displayed the indigenous origin of corn, bean, and squash seeds offered in their catalogue. Following this, Curry presents a series of central actors and events in maize conservation history. She discusses the work of Henry Wallace, a politician and founder of Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company, which contributed to the rapid success of hybrids in the United States and is even now a major maize seed company. She then addresses the efforts of Edgar Anderson, Paul Mangelsdorf, and others who collected and classified maize, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation through the Office of Special Studies (OSS) in Mexico, which was subsequently extended in other Latin American nations. Her descriptions of these efforts include some Mexican actors, most notably Efraim Hernández Xolocotzi, who was trained at Cornell University and collaborated with the OSS collection and classification project and later came to be the most renewed proponent of peasant-oriented research in Mexico.

Mexico is mainly discussed through its policies regarding agricultural development, its key agricultural institutions, and non-governmental-related actors such as the Zapatistas indigenous movement (EZLN) and the campaign Sin Maíz No Hay País (Without Maize There is no Nation). Curry describes tensions among policy proposals, as well as the existence of alternative development models even before the start of the Green Revolution, and of Mexico's show of concern for food self-sufficiency issues with the brief Mexican Alimentary System project (Sistema Alimentario Mexicano; 1979–1982). She also describes Mexico's predominant role in promoting an internationalist stance at the 1981 FAO conference by proposing an International Plant Germplasm Bank which would be the “heritage of humanity”. As a result of this conference, a debate unfolded, with industrialized nations rallying around private ownership and intellectual property rights (IPR), ultimately pressing nations worldwide to align with UPOV's guidelines. Nonetheless, this conference led to a limited International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture that currently regulates international exchange of germplasm, which Mexico declined to sign despite having led the initiative.

Underlying the history of these narratives and events is the relationship between industrial agricultural programs and Indigenous farmers and their seeds, which has been marked by a not-always-subtle colonialist perspective. Aside from the widespread concern that commercial crop varieties will displace native varieties and erode agrobiodiversity is the issue of who is best suited to protect and develop seeds, and under what circumstances. As Curry highlights, until the 1980s, maize conservation efforts did not contemplate indigenous or other farm communities as actors suited for this task, or even that their knowledge was adequate for this purpose. Rather, indigenous seeds were seen as detached from their cultural context and viewed as genetic resources that must be preserved by scientists and government agencies. Collection, classification, preservation, and reproduction of maize seeds were all part of ex situ conservation strategies that relied on public and private funding. Even today, the most iconic crop conservation project is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, a “frozen” facility that holds over 5000 plant species, including more than 35,000 samples of maize.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of alternative perspectives regarding two related issues: the key role of indigenous and other farming communities in agrobiodiversity conservation and farmers' rights over their seeds in a global context in which breeders' IPR over plant germplasm had proliferated—which was soon further exacerbated by the rise of biotechnology and the rigorousness of patenting laws to protect IPRs for genetically modified crops (Pechlaner, 2012).

Although debates and disputes regarding ex situ versus in situ conservation and seeds as inherited commons versus seeds as commodities protected by IPRs are far from resolved, farmers have unquestionably become key political actors contesting the narratives of extinction and conservation that have prevailed for over a century. The transnational peasant movement La Vía Campesina and hundreds of other rural and urban grassroots initiatives throughout the world have reclaimed peoples' rights to food and seed sovereignty, denouncing the increasing concentration of corporate power within the global seed sector, as well as negative environmental and social consequences of industrial agriculture and free trade agreements (Peschard & Shalini, 2020). Many of these initiatives coincide with one of Curry's key claims: “conservation is best achieved by continuing to develop farmers' varieties […] Native and indigenous collectives reject the declaration of the sweeping, inevitable loss of crop varieties—and other foods and lifeways—and champion instead accounts of resilience, resistance, and adaptiveness” (p. 233). Curry's analysis of the history of maize contributes to understanding the complexity of how these disputes originated and have evolved over the years.

Curry concludes with an example of what she terms “creative remixing” by discussing the Glass Gem variety of corn, which became a “poster child” for recovery of heirloom seeds, but which in fact is a recent variety. Based on seeds collected in the 1980s, Carl Barnes “allowed different kinds of corn to cross-pollinate in the field and selected new types from the subsequent mosaic, letting environment and interest dictate the choice. ‘I think most Indians did this too.’ he reflected in an interview” (p. 231). This may well be the case. A similar story has been described for Ancho maize from the Mexican state of Morelos (Khoury et al., 2022), which is a large grain variety that receives a premium price due to its popularity for use in pozole, a speciality dish in Mexico. This variety has evolved recently, possibly because of “creative remixing” of previous landraces.

While commercial maize varieties have indeed become predominant in the United States and other countries, this has not been the case for Mexico. Perhaps the main weakness of Curry's book is its failure to address the fact that well over half of Mexico's eight million hectares that are cultivated annually are planted with farmers' varieties (Bellon et al., 2018). This is not a minor feat since, as described in the book, the efforts to produce hybrids and other commercial varieties have been going since the late 1940s. Although commercial varieties have had their success stories in Mexico, to date, the total surface area planted with first-generation hybrids does not exceed one-third of maize cropland. As Mexico is the centre of origin of maize, Curry's failure to integrate the scale of conservation of maize diversity in Mexico into her overall narrative appears to be a shortcoming, in particular regarding the evolutionary role of growers in her conclusion.

Curry states, “[t]he problem is not that crop diversity is being lost. It is that so many people have abdicated the duty to create it, not the least by the inevitable loss in the stories they tell. Broadcasting extinction as the problem invites the solution of salvage, storage, and defence against change. Advertising the need to reengage creation—to reimagine, revamp, and retool crops—might prompt a different approach” (p. 233). Curry's work joins other scholars (Fenzi & Bonneuil, 2016) who are abandoning “timeworn stories” (p. 4) and enabling […] to “assess anew the complexity of the work ahead” (p. 12) regarding conservation of crop genetic resources. Endangered Maize makes a valuable contribution towards this end and is a significant read not only for professionals interested in crop genetic resource conservation but also for those interested in agrarian change. As stated above, although the debate over agricultural seeds as intellectual property versus commons is not resolved, this dispute has had and will continue to have considerable effects for the trajectory of agrarian change. Endangered Maize does not specifically focus on this debate and its history; however, its strong background on the ideas of genetic conservation and use are groundwork for the disputes over the rights to seeds and genetic resources—a fundamental input in all agrarian structures.