Conserving Crop Biodiversity: Navigating Politics and Climate Change to Create a Global System

A couple of months ago a journalist from a magazine asked me to name the five most important or influential books in my life. I had to start off with a little book called Zeek the Rabbit which hooked me on reading when I was about seven or eight years old, and that left me four more slots. One of those slots I gave to a remarkable book that I keep going back to over and over again. It’s a haunting and informative book called Feeding the Ten Billion written by an Australian plant physiologist named Lloyd Evans. Lloyd looked at different moments in human history, going all the way back to when the population was five million and then 50 million, 100 million, a billion, 2 billion, and 3 billion. He asked what kind of food system was in place for each of those periods and how the way in which people procured or produced food had changed as the population grew, as the technology changed and as the environment changed. Today, as the population races along towards the nine billion expected in 2050, this is a question that should be examined. Just as important, perhaps, as asking how are we going to feed two and a half billion more people on planet earth, is asking how are we going to deal with an extra two degrees of temperature, or more.