The Lighthouse and the Potato: Internalizing the Value of Crop Genetic Diversity

1 Introduction The incongruous juxtaposition of my title, " The Lighthouse and the Potato, " refers to two public goods of incalculable value – safe navigation and crop genetic resources. Neither lighthouse keepers nor the farmers who cultivate genetic diversity in potatoes and other crops provide their respective benefits to humankind without cost. The costs of lighthouses are relatively easy to measure – construction of the tower, fuel for the light, wages for the keeper. The costs of sustaining crop genetic resources are less evident, but can be viewed as the income foregone by not switching to new varieties, new crops, or other economic pursuits. This foregone income is the functional equivalent of the costs of building and operating a lighthouse to provide the public good of safe navigation. The increasing availability of more profitable alternatives to growing traditional crops means that society must find ways to sustain diverse crop genetic resources and the environments where they are created and maintained – the small farms of poor farmers. We have long recognized that we cannot simply depend on the goodwill of coastal dwellers to maintain lighthouses for ships at sea (Coase 1974, van Zandt 1993). Gradually, we are becoming aware that we cannot depend on the goodwill of farmers to conserve crop genetic resources. Crop genetic resources are a natural asset comprised of the genes of domesticated plants, together with the dynamic human and ecological contexts which are indispensable to a crop's evolutionary system. Abundance and diversity of these resources are concentrated in locations where crops were originally domesticated and/or long evolved under heterogeneous conditions. These locations are known as " Vavilov Centers " in honor of the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, who pioneered the study of crop origins in the early 20 th century. Today, the primary stewards of crop genetic resources in these centers of diversity, which continue to provide the foundation for agricultural development around the world, are poor farmers. This natural asset is increasingly threatened, however, by the economic marginalization of poor farmers, and by the competitive disadvantage of traditional crops compared to modern industrial agriculture. Genetic erosion, the loss of biological diversity and resources, is being caused by the replacement of local varieties by improved ones or by different crops altogether, and by the exodus of farmers to non-farm employment. The farmers who historically have provided crop genetic resources as a public good receive …