Emigrant plants and people

In the last 500 years, advances in transportation, chiefly maritime, made emigrants of even more plants. Species from the New World, such as beans, maize and rubber, were carried to Europe, Africa and Asia. New World tomatoes combined with pasta made from Near East wheat created the starting point for what is now the "traditional" dinner in today's Rome. Rice and soybeans from Asia travelled to the Americas where they became major crops. Maize, whose origin and primary area of diversity is Central America, has a major secondary source of diversity in Africa where many distinct types have been selected and developed over hundreds of years. In some cases the variation in such an area may exceed that in the ancestral homeland of the crop.

"North America is almost completely dependent on species originally domesticated in other regions for its food and industrial crops. Sub-Saharan Africa depends on species domesticated elsewhere for 87 per cent of its crops. It is estimated that 69 per cent of developing countries acquire more than half of their crop production from crops domesticated in other regions.

"Even countries that are particularly rich in biodiversity still rely heavily on crops and hence, to a considerable extent, genetic resources originating in other parts of the world. In Brazil, for example, nearly half the population's energy from plant sources comes from the three major cereals -- rice, wheat and maize -- all of which originated in other parts of the world." -- from "Access to Plant Genetic Resources and the Equitable Sharing of Benefits: A Contribution to the Debate on Systems for the Exchange of Germplasm", a feasibility study prepared by the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute for the FAO Commission on Plant Genetic Resources, April 1996. (See "More Reading".)

Unfortunately, human migration can also mean a loss of knowledge about useful plants. In modern times, there has been mass migration from the farm to the town or city. When farmers become urban dwellers, they no longer pass along from generation to generation their special knowledge of the uses to which certain plants can be put. Such "ethnobotanic" knowledge may never be recaptured, even by the best of modern science.

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