💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › geoff-hall-reading-nikolay-vavilov.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 10:32:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Reading Nikolay Vavilov Author: Geoff Hall Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: agriculture, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #381, Russia, science Notes: From Fifth Estate #381, Summer-Fall 2009
A Soviet agronomist travels the world to help end famine and ironically
dies of starvation in Stalin’s prison
“It seemed that we had finally passed this very difficult trail so that
we could mount the horses and continue on. But suddenly from the cliff
above the trail, two gigantic eagles flew out from a nest, circling on
enormous wings. My horse shied and bolted, galloping along the trail and
the ovring. The rein was unexpectedly torn out of my hand and I had to
hang on to the mane. Above my head were cliffs but below me, 1000 metres
down in the deep ravine, rumbled the beautiful, blue Pyandzh, the upper
reaches of one of the great rivers of Inner Asia. That is the
experience, which afterwards this traveller remembers best. Such moments
steel one for the rest of one’s life: they prepare a scientist for all
difficulties, all adversities, and everything unexpected. In this
respect, my first great expedition was especially useful.” (1916, Five
Continents)
The man who wrote these lines was Nikolay Vavilov (1887–1943), Russian
geneticist, plant breeder, plant geographer, and first President of the
Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences who, for almost two
decades, had at his disposal countless experimental stations with a
total staff of 25,000 scattered throughout the Soviet Union.
Vavilov wanted to increase farm productivity to eliminate recurring
Russian famines. Early on, he defended the Mendelian theory that genes
are passed on unchanged from one generation to the next. He became the
main opponent of Stalin’s favored scientist, Trofim Lysenko, by speaking
out against the neo-Lamarckian agronomist’s belief in the inheritance of
acquired characteristics.
Little known by non-Russians until the release of The Murder of Nikolai
Vavilov by Peter Pringle (2008) and Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing
Nikolay Vavilov s Quest to End Famine by Gary Paul Nabhan (2009),
Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD secret police in 1940 while collecting
samples in the Ukraine, and disappeared.
In a supreme irony, the architect of Russia’s increased food producing
capacity died an ignominious death in a Stalinist prison from starvation
after being sentenced to death at a secret trial for espionage,
sabotage, and wrecking.
Released documents showed that before his show trial, Stalin’s police,
seeking a confession, had subjected Vavilov to 1,700 hours of brutal
interrogation over 400 sessions, some lasting 13 hours, carried out by
an officer known for his extreme methods. Before his arrest, during the
long rise in influence of Lysenko, beginning in the 1920s, Vavilov,
unlike Galileo, had refused to repudiate his beliefs, saying, “We shall
go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our
convictions.”
Who was Vavilov and why does time cement his stature as almost a 20^(th)
century Darwin?
In a 2005 article in the Journal of Bioscience, Moscow geneticist Ilya
Zacharov described Vavilov as “a person of inexhaustible energy and
unbelievable efficiency. During his relatively short life, he
accomplished a surprising amount: in his expeditions he travelled all
over the world, he formulated very important postulates in genetics, he
wrote more than ten books, and carried out the gigantic task of
organizing a system of agricultural institutions in the USSR.”
Vavilov spoke many tongues fluently and learned the essentials of
numerous local languages spoken by farmers he encountered in his
world-wide travels.
Nabhan interviewed various farm experts in the countries he visited. One
in Ethiopia said that Vavilov had “an uncanny ability...to pinpoint
areas of high diversity.” An elderly agronomist in Kazakhstan, who as a
boy had guided Vavilov into forests of wild apples, remembered that “he
figured out everything...from little more than a day in the field.”
Indeed Vavilov moved at breakneck speed, often commenting, “time is
short, and there is so much to do. One must hurry.”
Despite knowing something about Lysenko, ethno-botany, and biodiversity
hotspots due to professional floristic work in Quebec, Guerrero, and
temperate wetlands, I never learned Vavilov’s name well enough to retain
it until reading Nabhan’s persuasive book. I asked friends
professionally linked to agronomy outside the U.S., in Canada, France,
and Cuba, about Vavilov. Only Anel Matos Vinals, a field botanist in the
Cuban Sierra del Cristal, was familiar with his name and work, having
participated in a project inspired by Vavilov’s writings, the study of
wild mountain relatives of Cuban cultivated plants.
To improve the standard of nutrition for his people, Vavilov wanted to
select and introduce resistant crop varieties adapted to Russia’s
varying conditions. To use the planet as his garden of Eden was dazzling
and ambitious, wrote agronomist Jack Harlan in Crops and Man (1975), “It
was his plan to collect and assemble all of the useful germplasm of all
crops that had potential in the Soviet Union, to study and classify the
material, and to utilize it in a national plant breeding effort.”
Vavilov launched a worldwide plant exploration program and organized —
and often led on horseback — 115 expeditions to 64 countries (including
Afghanistan, Iran, Taiwan, Korea, Spain, Algeria, Palestine, Eritrea,
Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, and in the U.S., California,
Florida and Arizona) to collect seeds of crop varieties and their wild
ancestors. To begin, Vavilov concentrated on “areas in which agriculture
has been practiced for a very long time and in which indigenous
civilizations arose” (Harlan).
Inspired by renowned Swiss botanist Alphonse De Candolle’s attempt in
1882 to deduce the region of origin of many cultivated plants, Vavilov
predicted that by analyzing geographic patterns of variation and mapping
regions where genetic diversity was concentrated, the origin of a
domesticated plant could be found, especially, “if much of the variation
was controlled by dominant genes and if the region also contained wild
races of the crop in question” (Harlan).
As he gathered data on the back of mules, Vavilov postulated the
existence of eight world centers of origin of cultivated plants, often
associated with mountainous areas and their tribal peoples. After
modification, these centers of origin later became “Vavilovian Centers
of Diversity.”
Later study showed that the phenomenon of centers of variation is real
for many crops but not always related to the region of origin of a crop
per se, i.e., where first domestication took place. After his
exploration phase was cut short in 1933 by Stalin’s order, Vavilov
developed concepts not only of secondary crops derived from the weeds of
fields of more ancient primary crops, but also of secondary centers to
account for the fact that centers of diversity may not be the same as
centers of origin. Much later, Harlan considered data still too sketchy
to do more than identify three broad independent systems of origin, each
involving centers and non-centers of first domestications.
Nabhan points out that the concept of Vavilovian centers of diversity
has been one of enduring usefulness to geneticists, conservation
biologists, and biogeographers. Vavilov’s analyses of patterns of
concentration of crop varieties helped lead to the realization that
there are patterns of concentration of wild species (biological hot
spots) and centers of origin of ornamental plants.
The results of Vavilov’s efforts to pinpoint where our food comes from
included the creation in Leningrad of an international seed bank,
maintained with frequent rejuvenation in field lots, of 200,000
recognizable forms of 2,500 species of food crops.
With the encirclement of Leningrad in 1941 by Hitler’s Operation
Northern Light, this huge collection of living seeds and roots was in
danger not only of falling into the hands of informed Nazi geneticists
like Heinz Brucher, but also of being used for food by the suffering
local population. Before the arrival of German troops, Stalin had agreed
to the secret evacuation of Russia’s greatest art museum, the Hermitage,
housed in the Winter Palace. But Stalin did nothing to evacuate the seed
bank in Vavilov’s institute, considering it to be an indulgence of
“bourgeois science.” 700,000 starved during the three-year siege,
including many colleagues in Vavilov’s institute who barricaded
themselves in with the hidden collection and managed to protect it.
These researchers refused to eat the specimens, viewing them as an
irreplaceable means for feeding humanity after the Nazi blockade and
their own deaths would be forgotten.
In 1969, following 25 years of Lysenko’s domination of Soviet biology,
much of the authenticity and germinability of the collection had been
lost. Nevertheless, Russian writer Genady Golubev wrote in 1979 that
“80% of all the Soviet Union’s cultivated areas are sown with varieties”
derived from Vavilov’s collection, including “over a thousand valuable
varieties known as ‘Vavilov.’”
Other results included over 350 publications by Vavilov, some issued
posthumously, including his principal work, Five Continents, the
narrative that underlies both Nabhan and Pringle.
Nabhan, who knows his subject probably better than anyone, as his
ethnobotanical experience, selected Vavilov itinerary and source
materials attest, did a more than competent job of researching and
presenting the Russian’s story and legacy. With Pringle, he shares the
great merit of giving Vavilov an audience in the West.
By his title, Where Our Food Comes From, Nabhan reminds us that crop
varieties providing the world’s food descend from wild biota that are
absent from over 80 percent of the earth’s land surface, including most
of the developed world, and that many basic domesticated varieties were
selected and preserved by peoples in remote areas.
He also reminds us that “global food security” depends on variability
within crop species, a variability that has declined 75 percent over the
past century. He lists the causes of this crop genetic erosion, “due to
the actions of the poor or the rich, or both” and throughout the book
suggests ways and a philosophy to stop this one-way trend.
In countries selected from many visited by Vavilov, Nabhan uses maps,
pictures, and text to compare current crops and farmers with those
Vavilov encountered between the World Wars — using, in at least one
case, detailed field notes that escaped NKVD raids — and allows us a
glimpse of Vavilov’s previous work.
Nabhan devotes space to Vavilov’s scapegoating by Stalin for the Russian
famine of 1933, to the rise of Lysenko, and to the dark repression that
fell upon Vavilov, his colleagues and their Research Institute as it
quietly worked to develop crop strains from its unique collection of
genetic material.
An admirer of a man who set the stage for the exploration and
preservation of the earth’s genetic resources and created before its
time an international seed bank to fight famine, Nabhan demonstrates
convincingly that, on the one hand, widespread chronic hunger today is
not a result of low seed diversity in gene banks, but rather a lack of
distribution, and on the other seed collections must be safeguarded as
“buffers against famine caused by plagues, pestilence, floods, and other
catastrophes,” including neglect and warfare.
Here is where the creation and replenishment of modern local, national
and global seed banks confront the issue of agricultural biodiversity as
intellectual property, much discussed by Vandana Shiva, an Indian
physicist who has authored a dozen books on the ramifications of what
she calls “biopiracy,” or the theft of germplasm from the Third World
and its copyright by multinationals.
Was Vavilov a biopirate? A one-dimensional pirate Vavilov possessing
“uncanny abilities to pinpoint areas of high diversity” on the payroll
of an earth-poisoning corporation would be the opposite of the real
Vavilov of the 1930s, devoted to the collective goal of feeding the
world through subtle detection and meticulously sampling of crop
varieties or ancestors in the field. What person in any country visited
by Vavilov would wish that he had not left behind descriptions of
agriculture and crops and sometimes living strains in Russia that could
be returned to the source locality?
In The Living Field (1995), Jack Harlan wrote, “The world of N.I.
Vavilov is vanishing and the sources of genetic variability he knew are
drying up. The patterns of variation [that Vavilov described on his
expeditions] may no longer be discernible in a few decades and living
traces of the long coevolution of cultivated plants may well disappear
forever.”
In his foreward to Nabhan’s book, K.B. Wilson of the Christensen Fund
acknowledges an ambiguity underlying the work that can only be explained
by the stark differences in attitude three generations ago: “Vavilov is
a hero for environmental and social justice activists troubled by the
unintended consequences of that same post-WWII crop breeding revolution
that Vavilov’s discoveries helped to usher in. These consequences
included the spread of industrial farming and the ‘green revolution’
that contributed to the destruction of diversity in crops and their wild
relatives.”
There are some negatives to Nabhan’s book. He causes recurrent
irritation when he equates wild diversity with cultural diversity,
implying that primitive peoples enhance biodiversity by their presence
in an ecosystem and impoverish biodiversity by their absence, notions
that ecologists don’t accept, but that most readers are not equipped to
challenge.
There are good reasons to defend native agriculture without claiming
miraculous virtues. We depend on agriculture for survival, but this was
not always the case. As Harlan wrote in 1975, “Crops are artifacts made
and molded by man as much as a flint arrowhead, a stone ax-head, or a
clay pot... The threat of famine has become a characteristic of
agricultural systems; we have no evidence that this was a part of
preagricultural systems.
Nabhan himself quotes a colleague as saying, “Crop biodiversity is the
biodiversity that people made.” In a 1998 article by a close student of
Vavilov, J.G. Hawkes mentioned, “If we consider the world flora, even a
quick survey will show us that there are many areas of plant diversity
which have little to do with cultivated plant origins.”
Nabhan also puts an inordinate amount of blame on conservationists for
the loss of crop varieties due to conflicts between native rights and
park creation in the tropics, although park creation is at the extreme
bottom of the list of the causes of world crop genetic erosion.
Vavilov’s own writings do not confuse agriculture with nature. In Five
Continents, he marvelled at nature regularly and I would be surprised if
the “prominent scholars and field scientists” mentioned by Nabhan as
presenting Vavilov to the West in the 1950s are any different. This
passage about Ethiopia in 1927 is typical of Vavilov’s sensibilities:
“Fields had disappeared. The area had become more sparsely populated and
increasingly more beautiful. Ahead a panorama of a picturesque valley
opened up. In hollows and along deep ravines there were groves of wild
palms (Phoenix abyssinica Drude), a relative of the date palm.”
Nearly thirty years before it was published in English in 1997, Maryland
botanist E.E. Leppik (1969) mentioned in Economic Botany Vavilov’s
“principal work, entitled Five Continents. This was a scientific survey
of his travels and explorations. It was to be published in two
comprehensive volumes. For this purpose, he prepared extensive
manuscripts with numerous original photographs... After Vavilov’s death,
his valuable materials and manuscripts were destroyed. Fortunately his
typist, A.S. Mishina, appreciating and comprehending the value of these
papers, managed to salvage portions of the major manuscripts. It was
published posthumously in Russian in 1962.”
Without the English translation of Five Continents, Nabhan’s and
Pringle’s well-researched books would have been orders of magnitude more
difficult to write, and much less interesting to read. Since Five
Continents can be freely downloaded from the publisher, the
International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, no readers of either
Nabhan or Pringle should deprive themselves of Vavilov’s own account of
his expeditions.