Sabina Zaccaro and Miren Gutierrez* interview three ‘GUARDIANS OF DIVERSITY’
ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) – How many varieties of date palm or melon exist? And why should we care? IPS spoke to three ‘Guardians of Diversity’ so named by Bioversity International for their contribution to conservation.Bioversity International is the largest international research organisation dedicated to conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity.
Slimane Bekkay is a farmer in Ghardaia, Algeria. Conservation of date palm diversity has been his mission for a long time, both for scientific and cultural reasons. His lexicon of date palm varieties explains the different terms used in Arabic, Mozabite (an ethnic language in central Algeria) and French in order to provide insight into the role of the date palm in Arabic and Mozabite culture.
Jose Esquinas-Alcazar collected seeds of nearly 400 varieties of melon while a young man in his native Spain. Today, these form the basis of the national melon diversity collection. For 22 years, Esquinas-Alcazar served as secretary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) commission on genetic resources for food and agriculture; he is now professor of plant production at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and director of studies on hunger and poverty at the University of Córdoba in Spain.
Panagiotis Sainatoudis is the coordinator of Peliti, a non-governmental organisation in Greece that distributes local crop varieties to growers. To date, roughly 50,000 packages of 1,500 varieties of vegetables and cereals have been collected and distributed to farmers around Greece.
IPS: What prompted you to start collecting and tracking plants?
SLIMANE BEKKAY: What led me to date palms is their longevity and the importance that the Islamic religion bestows on the date palm. It appeared together with human beings on earth.
JOSE ESQUINAS-ALCAZAR: In the 1970s there was a tremendous amount of melon diversity in Spain. I wanted to prevent this abundance from being lost, together with traditional knowledge. When I started to collect seeds, I found 380 different varieties of melon; nowadays only 10 or 12 of them are available in the markets or cultivated at all.
PANAGIOTIS SAINATOUDIS: In January 1991 a friend asked me if I wanted to buy some seeds that he had brought from abroad. He said they came from a bank of seeds in the U.S. The parcel contained seeds and roots from various plants from all over the world; the most impressive was a variety of maize that was very colourful and was cultivated by Amerindians, a population that had almost disappeared!
The following year, I went home for the marriage of my brother. In a courtyard I saw a kontoroko black corn. I asked the owner, an old lady, for a few seeds. So I got this idea of asking people to share with me seeds from their own varieties. I collected seeds of maize, pumpkins, beans etc…From then on, wherever I went, I asked the local people which seeds they cultivate, and also how to cook and maintain them. In the beginning I did not realise their value. Only after many years I began to see their political, economic, social and cultural dimension.
