COLUMN ONE : Dangers of Narrowing the Field : Thousands of plant and animal species have been lost in the drive to boost farm yields through technology. This threatens the world’s delicate balance and limits our ability to develop nature’s treasures.

There’s big trouble down on the farm.

Revolutionary successes in the quest to feed a hungry, ever-growing world are also nonchalantly decimating nature’s kingdom.

So this is progress?

Since the beginning of this century, 75% of the genetic diversity of the world’s agricultural crops has been lost. In Europe, about half of all breeds of domestic animals that existed in 1900 are extinct. A third of the breeds that remain could be gone in 20 years.

About 6,000 apple varieties that grew on American farms 100 years ago are gone. Globally, domesticated animals are disappearing at the rate of one breed a week in a rapidly accelerating and potentially apocalyptic chronicle of human destruction.

Ironically, this is occurring as a byproduct of modern technological sophistication: Farmers cultivate for maximum efficiency and yield, soon concentrating on the best, most productive few. This, however, leaves more and more species--plants and animals--to fall into disuse and obscurity.

The dangers of the massive genetic erosion that results alarm specialists at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization here who monitor the world’s plant and animal life. They call it “a catastrophe in the making.”

“Evolution has always led to extinction or mutation--man can’t stop that,” said Hartwig de Haen, FAO assistant director general in charge of agriculture. “But we are seeing a dramatic decline in the number of useful plant and animal species. And this time--often unconsciously--it is provoked by human action. We have an obligation to maintain what is left as a promise for the future.”

Editors of a new study on genetic resources published this fall say that while international public attention focuses on tropical forests, “biodiversity in farmers’ fields is at least as significant, since it underpins our basic food security.”

A pioneering FAO World Watch List, published last month, shows that of about 4,000 known breeds of farm animals, 1,000 are threatened by extinction. On a detailed, depressing endangered list are California’s San Clemente goat and Santa Cruz sheep; Florida Cracker cattle; the Rocky Mountain horse; the Navajo-Churro sheep; Maine’s Katahdin sheep, Iowa’s Cream Draft horse; the Tennessee Fainting goat; the red Minnesota No. 1 pig, and the black Montana No. 1 pig.

“Only about a decade ago did we become aware that organisms were being lost in great numbers,” said Robin Welcomme, a senior FAO fisheries officer. “Once we began documenting what we are actually losing, people got very scared very quickly.”

In an otherwise glum picture, there is good news: International recognition of the need to conserve diversity among animals and plants officially comes of age this month. A protective Convention on Biological Diversity goes into effect among 34 nations that have ratified it. An additional 120 countries, including the United States, have signed but not yet ratified the accord, which establishes global priorities, policies and mechanisms for preserving biodiversity.

“The convention is a flag, an alert, a warning,” Welcomme said. “There is no doubt we are losing a considerable amount of our biodiversity at a progressively increasing rate. But the convention can’t solve the problem. Individual countries must do that.”

While the convention is widely seen as a key step toward improved international protection and conservation of genetic stocks, incalculable damage has already been done, FAO experts lament. And more occurs every day.

FAO specialist Cary Fowler was an avid apple sleuth back home in North Carolina. He counted 7,091 American varieties listed in state and federal reports at the turn of the century. Comparing old lists with ones of apples now grown in Europe and North America, he found that 86% of the old varieties are functionally extinct--no longer known to be grown.

“It was through control of the shattering of wild seeds (and their pods) that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world’s food supply,” said Fowler, co-author of the book “Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity.” He is in Rome helping to develop a first overview of the state of the world’s genetic plant resources and a companion global action plan. Publication date: 1996.

“Most people think of biodiversity as butterflies and ferns, but we are not talking so much about species diversity as diversity within species,” Fowler said. “Extinction is not simply an event that happens when the last one dies, but a process. Extinction is what happens when a species loses its ability to evolve.”

Biodiversity can be quite a mouthful, but the National Academy of Sciences defines it simply as “the variety and variability among living organisms, and the ecological complexes in which they occur.” Think of biodiversity as the palette that nature has bestowed on humanity. With every new extinction, a color vanishes forever, diminishing both the artist and any potential creations.

Diminished biodiversity is a function of need and, sometimes, of greed: Farmers in India, Italy and Indiana all seek the best return for their investment of land, time and money. Their everyday agenda is very different from that of agrocrats in Rome and the representatives of public and private groups around the world that increasingly fly biodiversity’s banner.

Imagine the reaction if you tried to persuade a poor farmer in Botswana, Bolivia or Bangladesh to plant some secondary local variety of a crop because the survival of its genetic code might prove important a century or two hence.

The supreme irony is that erosion of agricultural diversity is an unhappy byproduct of the industrialized world’s responses to the specter of world hunger: the genetically engineered Green Revolution that feeds the greatest population in the planet’s history.

Improved seeds, monoculture (cultivating just one crop), fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation all make for high-input, high-output farming: bumper crops--if nature smiles--but at great genetic cost as old-timer varieties are forsaken for the latest, bio-engineered marvel.

“Our genetic diversity is a patrimony of 10,000 years of agriculture--farmers passing seeds from generation to generation. But a negative effect of the Green Revolution has been to destroy thousands of varieties of plants,” said Jose T. Esquinas-Alcazar, secretary of the FAO commission on plant genetic resources. “We can’t stop improving crops when the world is hungry, but neither can we allow great genetic losses to continue.

“If we don’t preserve what is left, we mortgage the future,” he said. “Genetic diversity is a kind of bridge between development and conservation.”

Today’s emerging science of biotechnology can foster biodiversity in such areas as improved collection, identification and storage of useful genes.

Without conservation, though, FAO specialists fear that biotechnology could unleash a harrowing new wave of genetic erosion. A company in Chile, for example, can propagate up to 10 million eucalyptus seedlings, all clones, in an automated nursery.

“Similarly, commercial semen and embryo transfer services for domestic animals raise concern about the displacement of traditional livestock breeds,” an FAO report says.

New crops have replaced traditional and wild varieties on a vast scale. By 1990, in the fourth decade of the Green Revolution, new crop varieties covered half the world’s wheat and rice lands. One-third of American prairies are planted under one variety of wheat today. Agronomists say that just 10 varieties of rice will soon cover three-quarters of the areas where 30,000 varieties once were harvested.

There may be 50,000 edible plants in the world today. But only about 150 species are cultivated, and just three of them--rice, corn and wheat--account for 60% of the proteins and calories derived from plants. “The tendency toward monoculture and intensive agriculture has laid us open to catastrophic outbreaks of disease and pests,” Welcomme said.

The European potato blight, which rewrote the history of 19th-Century Ireland--and America--is back. Scientists are scrambling in the Andes, the potato’s birthplace, for resistant varieties. In the United States, researchers have been fortunate to find resistant native stock to replant in fields ravaged by vine blight in the Napa and Sonoma valleys.

“We exist in a world of refined and sophisticated crops adapted to human demands,” Welcomme said. “If demands change, or the climate, or if disease strikes, we lose the crop if wild ancestors are not around as replacement.”

There are more plants than animals, but the same imperative exists. If you don’t think much about wild turkeys, think about this: Virtually all turkeys mass-farmed in the United States are of the broad-breasted variety that makes Thanksgivings memorable. So broad-breasted, in fact, they have lost the ability to procreate. Without artificial insemination, the broad-breasts would vanish after a single generation.

“If you ask why we should weep for the endangered (Ohio) Mulefoot pig or the (Alabama) Guinea hog, the answer is we don’t necessarily know all their values,” said FAO animal production officer David Steane. “Breeds have developed over thousands of years, often in specific environments, and we lack records. But with breeds being lost at a high rate, we must maintain diversity to be able to maneuver.

“As a practical matter,” he said, “we can’t keep every breed. But we need to know more about what we still have. Using (laboratory research), we could establish what breeds contribute most to diversity. Then, perhaps, if it was a question of three endangered breeds we’d know which one to save.”

Precisely because it is impossible to foresee possible uses for plants and animals, scientists recoil at the prospect of genetic loss.

Who could have imagined that a gene borrowed from an Arctic fish would make it possible to grow strawberries in subfreezing temperatures?

China’s Taihu pig doesn’t have much lean meat. But the beast is highly prolific--as would be its potential lean, hybrid offspring, which would be a boon in parts of the world where pigs are the closest many families ever get to savings accounts.

There are: African cattle that have grown resistant to sleeping sickness; pigs in northeast China that thrive despite temperature extremes; sheep in Scotland that eat seaweed. It would be a tragedy, specialists say, if breeds that are adapted to particular, local environments vanished in the name of higher production or homogenized breeding.

There have already been enough mistakes. Californian Devin M. Bartley, a fishery resource officer, notes that up to 200 species of native fish may have become extinct in Africa’s Lake Victoria after the introduction of a voracious Nile perch as a sports fish. The perch, which grows to up to 50 pounds, is good news for new-breed commercial fishermen around the lake but bad news for nature.

“Wild strains of fish must be maintained,” Bartley said. “Ultimately, the native resources are the reservoir of diversity and of the future of the species.”

Over the past decade, FAO has developed a global network on plant genetic resources to promote conservation, sustainable use and unrestricted access to plant germ plasms for breeding.

Among provisions of the new conservation convention is a call for increased plant and embryo storage facilities around the world. Countries are urged to preserve endangered plants and animals in traditional farm settings to allow them to evolve naturally. Subsidizing farmers who work with endangered species rather than more productive alternatives is an idea whose time has come, FAO specialists say.

That raises one of many questions about biodiversity still to be resolved between the gene-rich developing nations and the technology-rich industrialized world.

Nature has always been at its most fecund in tropical and subtropical areas: Panama contains more species than all of North America. A 13.7-square-kilometer patch of cloud forest in Costa Rica contains almost 1,500 plant species--more than in all of Britain. So it is that the raw genetic material for tomorrow’s engineered plants and animals, foods and drugs is most often found in the world’s poorest countries.

Who then should benefit in what measure from the wealth of biodiversity?

Shouldn’t countries that husband the raw material, most in the Third World, have full access to seed banks derived from it, most in the industrialized nations?

Should developing countries, which have most of the biodiversity that needs protecting, be reimbursed for costs implementing the new convention that exceed its benefit to them?

What method of recompense should be established to pay farmers and indigenous communities for the biodiversity they have helped evolved?

This all is a matter of lively international debate, and with good cause, because the potential gain is enormous: Genes from a tomato found on the Galapagos Islands have created a hybrid that can be irrigated with one-third salt water.

FAO notes that University of California researchers have filed for a patent on an extract from a West African plant that is 100,000 times sweeter than sugar. Ohio scientists are seeking to patent an extract from the African soapberry to fight harmful zebra mussels in the Great Lakes.

Typically, profits from the ongoing “Gene Revolution” principally benefit multinational companies and their industrialized-world customers. FAO estimates that the market value of pharmaceuticals derived from plants used in traditional medicine at $43 billion. “Less than 0.0001% of the profits has gone to the indigenous people who led researchers to them,” FAO says.

More than medicine is at stake. It is now possible to chemically replicate the vanilla plant’s flavor in a vat. Nice if you’re making ice cream, perhaps, but disquieting if your family’s been harvesting vanilla pods in Madagascar for generations.

Indeed, a long-range risk to biodiversity is the international consumer leveling that is rapidly exporting Western tastes and products, soft drinks to cornflakes, to parts of the world that never knew them.

It is one thing if everybody, from Santa Monica to Singapore, eats hamburgers. But if taste-alike hamburgers around the world all come from the same kind of cow, all buns from the same kind of wheat and all ketchup from the same variety of tomatoes, then nature’s big trouble can only get worse.

“Diversity in plants and animals has a lot to do with diversity in human beings,” Fowler said. “If society bestows its highest value on modernity and conformity, how can we expect to find great diversity in nature?”

Trouble on the Farm

In the quest to feed the world’s hungry, certain species have been roaring successes while others have been left by the wayside.

SUCCESS STORIES

Taihu Pigs: In China, these pigs use a high proportion of forage foods in their diet. They also produce an average of six more piglets per litter, compared to their Western counterparts.

Crustaceans: Aquaculture has helped produce a surge in crustaceans, such as this giant river prawn, over the past 10 years.

SIGNS OF TROUBLE

Nile Perch: It has made Africa’s Lake Victoria one of the most productive lake fisheries in the world but has driven many of the smaller, indigenous species to extinction.

Peruvian Anchoveta: Once one of the most productive species in the world, it has declined because of overfishing and environmental damage.

ON THE TABLE

Despite up to 50,000 edible plants in the world today, rice, corn and wheat account for 60% of the proteins and calories derived from plants. (In thousands) Total plant species: 250,000 to 300,000 Edible plant species: 10,000 to 50,000 Used as food for humans: 150 to 200 Source: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization