Cary Fowler was enjoying a comfortable retirement at his country home in New York. The food activist, who's in his 70s, already has shelves full of prestigious awards honoring his efforts to preserve the seeds of endangered crop varieties around the globe.
But something gnawed at him. A job left undone. "There was one big project I hadn't had a chance to tackle," he says.
He's now taking on that daunting project and has recruited partners that include the U.N. and the African Union. It's a quest to revive traditional food crops and fight the unhealthy dominance of major crops like corn, wheat and rice in farmers' fields and consumers' diets. Fowler has made it the centerpiece of his new job as the U.S. State Department's special envoy for global food security.
The hardy grass pea has one potential drawback To explain the project's goal, Fowler cites one plant in particular. It's a hardy, drought-tolerant legume called the grass pea, a native of Africa.
Some twenty years ago, Fowler was visiting scientists and farmers in Ethiopia, at a time when the country was suffering from drought. Fowler had heard of the grass pea, and asked one of his hosts if he could see a field where it was growing.
"He looked at me as if I was an idiot," Fowler recalls. "He said, 'Everything you see out there that's green, is grass pea. Everything else has died.' And he was right. We walked out into the field, and the field was cracked, it was so dry.
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Categories: Iowa, Crops, Corn