Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the history of an international potato gene bank, this paper explores how scientists and institutions have managed the risk of disease introduction that arises from the search for new sources of genetic resistance needed to sustain vulnerable monocultures.

Paper long abstract:

Critical takes on industrial monoculture often note the increased susceptibility of homogenized farm fields to diseases and pests. Those who breed commodity crops engage in a near-continuous defensive labor in which they must seek genetic sources of resistance to rusts, viruses, and insects to incorporate into the breeding pools that will be the seeds of future harvests. Since the early twentieth century, farmers' varieties and especially the wild relatives of crops have been heralded as important sources of genetic disease- and pest-resistance and for this reason, among others, have been sought out in agricultural bioprospecting missions and placed in gene banks where they can be made available to breeders in sites far removed from their natural habitat. Yet the transit of seeds and other plant materials across lands and oceans brings risks, and none greater than the risk of introducing new pests and diseases that will in turn threaten vulnerable monoculture. In this paper, I explore the history of efforts to manage the risk of disease introduction that arises from the search for new sources of disease resistance needed to sustain monocultures through a study of one of the world’s key potato gene banks, the Commonwealth Potato Collection. I show that managing monocultures is also about managing crop diversity and that crop diversity has been understood as a source of both security and risk in twentieth and twenty-first century industrial agriculture.