Landraces, Crop Improvement, and the Politics of Food Security

Governments, nongovernmental actors, and producers all regard the return to landraces as a potential answer to the challenge of securing food production in an increasingly unstable environment. The development of a market for historic breeds of wheat in contemporary Italy illustrates and illuminates the complexity of the challenge. The work of improving such breeds to meet this challenge takes diverse forms, ranging from a focus on the attributes of a particular breed to how the same breed reproduces in the individual producer’s field. Such diversity of forms produces a slippage between definitions of a landrace that attend to the characteristics of a particular plant population and those that attend instead to the historical and geographical processes involved in the formation of these same populations. The slippage opens a space for a variety of models of food production, which all use landraces but engage with consumers differently. Mobilizing landraces as plant populations enables agricultural and food producers to work with consumers as more or less active participants in the process of production, even as coproducers. In the process, the relationship between agricultural production and food consumption is transformed at a variety of scales, from global to local.