For many historians of biology, particularly those focused on the United States, the history of maize is indelibly associated with the development of hybrid corn in the first half of the twentieth century. In Endangered Maize, Helen Anne Curry explores the imagined consequences of the domination of cornfields by a select few varieties, examining fears that the diversity of maize and its potential usefulness for future plant breeding would be lost amid the expansion of industrialized agriculture. Curry draws on work by scholars such as Christophe Bonneuil on these predictions of agrarian extinction and the subsequent depiction of crop plants as ‘genetic resources’ by Western scientists and policymakers, but pushes this field of scholarship in new directions (p. 5). Endangered Maize turns out to be as much a history of the seedbank as it is of its titular subject, showing the reader how maize was incorporated into scientific and commercial collections over the course of the twentieth century. The structure of the book reflects this seedbank focus. Largely set in the United States and Mexico, each chapter is oriented around a ‘task’ considered central to the conservation of maize and other crop plants, including collection, duplication, cold storage and data generation, among others.
The drive to collect maize varieties emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century, spurred by government organizations such as the Office of Corn Investigations and commercial seed merchants. As Curry explains in Chapter 1, however, this desire to preserve corn through collection arose from a manufactured crisis of extinction. The disappearance of maize varieties was correlated with the perceived decline of Indigenous cultivators in the United States. The irony – one of many identified in Endangered Maize – was that government policies of dispossession and confinement inflicted on Indigenous Americans resulted in the apparent disappearance of traditional maize varieties that government biologists sought to combat. This, Curry claims, was the ‘narrative of salvagers’ that ‘served to advance the economic and political interests of settlers and the state, and those of scientists too’ (p. 33).
Chapter 2 shifts the geographical focus to Mexico. There, biologists from both North and Central America collaborated to gather seeds and specimens. Yet, as Curry shows, this scientific programme of maize collection and classification was once again underpinned by the assumption that industrialized agriculture and commercial maize varieties would inevitably replace the ‘primitive’ types grown by Mexican peasants.
Maize collections needed to be stored somewhere, and Chapter 3 follows the mid-twentieth-century activities of the Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize, whose American members drew upon Cold War fears of political instability in Latin American nations to gain funding for a network of collection points across Central and South America. Eventually, corn samples were dispatched to the National Seed Storage Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado, for cold storage. Such seedbanks were established on the premise that Indigenous maize varieties both were endangered and had remained unchanged for centuries. These varieties, Curry argues, ‘were essentialized, much like the Indigenous peoples they were associated with and yet not attributed to’ (p. 94).
One consequence of the Green Revolution, which opens Chapter 4, is that Endangered Maize goes global. Here, maize occasionally disappears from view, in part because hybrid corn was replaced by ‘miracle rice’ and semi-dwarf wheat as the emblematic example of ‘genetic erosion’ in action (p. 108). Curry covers the activities of the World Germplasm Project and debates over how best to conserve crop varieties at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
Chapter 5 presents critiques of the Green Revolution and plant patents in the 1970s and 1980s, interweaving this international story with the struggles of Mexico to maintain self-sufficiency in corn production. There is a great deal of admirable and detailed work here, although those readers not versed in postwar science diplomacy may struggle to keep track of a flood of acronyms.
Chapter 6 expands on bioprospecting, harnessing the term ‘tropical thinking’ to describe how US biologists saw tropical maize varieties in Latin America as an exploitable resource that could rescue the disease-ridden cornfields of the United States (p. 164). Curry explains that this imagined potential, however, was restricted by the need of ‘exotic lines’ to conform to the expectations of commercial seed companies in order ‘not to upset the agronomic or economic landscape’ (p. 188).
Mexican farmers would not be accorded the same level of consideration, as Chapter 7 shows with the emergence of transgenic maize and its ability to cross with both traditional maize varieties and their teosinte ancestors. In Mexico, the seedbank re-emerged in the form of local farms and small-scale collections held by Indigenous farmers and gardeners.
Overall, Endangered Maize is a well-researched and eloquent book that provides a new and rightly sceptical take on the concept of extinction in crop plants. More could have been made of the temporary nature of the seedbank. For a reader not familiar with the subject at hand, it is a revelation that seedbanks do not hold seeds in stasis, with collections requiring regrowing or replenishment over time to keep them viable. Too much reproduction, however, can run the risk of altering varieties from their original form. This is seemingly a powerful and inescapable dilemma (p. 122). Curry closes Endangered Maize with a series of insightful arguments, linking narratives of crop extinction to the disappearance of farmers, emphasizing the ever-changing nature of crop plants and cautioning against ‘inevitablizing loss’ (p. 233). The diversity of maize will only persist when a diverse community of growers is also allowed to flourish.
