Food security revolution

“As a follower of Jesus, I am called to share my God-given talents to achieve social justice through food security,” Peter VanderZaag told Christian Courier. “Looking back over my career, I am blessed to see great impact through the relationships I have built in over 60 countries working on potatoes and living and sharing my Christian faith.”

Peter grew up on a farm in Alliston, Ontario, purchased in 1952. The times – and soil – were different. His family farmed multiple crops and raised cows and pigs. In 1963, farms changed to meet the growing potato and tobacco demand and the inorganic fertilizers and new practices slowly eroded the soil. Peter remembers the sandstorms that threatened to turn south Simcoe into a desert. Soil nutrition and health weren’t on farmers’ minds – yet.

Peter intended to be a “rich potato farmer in Canada” but after completing his BSc at Cornell, God convicted him to go to Bangladesh instead to help farmers. After completing his PhD in tropical agriculture in 1979, Peter joined the International Potato Center headquartered in Peru as a scientist. “I choose to work in the poorest countries of central Africa, based in Rwanda and then to southeast Asia as regional director based in the Philippines.” Then, in 1985, he was asked to go to China. For the next 38 years, Peter saw “incredible changes and relative prosperity” take place in China. Today, China produces a quarter of the world’s potatoes. In 2014, Peter received the highest Chinese honour given to a foreign specialist: the National Friendship Award. Peter saw firsthand the power of “innovative breeding” which saved more than a billion people from starvation. “I can say that I was a player in that [green] revolution.”

Meanwhile, farms back home in south Simcoe were shutting down. Population increase and car factories were driving land prices up and soil quality was still poor. In 1991, Peter and his wife Carla opened SunRISE (Sustainability Research Including Systems Education) to practice their “regenerative agricultural practice philosophy.” They began renting abandoned farms and pouring everything back into the soil, starting with intensive manure, cover crops and irrigation. The land, slowly, came back.

The next revolution that brings us closer to food security, Peter says, will be cisgenics (selective gene movement within the species). But popular opinion can turn on these innovations: a Christian friend and scientist at Rockefeller Foundation was funding the development of golden rice, only for Greenpeace to now block it in the Philippines. It remains on hold in Bangladesh. “[It’s] so sad,” says Peter.

For Christians questioning new developments in farming, Peter responds as a scientist. “Science is discovering what God has already created. In Genesis, there is no mention of tuber or root crops. They evolved by natural selection. What we are doing is just quicker because God has allowed us to understand the DNA of every living organism and see how each part of it contributes to the full function of that specific species.”