Droughtscapes of Modernity

Crop Science and the Trans-Imperial Origins of Climate Change Adaptation

A key component of my research agenda will be the development of an ambitious, long-range project entitled Droughtscapes of Modernity: Crop Science and the Trans-Imperial Origins of Climate Change Adaptation. The project moves from the necessity to address and bring into a common historical narrative three issues which are becoming more and more central to contemporary debates on the climate crisis: a) drought and global food security; b) the value of agrobiodiversity and the causes of “genetic erosion”; c) the relationship between plant breeding, agro-ecology, and climate change. 

Far from being exclusively related to our present and future, I believe that these three questions – and their interconnectedness – do have a history, a history that can be traced back to the acceleration of colonization, settlement, and capitalist frontier expansion into semi-arid and arid lands since the late 19th century. The project will be global in scope, including a diverse range of case studies among which especially southern Italy and colonial North Africa, the Argentinian pampas, and Western Australia’s “wheat belt”, all characterized by the ever-present threat of drought in relation to food and especially cereal production. As crop science and “modern” technologies were progressively deployed as key means to adjust agricultural intensification and settlement to such droughtscapes, the project will examine the emergence, between 1890 and 1940, of a trans-imperial network producing and exchanging scientific knowledge and materials aimed at dryland ecological adaptation. 

Be it through the creation of drought-tolerant crop varieties, the introduction of foreign species, or the valorisation of “indigenous” agrobiodiversity, recovering the dynamics of this climate adaptation network will allow to situate historically and fully grasp the challenges posed by the crucial role currently entrusted to plant breeding and agro-ecology in view of sustaining global food security in a drying world.