Lighter news this week, and not quite with the urgency of usual coverage – a story we run this week is the update from the CGUARD program.
CGUARD, for the uninitiated, is an agricultural-cum-academic program run by the government in partnership with the scientific sector in order to preserve, replicate, and upgrade the varieties of corn throughout the country.
The news is a simple update – the CGUARD program has, as of last year until now, preserved nearly three-quarters of a thousand corn samples from Benguet and Mountain Province for storage, propagation and study.
Corn is not my expertise – that lies in half-informed and half-baked deprecative verbosity – and while I do not particularly care for that crop myself, it is a significant mover of the agricultural industry and the food industry.
The myriad forms of corn and all its variants and byproducts are staples of all forms of culinary and agricultural business – corn syrup forms a great part of our diabetes-inducing sweet drinks, and every form of food from junk to “proper cuisine” has homes for corn products. Even our food is fed on corn – not all farms and raisers use it, naturally, but there are plenty of corn-fed poultry animals going around the agricultural circuit, as it were.
Naturally, corn is a staple of agricultural livelihood as well. Though we may be in a rice-eater country, there is still plenty of demand for the yellow starch, and cultivation of it has been a significant portion of agri-history in the Philippines, the world notwithstanding.
The CGUARD program has prioritized or rather, focuses on small-scale heritage and traditional corn varieties. This is as much a practical reason as it is a cultural one; these varieties have historically been grown where they have for practical reasons, be it suitability for specific climes and weathers, hardiness in a colder, more rugged and less uniform farmland, the better input-to-output ratio, or even disease resistance.
Corn is as varied as the people that tend them and the lands they call home – mountain-bred corn, for instance, necessarily requires a different set of adaptations to corn raised in the sweltering heat of a large, lowland corn hacienda. Different temperatures, conditions, pests and diseases cause different traits to emerge from generation to generation.
Suffice it to say that the preservation of these strains is also akin to capturing a moment, a slice of that community’s existence. Each strain is different in some way to another – while there may be what we can collectively consider the “default corn”, local varieties and heirloom strains carry with them a little reminder of the times they were bred for. Perhaps in the outbreak of a cornblight we find samples of what has grown resilient to fight it off.
The most fitting metaphor then, when we consider corn as a preserved memory and signature of a community, is that CGUARD does not merely preserve corn – though there is definitely a portion that is purely preserved – but it also works to use the samples to breed better strains for the future that carry the traits of their progenitors.
In a similar manner, society’s forward progression has been marked by the same; the identification of what is desirable and the gearing of advancement toward those goals, while trying to preserve what can be preserved of what came before. Discard that which is harmful, and move toward the future with what is desirable, what is survivable, and what is good.
Definitely still not a case for eugenics though – reductio ad absurdum is a fallacy and it need not be applied here.
