Erna
Bennett was one of the early pioneers of genetic conservation. After active service in the
Second World War in the Middle East and Greece, she returned to her studies. In her early
postgraduate years she taught in England, and was engaged in cytogenetic research there
and in Ireland for a number of years.
Working
the Scottish Plant Breeding Station with J. W. Gregor in the mid-1960s, she returned to
her early interest in micro-evolution and the origins of genetic diversity, and began what
was then to become a long series of expeditions collecting genetic diversity of mainly
forage and cereal crops. At this time she wrote her 1964 paper warning of the need
conserve and protect genetic resources, “Plant Introduction and Genetic Conservation:
Genecological aspects of an urgent world problem”, which was widely read and
translated into a number of languages.
Erna
joined the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1967, where she succeeded
in mobilising the FAO to become involved directly in collecting the genetic resources of
crop plants in many countries, while there was still time. She was responsible for
coordinating national and international exploration and genetic conservation programmes in
the countries of the Mediterranean Basin and southwest and Central Asia as a far as
Afghanistan, and travelled very widely in the course of her work. She also initiated the
first world survey of crop germplasm collections, which yielded invaluable information
that has been drawn on widely over the years. As this time she co-authored and edited the
first classic book on genetic resources with another early campaigner, Sir Otto Frankel.
Published in 1970, “Genetic Resources in Plants” helped to convince in 1972
Stockholm Conference on The Human Environment (a predecessor of the 1992 Earth Summit) to
call for the first global programme on the conservation of crop genetic resources.
While at
FAO, Erna became increasingly concerned that the immense efforts to collect and conserve
the world’s precious and irreplaceble germplasm in which she was involved stood in
grave danger of being hijacked by powerful private interests. She observed the initial
moves towards first, covert, then overt and massive privatisation of genetic resources and
the increasingly dominant role of corporations determined to usurp control of immensely
valuable agricultural germplasm. Having battled whithin the FAO for many years to keep
corporations out of the UN system, she was eventually forced to resign from the UN in
1982. Since then, she has stayed active on these and other issues- lecturing, writing and
advising- but outside official circles.
Erna
Bennett was not alone in the first turbulent years of campaigning for programmes on
genetic erosion. She remembers with great warmth and affection many of her early fellow
pioneers. But as Pat Mooney wrote in his book Shattering1, “it was this colourful,
outspoken Ulster-born Irish revolutionary who first coined the phrase ‘genetic
conservation’ and brought substance and strategy to the term for the world
community”.
