Abstract
Rice is the staple food for half the world’s population, but since the Green Revolution in the 1950s, a significant proportion of landraces has disappeared from farmer’s fields worldwide, resulting in severe genetic erosion. Maroons, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations into the interior forests of Suriname, cultivate an astonishing number of rice varieties, most of which are Asian rice (Oryza sativa) and a few are African rice (O. glaberrima). Apart from one single landrace of African rice that our research team traced back to Ivory Coast, the provenance of the other 200+ rice varieties remains a mystery. These traditional landraces may be better adapted to marginal soils, pests and diseases, and thus be a unique set of untapped genetic resource for breeding new cultivars resilient to future challenges. We aim to use a mix of ethnobotanical surveys, archival research, and advanced genomic analysis of traditional Maroon rice landraces to discover their geographical origins and migration history, and to unravel the methods and motivations of Maroon rice farmers to maintain this vast diversity. A PhD student will collect rice landraces in several traditional Maroon villages, document their morphological, agronomical, culinary and cultural properties and analyse how and why rice farmers maintain this rice diversity. Collected rice varieties will be conserved in the Surinamese germplasm bank, so they become available to plant breeders and to farmers who have lost their traditional landraces. Maroon traditional knowledge on the origin of their rice will be compared with published and archival sources on former Surinamese plantations, Maroons and rice cultivation in the New World. A postdoc will characterize the genomic variation in the Maroon rice landraces and compare these to modern and historic rice accessions and crop wild relatives from the Guianas, West Africa, Asia and the US, by means of whole-genome sequencing. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) will be used to quantify diversity within Surinamese landraces and assess their genetic and geographical origin(s). Using advanced genomic and bioinformatic methods, we can detect specific genetic traits for which these landraces were selected, potential introgression from wild rice (O. rufipogon), and at what time in history these events took place. We hypothesize that Maroon rice fields reflect 370 years of migration history and skillful adaptation to the Amazonian environment: a highly diverse and dynamic system that combines ancient African landraces with traditional Asian varieties, exchanged around 1900 with Indian and Javanese contract laborers, commercial rice cultivars from the 1930s and newly developed hybrids between wild, weedy and cultivated rice. Our innovative combination of written and unwritten sources, plant collection, herbarium studies and genomics will reveal an alternative history of Suriname through the DNA of rice grains and the traditional knowledge associated with them. By combining ethnobotanical and genomic evidence, this multidisciplinary research will improve our understanding of crop migration during and after the transatlantic slave trade and the contribution of the African Diaspora to agricultural diversity in the Americas. Maroon culture is increasingly affected by urban migration, imports of cheap rice and other elements of globalization that gradually dissolve their unique agroforestry systems. Our efforts to contextualize and preserve these landraces will help to raise global awareness on Maroon rice. Ultimately, the results of this study will provide a timely contribution to the conservation of cultural and ethnobotanical heritage of Suriname and protect a staple crop of utmost importance for current and future food security.
Netherlands