In the bazaars of Balkh, Afghanistan, traders sit next to tables laid with carrots, apricots, almonds and melons. The carrots are much like carrots found all over the world, orange and straight. Yet if nature ruled, these carrots would be purple and Balkh would be the carrot capital of the world
This Northern Afghani city is one of the world's oldest cities. Carrots have been growing around Balkh for at least five thousand years. Northern Afghanistan is the birthplace of carrots. Cut open any carrot, examine its genes and the DNA pathway will lead to Northern Afghanistan and the purple (sometimes cream) carrots which grew there .
Yet 5,000 years later carrots are not purple and Balkh is certainly not the carrot capital of the world. In fact Afghanistan does not even feature on the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) list of over 130 carrot producing countries. It's biggest crop is opium. It produces over 90 percent of the world's opium.
Today the small amount of carrots produced in Afghanistan are not purple. They are orange and come from seeds developed in Europe or the US. Centuries of trade and recent plant engineering has seen the purple carrot transformed into something little like the original bitter tasting, root vegetable. They are now rich in carotene (an orange pigment high in vitamin A) while the original Afghan carrot was filled with anthocyanin (a purple anti-oxidant pigment.)
(Even most of the new alternative western purple carrots are not as high in anthocyanin as the original Afghan carrot. Under their purple surface they are carotene rich.)
The biggest carrot producer in the world is China. It produces about 8.5 million tonnes of carrot each year. Nearly five times more than the second largest producer Russia.
Each year the world produces over 24 million tonnes of carrots and then dumps or sells as rejects about three million tonnes. Why? Because every so often the orange carrot gives off a reminder of its rugged past in Afghanistan. It shows a tiny part of its history. It emerges from the earth slightly crooked, the wrong size, or with a slight purple crown on its head.
So in the remarkable event you ever see such a misshapen, poorly coloured carrot, value it.
It's travelled over 5,000 years to meet you and has been spliced, diced and sliced for hundreds of years. Its been sorted by lasers, weighed, washed and marketed. Its been cross-bred, cultivated and traded. Its been the subject of research and conferences. Its had its DNA analysed, poked at and re-arranged so that its descendants are now registered as patents owned by international seed companies. And these are the seeds which the world and Afghanistan now buy to grow orange carrots.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/MannUsda/viewDocumentInfo. do?documentID=1577
Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants Vavilov, N.I; Dorofeev, V.F; Cambridge University Press, 1992
http://www.aisa.org.af/Downloads/ProvincialProfiles/Balkh.pdf