It was very strange on Friday to read Vavilov’s views on the limited scope for agriculture in Palestine and then, on Sunday, an article by the excellent Joanna Blythman recounting a trip she recently made to the area; the foods she enjoyed, the efforts of Palestinian farmers, the obstacles they face and their growing successes.

Blythman makes much of the attachment of Palestinians to their land and their olive trees, and it is hard not to be outraged at the cavalier way in which Israel’s security concerns separate a family from its land, its history and its means of support. But she also takes an awful lot on trust. I’ve visited Israeli and Palestinian farmers too, and to assume that because a farmer says he cannot afford chemicals and that he is organic in everything except certification is to accept an awful lot. On both sides of the borders I saw empty cans of Lindane, a deeply suspect pesticide that had been banned in Israel (and 50 other countries) but, along with sundry other supplies, was apparently being smuggled in from Gaza. Admittedly that was while ago, so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

What hasn’t changed is the role of government. In 1926, Vavilov noted:

It is absolutely obvious only that the system of government and the building up of Palestine is not radical but often counterproductive. … It is impossible to escape the detrimental effects of the national disunity and the discord that seem to be what is primarily being cultivated in this country.

Blythman tells a similar story:

In Jerusalem, Avi Levi, director of the Israeli environmental group Green Action, ever mindful of the necessity of reducing food miles, believes that Israel should be Palestine’s most important export market. He brings fairly traded Palestinian olive oil into Israel and sells it through consumer co-ops. If the oil came directly it would travel 50km, but because it can only come in through four or five Israeli checkpoints, and must travel by a circuitous route around the separation wall, Israeli road blocks, random “gates”, and cannot be transported on settler-only roads, the journey clocks up 150km. Physical and fiscal impediments to trade mean that Palestine’s economy is constantly disrupted. As a result it can be cheaper for Palestinians to buy vegetables from a distant Israeli polytunnel than from a nearby Palestinian village.

This, surely, is a form of madness that Vavilov would have recognized and, one expects, deplored.

1926
November

The agricultural opportunities for Palestine are limited. Most of its area is occupied by highlands, suitable only for cultivation of olives. The area for fields is limited and to a great extent already used up. A number of major irrigation projects have been worked out, offering rich possibilities for spending considerable amounts of money. Opportunities for developing agricultural crops are far better on the other side of the Jordan, in Trans-Jordania. This country, which seems like a natural extension of Palestine and is immediately adjacent to Mesopotamia, is represented by an enormous level territory favourable for cultivation of cereals. Crops stretch over wide areas almost to the horizon. They consist mainly of hard wheat and the distichous, drought-tolerant Palestinian barley.

Barley harvest near Bethlehem, Palestine.

Gathering tares from wheat in the stony fields of Bethel, Palestine.

Vavilov said of Jaffa oranges:

The well-known brand ‘Shamudi’ arose apparently as a vegetative mutation as was demonstrated by a Dutch research worker, Oppenheimer. Jaffa oranges are distinguished by their smooth and thick skin and the large size of the juicy fruits and have therefore, in essence, no competitors. The market for them is absolutely secure and practically unlimited.

The history of the Shamouti orange is not quite that simple. Wikipedia is quite wrong when it cites Daniel Rogov as an authority for the statement that “the variety ‘originated in China and Cochinchina’”. Rogov’s article says clearly that “sweet oranges grow on an elegant tree, one with pleasantly scented blossoms, that originated in China and Cochin-China”. Note: Rogov is talking about the species (sensu latu) of sweet oranges, rather than the variety Shamouti. So, with that out of the way, where did the variety arise?

The most common explanation that one sees around is that Shamouti arose as a branch sport — a kind of mutation that can give rise to noticeably different properties in the fruit — of a local orange variety called Beledi some time around 1844 (or 1860) near the town of Jaffa. There’s an early record from the poet Lamartine visiting Palestine in 1832, but Aaron Aaronson calls attention to what he considers mistakes in Lamartine’s account and concludes:

This and other errors of observation cause me to doubt the value of the poet’s description from the point of view of the naturalist and agriculturist, although its value as literature is unquestioned.

Beledi is thin-skinned and has seeds. Shamouti is thick-skinned and generally almost seedless. The exact genetic differences between them, however, have not as far as I can discover been identified. It seems that Shamouti is what is called a periclinal chimera, that is a mixture of cells from the original Beledi and mutant Shamouti cells. A periclinal chimera arises when the mutation originally takes place in a cell very near the apex, or growing tip, of a plant shoot. These cells in the apical meristem are more or less the plant equivalent of embryo stem cells in animals. A mutation there will often be carried in all the cells of one of the plant’s tissue layers, with unmutated cells in other layers: a chimera. Then, depending on how the sport is propagated, some of the offspring could end up with only mutated cells. In experiments, seeds from some Shamouti trees gave rise to only Beledi trees; the cells that formed the seeds were pure Beledi cells. Seeds from other trees gave rise only to Shamouti trees; they ere now composed entirely of Shamouti cells, homohistonts, if you hadn’t forgotten.

As for the seedlessness, that was studied a long time ago by Otto Frankel and one J.D. Oppenheim. I can see only the abstract, but it seems to be saying that genuine Shamouti produces plenty of ovules and plenty of pollen, so something else is interfering with them getting together to produce seeds. Frankel’s is a name to conjure with. He and Vavilov must have met, but that will have to await more research. And while we’re on the subject of names, Balady is an Arabic word, meaning endemic to an area, or, to put it more prosaically, the local orange, date, sugar cane, ginger, whatever. As for Shamouti, who knows? Luigi thinks it may be something to do with the Sun, which seems reasonable enough, but what we really need is an Arabic etymologist, in case you happen to know of one.

And finally, there’s an interesting account of the history of trade in Shamouti, or Jaffa, oranges in the book From Desert Sands to Golden Oranges, which stresses the robust nature of Jaffas. They survived camel trains and later truck journeys, hand-loading onto ships and a month or more in unrefrigerated cargo holds before arriving in northern Europe almost undamaged. They must indeed have seemed “absolutely secure” to Vavilov, but the recent history of Israeli citrus exports shows it to have been anything but.

1926
November

The Bazaar of Jaffa, Palestine.

1926
November

Mountains of Judea, from the Plain of Jericho, Palestine.

1926
November

I also went to the lake of Genesareth. There fishing is conducted just as it was in the distant past. No doubt the population of ancient Palestine was much larger than the present one: hundreds of structures, long ago fallen into ruins, and thinly populated areas provide a picture of the present. Everything in this area is abandoned, neglected and deserted. The blue lake carries one back to Biblical times. Nazareth is also here. It is surrounded by a thicket of cacti, mainly without spines (Opuntia ficus-indica), that was planted 160 years ago. This indicates that the spineless cactus was known long before Burbank, to whom usually the ‘invention’ of cacti without spines is attributed. The cactus is a typical Mexican plant and the presence of spineless cacti in Palestine indicates a distant provenance of this form.

Fishermen on the Sea of Galilee - and distant hills of the Gaderenes, Palestine.

I went to the northern border of Palestine, back towards Syria, where the Syrian Khoran imperceptibly crosses over into the Palestinian one. The flora is the same and so are the dry foothills and the hard wheat, the ‘Khoranka’. Turning eastward I went to the Jordan river, which flows out into the Dead Sea and separates Trans-Jordania from Palestine. The bright, dark-blue and narrow band of the river is flanked by a marsh on the Palestinian side. Around the river itself and on a part of the bank, there is a stand of beautiful papyrus (Cyperus papyrus), reaching 2 metres in height. Behind them there is a thicket of oleanders (Nerium oleander) with pink flowers.The oleanders flower in September. From far away it looks as though the entire valley is an endless stretch of pink. The papyrus and oleander bordering the Jordan give it an exceptionally picturesque aspect. The water is clear and potable. A marshy area lines the Palestinian side. Across the river from Palestine, on the Trans-Jordanian highland, a rural extension of Palestine begins where enormous crops of wheat are concentrated.

1926
November

After working out a plan for an expedition in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I went together with the agronomist Eittingen to the valley of Esdralon where at present the Jewish colonization is concentrated and where Aaronsohn had made the main finds of wild wheat. The vegetation was mainly arboreal. Only during early spring is it possible to see the herbaceous ephemerals to which the wild wheat belongs.

In the foothills of the mountains from which a subterranean stream flows into the Esdralon valley, I actually found a large stand of wild wheat together with an admixture of distichous barley. This was on vacant land with soft, fertile soil surrounding the crops themselves. The wheat here looked distinctly different from what we had collected in Khoran in Syria. The spikes and the spikelets were large, reminiscent of those of cultivated wheat but with rough awns and large grains. This was far from a xerophyte like the Syrian wheat and in essence the plants were close to cultivated wheat.

…

Nazareth and the Plain of Esdraelon at S.W. - hills where the boy Jesus played. Palestine

The wide valley of Esdralon, with a kind of black soil, is exceptionally favourable for agriculture. The level character of the area makes it possible to do completely mechanized work here. The most productive of the local wheats have been selected and are sown by Jewish farmers.

After Syria, Vavilov drove down along the coast from Beirut to Palestine.

I had to wait for 2 months in Palestine for visas for Egypt and Abyssinia, a long time in such a small country; but it allowed me to travel in all directions over it and Trans¬Jordania.

In reading his views on conditions in the two British mandates, it is impossible not to be struck both by how little has changed and how much. It would, however, be inappropriate to delve too deeply here into his views of the politics, administration, development and all the rest of it. There are of course also trenchant observations on agriculture, which we will be getting to.

Consider, though, Vavilov’s note on crossing into Palestine:

Behind the border gates, the landscape was the same. The demarcation did not in any way coincide with any natural border: on both sides the same narrow belt of Mediterranean vegetation, the same kind of dry foothills with a shrub vegetation called ‘maquis’ together with which wild olive trees, wild figs, pea-shrubs (Caragana ) and wild almond trees could be seen.

Now consider this image:

Middle East, acquired by MIRES instrument, 14 February 2005, from European Space Agency. Click to enlarge.

See that diagonal line, roughly in the centre of the image? That is the border between Israel and Egypt. The land is identical on both sides of that border. I wonder what Vavilov might have made of that?