From the milpa fields of Mexico to the communal lands of Zimbabwe, researcher Mauricio Bellon has spent decades listening to farmers and learning from the crops they keep. After this spring semester, Mauricio will be retiring from Arizona State University and the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. We sat down with him to talk about his career, crop diversity, and why genetic resources are humanity’s most undervalued inheritance.
Mauricio Bellon is a researcher affiliated with Arizona State University’s Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems. He holds a PhD in Ecology from UC Davis and has conducted field research in Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and Central Asia, focusing on agricultural biodiversity, participatory research, and the intersection of traditional knowledge with modern food systems. This interview was conducted by Tobe Ndulue, a student worker with the Swette Center, and the following transcription has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You’ve been with the Swette Center for nearly five years now. What brought you here originally?
Honestly, it was something of a fortunate coincidence. A friend told me about the position, it aligned with my qualifications, and I applied. I had to admit that I didn’t know much about the Swette Center before applying, but it turned out to be a particularly good fit.
Your biography mentions fieldwork across Mexico, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, and more. What first sparked your interest in working directly with farming communities?
I come from a very urban family in Mexico; no one in my immediate background had anything to do with agriculture. But I became fascinated by it because I was interested in both biology and economics, and I thought agriculture brought those two things together. So, I studied agronomy.
The school I attended was quite innovative. They had us go out and actually talk to farmers, spend time in the field, and try to learn from the people who were doing the work. When you come from an urban environment and you have no real sense of rural life, that experience is enormously valuable. You develop a deep respect for farmers; you start to appreciate how much knowledge they carry, which is obvious once you see it up close, but very different from the attitude that sometimes prevails in conventional agricultural education, where smallholder farmers are seen as traditional and behind the times.
How did your training in agronomy and ecology shape your thinking about food systems today?
My PhD was in ecology, but it was really human ecology, the interface between human management and ecological processes. That framing has stayed with me. To understand crop diversity, you have to understand food and culture together. With smallholder farmers, diversity is maintained for multiple reasons simultaneously: biological, economic, and deeply cultural. These farmers have been managing and preserving diversity for thousands of years. That doesn’t happen by accident.
Can you explain why preserving crop diversity is so important for the future of food?
The diversity we have today is the result of what we call co-evolution — the long, ongoing interaction between farmers, crops, and their environments. Over centuries, humans selected for traits that made plants more useful, and those plants became adapted to a vast range of conditions. That accumulated genetic diversity is what allows crops to be cultivated across many environments, to resist pests and diseases, and crucially, to adapt to new conditions in the future.
About a hundred years ago, essentially all cultivated food species were part of this co-evolutionary process. Since then, industrialized agriculture has narrowed that base considerably. The Green Revolution, a period of rapid industrial development in the mid-20th century, was enormously productive for wheat, maize, and potatoes, but it largely ignored hundreds of other nutritious, resilient species that smallholder farmers had maintained for generations. Those species are now receiving renewed attention, and rightly so.
I sometimes use the analogy of lottery tickets. You don’t know exactly what conditions the future will bring, but the more genetic diversity you hold onto, the more chances you have to find the adaptation you need. That’s why maintaining this diversity isn’t just a conservation interest — it’s the foundation of our capacity to respond to an uncertain future.
How urgent is the connection between crop diversity and climate change right now? Are we moving fast enough?
It’s a crucial relationship and a pressing one. Crops do adapt — sometimes quite quickly — but the pace of climate change raises earnest questions about whether adaptation can keep up. For the major commodity crops, there are active scientific breeding efforts. But most crops and species that are useful to humanity are still being maintained by farmers in their own environments, largely without outside support, and we still don’t fully know the extent of their adaptive capacity.
There’s also the question of access. Smallholder farmers in the developing world often save seed from their own harvest or trade with neighbors within a small radius of maybe ten kilometers. But if the local environment is changing, the varieties adapted to conditions in that radius may no longer be the right ones. The variety they need might be two or three hundred kilometers away. Connecting farmers across those distances is a genuine challenge, and probably one of the things we most urgently need to figure out.
You’ve led multidisciplinary teams across many countries. What’s the biggest challenge in getting scientists, farmers, and policymakers to actually work together?
The most fundamental problem is that we don’t speak common languages, and we don’t share common assumptions. Each discipline has its own culture, its own vocabulary, its own values. And those cultures don’t always mix easily.
What makes it work when it works is having people who are genuinely willing to learn from each other and to challenge their own assumptions. I was extremely fortunate to collaborate with a population geneticist who was skilled at understanding the human dimensions of his own field, not just the technical side. That kind of intellectual openness is rare and valuable. If I had to name the single most important quality for this kind of work, it’s the willingness to learn from people who think very differently than you do, including from farmers themselves.
Across all your work, what makes you most hopeful about the future of food and crop diversity?
I think there is a genuine growing recognition of how important this work is. There’s a shift happening in how smallholder farmers are viewed — from being seen as a problem, or even a nuisance, to being understood as essential stewards of something irreplaceable. The concept of Indigenous knowledge was almost invisible in mainstream scientific discourse for a long time. Now it’s taken seriously. That’s a real change.
I try not to romanticize that knowledge; it’s important to give it the right perspective, not to idealize it. But there is so much to be learned from local and Indigenous communities, and that exchange can go both ways. That openness feels like progress to me.
What do you wish more people understood about crop diversity?
Without it, we are in very deep trouble. It’s hard to feel that urgency when food seems to just appear in supermarkets; you don’t naturally make the connection to genetics, to farmers, to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. But the connection is real and it matters enormously.
The hopeful thing is that consumers are beginning to care more. Even markets are starting to recognize the value of diversity, of different species, of where food actually comes from. That’s not nothing. That’s the beginning of the connection being made.
If you could only eat food from one country for the rest of your life, which would you choose (other than Mexico)?
Italy, without hesitation. And not just for the pasta. I lived there for several years. Sicilian cuisine in particular is extraordinary: a remarkable mixture of Arabic, Mediterranean, and local influences. Layered history on a plate. I was going to say Mexico, of course, but I knew you wouldn’t let me.
All of us at the Swette Center thank Mauricio for his hard work, wisdom, and encouragement over the years.
To read Mauricio’s publications, please follow this link.