The World Vegetable Center conducts research, builds networks, and carries out training and promotion activities to raise awareness of the role of vegetables for improved health and global poverty alleviation.

Among the essential components of Kerala cuisine, various chili peppers were central in our diet during the India work years. I became quite tolerant of high intensity heat from capsicum, and learned to enjoy the steamy delirium of a typical mango curry. I am out of practice, not sure I can still handle high Scoville meals any more, but heartened to know that Derek Barchenger and the W.V.C team are taking care for capsicum’s future, so thanks to Clarissa Wei for this story:

The Quest to Save Chili Peppers

A seed bank in Taiwan is home to more chili varieties than anywhere else on earth. In a warming world, we’re going to need them.

In 1999, Susan Lin, a bespectacled plant researcher at the World Vegetable Center, in Taiwan, pulled on a pair of latex gloves and got to work cross-pollinating some chili peppers. She collected tiny white flowers from a cayenne-pepper plant, shook their pollen into a tiny test tube, and walked over to an aji-chili plant. Using tweezers, she removed the petals and anthers from its flower buds, exposing the thread-like stigmas that serve as the plant’s female reproductive organs. Then she dipped the stigmas into the pollen, hoping that they would eventually form peppers.

Lin was trying to breed a plant that was resistant to anthracnose, a fungal infection that blisters mature chili peppers with sunken patches that look like cigarette burns. The disease afflicts farms from New Jersey to New Delhi; in India alone, anthracnose was estimated to inflict losses of around four hundred and ninety-one million dollars a year, according to a 2014 paper. But the chilies never emerged. “There were so many flowers, but they never bore fruit,” Lin said. “It wasn’t successful.” In the years that followed, Lin tested more peppers from the W.V.C.’s refrigerated gene bank, which contains heirloom and wild seeds that have been collected from around the world. Finally, the team managed to breed a cayenne-esque pepper, derived from a habanero known as PBC932, that showed resistance to both anthracnose and another fungal infection, powdery mildew. The chilies looked misshapen—Lin called them “very ugly”—but they represented progress.

The world’s supply of fruits and vegetables is at risk. One recent study found that environmental shifts such as climate change, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss could reduce yields by a third by 2050; diseases like anthracnose, which likes hot and humid conditions, are expected to spread as average temperatures rise. Of the eleven hundred vegetable species that are recognized worldwide, about a quarter are in particular danger because they are not preserved in seed vaults. “We see that the diversity out there, in terms of fruit diversity and vegetable diversity, is declining,” Marco Wopereis, the director-general of the W.V.C., told me. “What is triggering that declining diversity is urbanization, industrialization, and the fact that people eat more of the same everywhere.”

The nonprofit World Vegetable Center, which sprawls across two hundred and ninety acres in the dusty suburbs of Tainan, exists to research and breed vegetables that are resilient to climate change, pests, and disease. It houses the largest public collection of vegetable germplasm, or genetic material, on the planet. Its library of Capsicum, the genus of plants that includes hot and sweet peppers, contains more seed samples than any other collection: some eight thousand, or roughly eleven per cent of the varieties held in gene banks around the world. Some of the W.V.C.’s seeds are more than twenty years old. Because germination rates decline over time, even in controlled conditions, Lin and her colleagues are constantly growing the seeds out, harvesting them, and putting them back into storage, to insure the vitality of each line.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Lin, looking buoyant in a white T-shirt and a floppy beige hat, led me through half an acre of bejewelled pepper plants at the W.V.C., where she and her colleagues are currently conducting experiments. A riot of colors and fragrances—three hundred plants in all, each from a different variety—surrounded us. At a bush of vermillion chilies, which are among the hottest in the world, Lin plucked one, snapped it open, and placed it in my palm. “Just smell it,” she warned, in Mandarin. “Don’t eat it.” One whiff, a swirl of zest and rocket fuel, made my eyes water. I dropped the chili, and Lin giggled sympathetically.

Lin showed me royal-purple peppers, chocolate-hued habaneros, and miniature white chilies. Some were bell-shaped and others looked like tiny, glossy pumpkins; some smelled of green-apple candy and others had a distinct floral kick. One canary-yellow pepper, roughly the size of a pearl, was named the tepín, after the Aztec word for “flea.” Lin told me that it would blow out my taste buds, and she was right.

Later, Lin told me what had happened to her resilient ugly chilies. In 2004, she was out in the field when she noticed something that made her heart drop: lesions had appeared on her peppers. “I took it to the pathology department and asked what happened,” she told me. The lab concluded that the disease-resistant gene in PBC932 peppers had lost its edge. “The gene was from a seed collected from 1991,” she said. “By then it had been over ten years. The fungus in the field had mutated.” The evolution of anthracnose had nullified several years of scientific work. But the experience was also instructive, Lin told me. Crops exist in ecosystems that are always changing, and breeding them for survival can be a moving target.

The world’s first peppers probably sprouted from the lowlands of what is now Brazil. According to a study, the seeds of wild chili peppers are often spread by birds, which do not have heat receptors in their mouths. More than six thousand years ago, humans domesticated peppers, and in the late sixteenth century maritime trade routes carried them to Asia, where most chilies are grown today. “When you take a crop from where it originated, and you take them to a new place, they often do better,” Paul Bosland, a Regents Professor of horticulture and a co-founder of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, told me. Today, many cuisines—Thai, Indian, Mexican—would be unrecognizable without peppers. In Bhutan, some families consume more than two pounds a week.

Taiwan did not set out to train an élite team of pepper breeders. “Initially, they just wanted to have the world’s largest collection of mung beans,” Angel Jeng, the W.V.C.’s social-outreach coördinator, said when we met in April. After the technological innovations of the Green Revolution increased crop yields around the world, the U.S. Agency for International Development called for an institute that could increase access to vegetables in Asia, a region that still suffered from malnutrition. In 1971, the U.N. General Assembly voted to admit the People’s Republic of China and to expel Taiwan. Funding from international partners faltered; some thought it might be problematic to situate the institute in Taiwan, which most countries view as a self-governing territory, not a nation. In the end, however, Taiwanese lawmakers agreed to provide much of the center’s funding, and it opened in 1973. “Taiwanese planners turned to science as a way to regain a semblance of regional and global power,” James Lin, an international studies and history professor at the University of Washington, told me. The W.V.C.’s pepper-breeding team was established in 1986.

Although dozens of chili species grow around the world, the majority of the ones we eat, whether sweet, savory, or spicy, were bred from just five species. (They are not related to black pepper, which comes from the stone of peppercorn vines.) In general, sweet peppers are sensitive to hot weather, but other chilies are relatively sturdy. Some wild chilis can withstand temperatures of up to a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit; long, warm days and drought actually make their peppers spicier. nasa scientists have even grown a pepper plant in space. Still, the resilience of peppers has a limit. “As things get drier and hotter, pepper production gets more difficult and approaches impossible,” Derek Barchenger, who has directed the pepper-breeding team since 2017, told me…

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