IUCN in Wonderland

In a recent article, Jeff Sayer, IUCN’s Scientific Advisor, turns to agrobiodiversity. Here’s the crux of his argument:

In simple economic terms, small diverse farms may be less efficient than specialist farmers with genetically engineered seeds and large inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. But these highly diverse small farms provide many other products for consumption and sale beyond just the key staple.

This diversity provides safety nets in cases of failure of one or a few crops. In addition, conservationists are now recognizing that these small farms can support a lot of native biodiversity, protect watersheds and store large amounts of carbon and so contribute to mitigating climate change.

Which is something we’ve been saying here forever; well, ever since we started. So Dr Sayer is not going to get any of what I believe is sometimes called “push-back” from us. At least not on that broad point. He does, however, lose me on the details. Here’s the take-home message of the article.

Local production of a high diversity of crops with minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels is now a boutique industry for the rich. However, it has a lot of features that could make it a viable and attractive option for large parts of the developing world and it could provide much needed resilience in the face of climate variability and other shocks that will certainly shake the world in the future.

Wait, rich world niche ecoagriculture should be adopted in the developing world so that African farmers too can be resilient in the face of climate change? Surely there’s something of Alice in Wonderland’s surreal world about this way of putting things. Maybe I’m missing something. But no, here’s something from earlier in the piece.

Farm conservation schemes in the USA put tens of billions of dollars into the hands of farmers who adapt their farming to favour wildlife. The critical question is whether these multi-functional farming systems are a luxury that only the rich world can afford or whether they might be a model for diversifying the livelihoods of poor people in the developing world and maybe make them more resilient to the economic, climatic and pandemic-induced shocks that they will confront in coming decades.

Right, so US farm conservation schemes are going to teach African and Asian and Latin American subsistence farmers about diversification. Well, that’s something I’d pay money to see.

I suppose the point struggling to come through is that agricultural development in the South should not put all its eggs in the efficiency basket. It’s a good point, which could have been better made. The developing world doesn’t need to look at rich world organic farming for a model. All it has to do is look at itself.