Just wanted to point out to everyone that the biodiversity vs agriculture conflict is being played out in the comments to a recent post of ours.
Danny says:
I can’t help but feel we, the agricultural biodiversity community, have failed to tap into the ‘spirit of Nagoya’, and that this has happened in the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) may well represent a real missed opportunity.
Dave sees that and raises him:
…the only reason the conservationists want agricultural biodiversity is to document key wild relatives in reserves to prop up justifications for the failing system of protected areas.
Jump in, the water’s fine!
Who needs who? I don’t see much evidence of the wider conservation community wanting agricultural biodiversity to strengthen their hand or even documenting key wild relatives in protected areas. Although there has been some good work recently to highlight agricultural biodiversity benefits in protected areas this to my knowledge is driven as much by agricultural biodiversity groups, if not more. Maybe I’m wrong. It would make life much easier if conservationists were so entusiastic about documenting key wild relatives and managing them. Maybe my original comment was pitched wrongly as well or the reference to the WCPA gave the wrong impression. I was actually thinking as much about about the need to focus on working in the 90% of land that currently exists outside of protected areas.
At a somewhat higher level, there’s an interesting discussion about the use of the word “biodiversity” over at Mike Shanahan’s blog. Completely different participants and points of views from those expressed around here, apart from me performing my own ecosysystem service and trying to achieve cross-pollination.
@Danny
Just something I was reading on a WWF website “Using protected areas to secure our food.”
This is their tail wagging our dog.
They make huge mistakes — looking at of species of e.g. Cinnamomum or Myristica and implying we will all starve unless they are all protected in `their’ protected areas. I want `our’ protected areas rather than the vast undocumented — and very expensive — tracts that are out there now conserving little of use for crops.
They are wasting funding that is urgently needed for real wild relative conservation of wild relatives of important crops where their value in breeding is established or likely — not the kind of things they are dredging up in tropical forest reserves of unimportant relatives of vast genera of non-important crops.