- IFAD and Bioversity, sitting in a tree …
- Don’t mimic nature on the farm.
- But don’t ignore it either. Learn from nature.
- Costa Rican farmers have done both, to adapt to climate change.
- There’s no imitating pollinators though.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
IFAD and Bioversity. I wonder where the varieties are coming from. If from genebanks they will be landraces. If so, the programme will repeat the Community Biodiversity Development and Conservation Programme (CBDC). This is now defunct and seems to have been a failure – not something to be emulated, at least until we know what went wrong. One need is to move varieties and even crops around, as John Witcombe did in India. Another is to match local varieties with (better) bred varieties for replacement (also tried with success in India). Yet another approach is to bring in lots of new crops – preferably from other continents – the vast success of US farming over more than a hundred years. The ground rule seems to be getting crops and varieties away from co-evolved pests and diseases -preferably across a big ocean.