- What is sustainable intensification? Views from experts. Ambiguous term which may not signify a departure from current practice anyway. Ecological intensification instead?
- Intellectual Property Rights Access to Genetic Resources and Indian Shrimp Aquaculture: Evolving Policy Responses to Globalization. I kid you not.
- Patterns of Domestication in the Ethiopian Oil-seed Crop Noug (Guizotia abyssinica). Weirdness, for a domesticated crop, not due to its wild relative messing things up. What it is due to is a “mystery.” Thanks, authors.
- Bio-Banking on Neglected and Underutilized Plant Genetic Resources of Nigeria: Potential for Nutrient and Food Security. Never even heard of some of these.
- Comparison of different Ocimum basilicum L. gene bank accessions analyzed by GC–MS and sensory profile. Among 12 cultivars in the Hungarian genebank, there are 5 distinct smell profiles. That actually seems quite a lot.
- The role of cultural ecosystem services in landscape management and planning. Sometimes, they can hold you back.
- Carbon farming via assisted natural regeneration as a cost-effective mechanism for restoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. It can be a viable use of land in parts of Queensland, depending on the price of C.
- Ethnobotany of a threatened medicinal plant “Indravan” (Cucumis callosus) from central India. Cucumber wild relatives also medicinal.
Sustainable intensification: ecological intensification instead?
The authors argue that: ecological intensification: “…calls for a fundamental shift in food production based on ecological theory”, (elsewhere, based on “biological principles”) with the common thread to: “Increase agricultural system diversity”.
This solves nothing: it is yet another example of heading straight into the “diversity miasma” which can never be a generic prescription for food sustainability and is often a threat.
There are (at least) two major examples in agriculture where less biodiversity is better.
The first is crop introduction: D. Wood 1988 Introduced Crops in Developing Countries: a Sustainable Agriculture? Food Policy 3: 167-172.
This explains why crops do better away from their region of origin. The reason, and others before have suggested its validity — in particular the tropical agricultural botanist Purseglove — is lower biodiversity: the absence of co-evolved pests and diseases, leading to a pure, natural, chemical-free, and ecological reason for better farming.
The second is monocultures: D. Wood and J. Lenné 2001 Nature’s Fields: a neglected model for increasing food production. Outlook on Agriculture 30: 165-174.
This explains in some detail the idea that some of our major cereals evolved from natural ‘pure stands’ — that is, natural monocultures — and were then cultivated to escape competition from trees (rice, too, fits this pattern). This again is pure ecology, exactly mimicking nature for successful farming in monocultures. This idea has been endorsed by the foremost British ecologist, J.P. Grime FRS, who noted that: “Wood & Lenne (2001) have argued persuasively that the origins of arable farming and perhaps also its future are to be found as adaptations of naturally-occurring, productive ecosystems dominated by few species.” (Grime J.P. 2002 Declining plant diversity: empty niches or functional shifts? Journal of Vegetation Science 13: 457-460).
The common factor in these two papers is that it was the reduction of potentially harmful biodiversity that was the driving factor: in one case pest and disease, in the other case competition from non-crops. Yet “ecological intensification” always seems to insist on yet more biodiversity as the `ecological theory’ or ‘ecological principle’. This is certainly not generally applicable, must depend on circumstances, and the diverse circumstances are being ignored in calls to increase agroecosystem diversity.
Apologies if you have heard it all before.