- Colombia plants a bunch of peach palms. Hope they had some genetic diversity in there.
- Crop wild relative can tell you where diamonds are.
- Africa might need better seeds.
- Bangladesh certainly does.
- The black locust made America. The tree, not the insect.
- Another pean to agrobiodiversity.
- Towards a Research Agenda for Global Food and Nutrition Security: meeting at Expo 2015 organized by the EU. It’s today, though, and this is the first we hear of it. Sorry. Will genebanks even get mentioned? Well, if this tweet is from that meeting, it seems not.
- Cutting down forest bad for more than trees. How many crop and livestock wild relatives endangered by deforestation?
- Cubans ate cultivated plants a thousand years earlier than thought.
Another pean to agrobiodiversity: the lady who wrote it is a social anthropologist and she is praising agroecology. As a strong proponent of agrobiodiversity I think, for several technical reasons, that agroecology in junk science (academics and NGOs trying to get peasant farmers to turn back the development clock). In addition, I don’t comment on social anthropology.
Dave,
I assume you mean “many people who call themselves agroecologists are pushing junk science.” I agree. But are “agricultural ecologists” OK? Some of us, at least?
The broader problem is the assumption, by those who pioneer (or are particularly active in) some academic subdiscipline, that they get to dictate the conclusions in that subdiscipline. It’s not just agroecology, but also “food systems”, “evo/devo”, “string theory.” I may be the leading proponent of “Darwinian agriculture”, but that doesn’t mean I get to dictate conclusions to others who study evolutionary aspects of agriculture.
Ford: Indeed. I’d like to call myself an `agroecologist’ but hesitate to do so. And I think it is not so much pioneers who capture the agenda but late-arriving activist `neo-agrocologists’ who turn a science into politics.
I dug into old notes on one of my heroes, Dan Janzen. In direct contrast to the neo-agroecological calls for biodiversification and a total rejection of `monocultures’, Janzen (1973) had warned of the dangers of biological complexity in what he calls `sustained-yield tropical agroecosystems’ (SYTA):
• `…the complex processes in SYTA’s are likely to be highly unstable.’
• `One way to remove fragility is to remove complexity.’
• `… the tropics have some very successful monoculture agriculture.’
• `In some cases in the tropics a monoculture may have greater productivity that mixed crops.’
Janzen (1974) noted that in nature species-poor forests could exist, and that the ‘existence of such forests…falsifies the dogma that diversity is mandatory for ecosystem stability in highly equitable climates.’
Ecologists have even looked at the determinants of low species diversity. After noting that very little research addressed the question as to why some ecosystems had more species than others, May (1999:1955) suggested that in highly unpredictable and environmentally buffeted environments, the premium will be on dynamic robustness of populations, with relatively fewer species. Similarly, Gould (1976) suggested that low species diversity was an adaptive strategy in harsh, fluctuating environments. May makes a further suggestion: that a community’s biodiversity is correlated with the predictability of the environment, rather than with its overall productivity. Thus ‘the unpredictable and unsteady environments of estuaries, salt marshes and Arctic tundra are all characterized by low diversity, although again the first two are highly productive and the third is not.’ (May 1999:1955). So even ploughed fields – as `unpredictable and unsteady environments’ – may have parallels in nature with, we hope, monocultures of `dynamic robustness’.
Gould, S.J. (1976) Palaeontology plus ecology is palaeobiology. In: May R.M. (ed.) Theoretical Ecology. Blackwell Scientific, Oxford, pp. 218-236.
Janzen, D. (1973) Tropical agroecosystems. Science 182, 1212-1219.
Janzen, D. (1974) Tropical blackwater rivers, animals, and mast fruiting in the Dipterocarpaceae. Biotropica 6, 69 103.
May, R.M. (1999) Unanswered questions in ecology. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 354, 1951-1959.
Dave,
Great stuff, as usual. I know some of Janzen’s and May’s work, but hadn’t seen these references or Andy McGuire and I might have cited them in our recent paper on “What should agriculture copy from natural ecosystems?” We did cite your classic “Nature’s Fields” paper.