A LinkedIn post by CGIAR stalwart Dr Carlo Fadda convinced me I should give more exposure to the recent paper Long-term agricultural diversification increases financial profitability, biodiversity, and ecosystem services: a second-order meta-analysis than the brief Brainfood entry I gave it a few weeks ago. The authors are Estelle Raveloaritiana and Thomas Cherico Wanger and the paper was published in Nature Communications this January.
In that Brainfood, I tried to bring together various papers on different aspects of farm diversity and its benefits. In particular its effects on (among other things) diet diversity, and hence health outcomes.
The paper in question is in fact about the “other things,” suggesting that intercropping, organic farming, and other diversification strategies increase incomes, biodiversity, pollination, soil quality, and carbon sequestration significantly over 20 years, with — importantly — no effects on crop yield. And that’s from a meta-analysis of 184 meta-analyses and 120 years of data, so it’s a pretty robust result.
As Carlo points out in his excellent post, the evidence that diverse — including crop-diverse — farms are good for farmers, consumers and the planet is clearly there. The challenge is to find the institutional will to act on it. I’d like to add that genebanks around the world are ready, willing and able to do just that. It’s literally their job, or at least part of it. I hope they are given the chance — and the resources — to do it.