A final dispatch from the front lines of agrobiodiversity conservation and use. That is, the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica.
The participants at the last day of the 6th Wallace Symposium shared a warm glow. The people who I chanced to talk to all raved about the conference. Although agrobiodiversity suffers from being a vague term, it has the attractive ability to bring together a crowd of scientists from worldwide institutes, who obviously see great relevance in each other’s research. Everyone can appreciate the needs of farmers for a suite of integrated and sustainable options, including biodiversity at all scales, to enable them to cope with markets, pests and diseases, soils, climate, and — maybe most importantly — changes.
CATIE is in a prime position to integrate options with its stronghold in forest and agroecology research, watershed management, enterprise development and its international collections of cacao, coffee, peach palm and many other crops. Dr Ronnie De Camino, CATIE’s Deputy Director, stressed to the audience that the drivers of change are not slowing down and our actions are too slow. What is needed is a revolution. After this conference, I will certainly be looking to CATIE and the Mesoamerican region to lead the way in this agrobiodiversity revolution.
CATIE is indeed in a prime position – but it has been there before, more than 30 years ago, when it was the top global institute for agroforestry. It missed out to ICRAF – which was making the right noises in the right places. The same could happen again with anything CATIE promotes: it could all be done in Nairobi or somewhere more fashionable than a very small (but wonderful) town `beneath the volcano’.
When working CATIE in the 1980s I visited an old Englishmen in the estate house of his former coffee plantation (by then surrounded by sugar cane). Rather than go for the quality of varieties and terroir and estate sales, Costa Rica had put all its export coffee (metaphorically) in the same sack – mixed-up and exported as Costa Rican coffee (and well promoted). The old boy thought this a bad mistake (Kenya does the same) – and it is certainly no encouragement for diversity (or quality management). Anyone who likes good chocolate will know the value of provenance – estate cacao from all over the tropics and vastly different in taste and sold for very high prices (and the same for wines – but note that within each – clonal – variety, it is the land, climate, and winemaker that inserts the diversity and not the genes).
As for imposed changes and the need to respond – this can be constrained by the belief in `local adaptation’ of varieties. Keep what you have and hope it gets better (any evidence?) rather than experiment with different varieties from neighbours, relatives, and the seedsmen.
I wish I had been there.