Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Longer pieces; we’d call them essays if that didn’t sound pretentious.
Markets are fascinating. Wherever I go in the world, I consider it a real treat to be able to wander very slowly through the markets, seeing what there is, seeing whether I can identify things I’ve only read about, just soaking it up. Kunming is no exception.
Following on from yesterday’s post, which looked at the UNEP-WCMC report on the ecosystem services provided by biodiversity, including agricultural biodiversity, I wanted today to signal the publication by the International Centre for Underutilised Crops (ICUC) of a new position paper which is somewhat related, and of which I am a one of the authors. ((Dawson, I.K., Guarino, L. and Jaenicke, H. (2007) Underutilised Plant Species: Impacts of Promotion on Biodiversity. Position Paper No. 2. International Centre for Underutilised Crops, Colombo, Sri Lanka.)) This looks at the impact of promoting underutilised plant species (UPS) on overall levels of biodiversity in farming systems.
ICUC’s position on biodiversity is that its promotion should not be viewed as an “end in itself.” Rather, diversity needs to be “conserved through use,” or the livelihood opportunities it presents and the other services that it provides to the poor, both primary producers and local product processors, now and for the future. The significant nutritional and other health benefits received by consumers further afield in, e.g., urban areas and in other countries, through being able to access a more diverse range of foods, medicines and other products, should, however, also not be neglected.
Clearly, there are significant benefits that can accrue to poor families and communities, as well as others, through the promotion of one or more UPS — better nutrition, health, income etc. However, such promotion can result in the erosion of diversity in other crops, and in the agricultural landscape as a whole. If that happens, any benefits which UPS promotion delivers in the short term could be outweighed by long-term negative effects on the provision of the sorts of ecosystem services the WCMC paper discussed. ((We also discuss in our paper the complexity of the linkages between diversity, productivity and stability.))
In the ICUC paper, we look at the possible methods that can be used to promote UPS and suggest a number of conditions that should be met if such interventions are not to have undesired effects on biodiversity and the services it provides:
“Intelligent markets” are ones that improve both incomes and environmental management. Developing such markets “will involve educating producers and microprocessors in how to diversify their activities, encouraging value chain development, and supporting DO [denomination of origin] and related initiatives.” I particularly wanted to highlight this point because, coincidentally, FAO has just published a report on “Approaches to linking producers to markets” which looks at how best to help farmers organize themselves to supply identified markets. ((Andrew W. Shepherd (2007) Approaches to linking producers to markets: A review of experiences to date. Agricultural Management, Marketing and Finance Occasional Paper 13. FAO, Rome.))
We’ve had a few examples of this on the blog lately, haven’t we? They have ranged from the Ojibwa and their wild rice to the “under the sun” cheeses of Italy just in the past few days. Is it a zeitgeist thing?
We know hardly anything about the differences among varieties of the same crop. Oh sure, we know what different varieties look like; that’s easy. But detailed differences in composition are hard to find. There are the classics, of course, like wetet be gunche sorghum in Ethiopia, whose name translates as “milk in my mouth”. It contains almost a third more protein than other sorghum varieties and, even more important, about double the level of lysine, a vital amino acid for human nutrition. And there are the red and black varieties of rice, which are known to be high in iron and other minerals and vitamins and which are traditionally used to treat anaemia, especially in pregnant women. (I have been unable to discover whether this treatment is effective, in a Western sense, but it seems entirely reasonable, and a bit churlish to deny it.) But in general, we know next to nothing about the nutritional qualities of varieties, as opposed to species.
Continue reading “GI had no idea there was so much diversity”
Dear Mr Annan
Congratulations on your appointment as Chair of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. In your inaugural lecture in Capetown you said categorically that the Alliance would “work with farmers using traditional seeds known to them”. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “traditional seeds,” especially in view of Agra’s strong focus on breeding: “we will develop improved varieties for the full range of Africa’s important staple food crops,” it says on the Agra web site.
Maybe you just mean “not genetically engineered”. That might make sense, because the sentence before the one on “traditional seeds” reads: “We in the Alliance will not incorporate GMOs in our programmes.”
Danny Hunter has sent us this contribution. Until recently, Danny ran the TaroGen and DSAP projects at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Fiji. Thanks, Danny.
An interesting article from SciDevNet about farmer empowerment through Farmer Field Schools (FFS) reminded me of a great little programme that we had running in Samoa in the late nineties. Farmer Field Schools began as a training and extension approach for integrated pest management of rice, largely supported by FAO in Asia. Since then FFS have been used for a variety of agricultural crops, systems and problems, including livestock, and have spread to other regions of the world.
The article prompted me to reflect on earlier efforts that we made at the Alafua Campus of the University of the South Pacific in Samoa, using similar “field-based” approaches to help students and farmers (as well as researchers and extensionists!) learn about taro diversity and improvement. In 1993 Samoa was devastated by an outbreak of taro leaf blight. Initial responses using pesticides and cultural methods were futile and while introduced “resistant” varieties helped, the disease was still a major problem.
Continue reading “Farmer Field Schools in the Pacific and beyond”