Category: Articles

Longer pieces; we’d call them essays if that didn’t sound pretentious.

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Subsidise this

There is plenty of analysis out there on the topic of agricultural subsidies and their actual or potential effect on things like growth of the farm sector, productivity, rural population levels and employment rates, farmers’ incomes and the number and average size of farms. But I haven’t seen much empirical data – or even theoretical discussion – of what subsidies (or the lack of them) mean for agrobiodiversity on farms. The data and discussion must be out there, it’s just that I don’t know the agricultural economics literature well enough to even know where to look.

So it was kind of interesting that I happened across two pieces of work in the past couple of weeks that shed some – albeit oblique – light on the subject. A 2003 article on The New Farm looks at what happened in New Zealand when agricultural subsidies were phased out: starting in 1984, the kiwis kept “a basic social security framework … funding for agricultural research, … and measures to keep agricultural pests from leaping around the world, and (did) away with the rest.” 

The New Zealand experience strongly suggests that most supposed objectives of agricultural subsidies and market protections – to maintain a traditional countryside, protect the environment, ensure food security, combat food scarcity, support family farms and slow corporate take-over of agriculture – are better achieved by their absence.

The paper suggests that the end of subsidies forced farmers to diversify, embrace organic methods, let marginal land revert to bush and innovate furiously, including by adopting new varieties. It’s hard to be entirely sure from the information presented, but on balance it would seem that (agricultural) biodiversity was better conserved and better used after subsidies ended.

I also came across a newly-released FAO paper entitled “Long Term Farming Trends. An Inquiry Using Agricultural Censuses,” a meta-analysis of 43 agricultural censuses across 17 countries. The authors look at differences among countries, and changes in the last 30 years or so, in things like land inequality and farm size, but also crop diversification, by which they basically mean the extent to which non-staple crops are being grown. They found, for example, that small farms tend to concentrate on staple crops more than bigger farms do, and that agricultural openness (i.e. lack of subsidies) “is correlated with diversification away from staple crops.” Though this relationship did not hold for countries with high population levels, the result concords with what happened in New Zealand.

You see what I mean when I said that the light being shed is at best oblique. Neither paper discusses diversity within crops much (or at all!), and their concept of “diversification” was somewhat crude. That wasn’t really their aim, so you can’t blame the authors. But with WTO members discussing the freeing up of agricultural markets (when they manage to discuss anything at all), I do wonder whether agricultural economists are devoting enough (or any) thinking to the possible effects on agricultural biodiversity. I look forward to being reassured by someone out there.

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Who’s afraid of trans fats?

In “Fear of Frying,” David Schleifer gives us, in the words of his subtitle, “a brief history of trans fats,” and it’s a fascinating read. Trans fats are partially hydrogenated oils: attaching more hydrogen atoms to the oily backbone turns liquids into solids. First introduced at the turn of the century, they were all the rage by the 1960s because they were easier to use (e.g., in deep frying) and didn’t go rancid quite as quickly, but also because of (never fully substantiated) hype about how bad saturated fats were for you.

Some fifteen years ago, however, studies started to associate them with heart disease, diabetes and infertility. They have recently been banned from New York City restaurants. But unlike big tobacco, big food didn’t “deny the good science, buy some bad science, and try to avoid regulation.” What they did – despite the difficulties and costs involved – is jump on alternatives to trans fats, even before consumers started to change their minds in large numbers. In effect, they fostered perceptions of risk to drum up demand for a product that addressed that risk: value adding and niche marketing through fear. What’s the next big thing? Omega-3s fats, essential nutritionally but destroyed by hydrogenation. But it probably won’t be long before something bad is found out about them too and we all get onto the next bandwagon.

All very scary, but how is this relevant to the subject matter of this blog? Well, each of these shifts in consumer demand required new technologies, including new crop varieties. So, for example, the National Sunflower Association and the United Soybean Board, among others, developed cultivars whose oil does not need partial hydrogenation. But these are liquid, and difficult to use in baked goods, so palm oil is increasingly used, apparently. And Monsanto is projecting unveiling an enhanced omega-3 soybean by 2012.

Ok, so that’s one way to look at the role of agricultural diversity. Another is that you should stay away from processed foods and try to base your diet on a diversity of fresh ingredients, traditionally prepared. Which, by sheer coincidence, is the subject – or one of them – of a Time magazine piece this week on “How the World Eats.”

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Ho hum … another deadly disease

Science magazine today publishes a paper about mapping the geographical spread of diseases. ((No link, because they’re so inaccessible. But the paper is Large-Scale Spatial-Transmission Models of Infectious Diseases by Steven Riley, which should enable people to find it.)) The key point is that different diseases spread in different ways, and recognising that should make prevention more effective.

It would be possible to run an entire blog on the emergence of diseases. Going well beyond the World Health Organisation’s monitoring systems, and prompted by Larry Brilliant’s TED wish, INSTEDD — International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection — is starting to move. There are systems for veterinary and food borne diseases, and presumably some for plants too, although they are surprisingly hard to find on the internets. ((Help me, please! I know there are groups devoted to monitoring plant diseases, but aside from the usual suspect, which seems more interested in sexy animal diseases than dull old phytopathology, I cannot find them, honest.)) I’d like to read such blogs, but my point here is somewhat different. In a nutshell, agricultural biodiversity is likely to be a source of the solutions, both genetic resistance and as a buffer against disease spread.

In recent months we’ve seen UG99 wheat rust, Asian soybean rust, banana Xanthomonas wilt, cassava brown streak virus and now tomato leaf curl virus hit the headlines. Others too. By the time they make front pages news, these diseases are inevitably accompanied by estimates of the costs they will impose, and these can run into billions of dollars a year. And yet solutions, when they arrive, often go unnoticed. To some extent that’s a function of ADD among news organizations, which have a great deal of difficulty in understanding the process of science and so have very little time for long-term projects. To some extent it is because the solutions themselves often cannot exactly pinpoint specific contributions. A resistant variety may get its characteristics from several parents, as a result of many independent breeding and research efforts. It can be hard to trumpet that as a breakthrough worth stopping the presses for. And such resistant varieties may also take time to prove themselves, which also works against excited news coverage. As for the use of agricultural biodiversity to fight disease, that scarcely gets a mention.

We’ve heard a lot too about the Arctic (Seed) Monkeys and their plans to bury humanity’s global heritage of agricultural biodiversity in the frozen rock of Svalbard, but far less about the basic problem, which is that genebanks and conservation in the wild are starved of committed funding. Everywhere, it seems, people want convincing of the economic value of conserving agricultural biodiversity. At some point, I believe, one has to accept that it will never be possible to specify, in advance, the value of any particular bit of biodiversity. One has to go further and say that the manifest benefits of biodiversity to agriculture in just this one realm of defending our food supply against disease, are so large that the costs, whatever they may be, are trivial by comparison.

If some of those plant diseases caused real pain to the people who control the purse strings, perhaps the value of conservation would become more obvious. For now, I can only hope that agricultural biodiversity coughs up the solutions without too much delay. And when it does, we’ll try to take note here.

p.s. Of course, perhaps the biggest reason to fear disease epidemics relates squarely to human activity — the squandering of antibiotic sensitivity and vastly accelerated travel — which come together gloriously in today’s unfolding saga of the TB patient who took off on the lam. But I mustn’t abuse my position here to wail about those

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A prickly question

Carciofi

Dealing with a Carciofo alla Giudea I seldom wrestle also with the more fundamental existential question of what exactly an artichoke is. A flower, of course, although for the most part one is eating bracts and the receptacle. A thistle, too. But beyond that, I have to confess I have never really considered relationships among the various varieties of artichoke nor between the artichoke and its obvious cousin the cardoon (where one eats the blanched petiole, preferably in a tasty bechamel sauce).

Real taxonomists, of course, consider this sort of question all the time. And by and large they have concluded that in the genus Cynara the cultivated artichoke is C. scolymus, with cardoon — wild and cultivated — in a separate species, C. cardunculus. Then again, maybe they all belong to C. cardunculus. And how did they evolve? As crops, artichoke and cardoon are pretty recent, only a couple of thousand years old at most. Which wild species were they selected from?

I need concern myself with these prickly issues no more. A recent paper ((G. Sonnante et al. (2007) On the origin of artichoke and cardoon from the Cynara gene pool as revealed by rDNA sequence variation. Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution 54: 483-495. DOI – 10.1007/s10722-006-9199-9)) from the Institute of Plant Genetics in Bari is clear: artichokes and wild and cultivated cardoons belong to a single species, C. cardunculus. How exactly they evolved is less clear. Cardoon and artichoke were domesticated separately and independently, the artichoke around 2000 years ago and the cardoon 1000 years later “at the beginning of the second millennium AD”. Where all this happened is still mysterious. Artichoke’s origins are probably to the east, while the cardoon was domesticated in northern italy, southern France and Spain. But some of the wild “cardoons” of Spain, which differ considerably from those in the eastern Mediterranean, might be feral artichokes.

All of which is delicious. But beyond knowing more about artichoke and cardoon, these findings should also feed into the rational conservation of the species’ biodiversity, being undertaken thanks to a euros 4 million project in Italy ((For which we thank the photograph above.)).

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Eritrean farmers use agricultural biodiversity to improve agricultural production

Salavatore Ceccarelli is a researcher at ICARDA, the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas. In response to our post about barley diversity he sent this article, about how farmers and researchers are working together to use biodiversity to improve production and stability. As he concludes: Farmers are being progressively empowered, as indicated by one of the participating farmers who said, “we feel we have taken back science into our own hands.”

Eritrea is among the 10 poorest countries in the world, with GDP per capita of US$160. The economy is largely based on subsistence agriculture, with more than 80% of the population (~3.7 million in 2000 and growing at 3.8% per annum) living in rural areas and depending on farming and livestock production. The staple crops are barley (16% of total food production) and wheat, mostly produced in the highlands, together with cool season food legumes (lentil, chickpea and faba bean), which provide most of the daily protein requirement.

In 1997 it was estimated that two thirds of Eritreans were undernourished, and 40% of children under the age of five were malnourished. Approximately 30% of food consumption comes from food aid. Land degradation is extreme as a result of deforestation (from 30-40% to less than 0.1% now) and over-grazing over hundreds of years.

Eritreanfarmers
Eritrean farmers assess the crops in their fields

The prolonged and very dry season, roughly from November to April, means that the fields lie as bare cultivated fallow for many months, ready for planting as soon as the rainy season starts. Rainfall (500-700 mm per annum) is highly erratic and variable, and most falls during a short period between June and August. The start of the rainy season is also highly erratic in terms of time and amount. There are small pockets of irrigation in the river valleys of the Atbara basin, mostly for vegetable production, through small dams and groundwater pumping.

The country, like its neighbour Ethiopia, is rich in diversity for all the most important crops. Diversity is also part of the culture of the farmers who cultivate diversity in several ways. They grow different crops and different cultivars of a given crop and also grow landraces that are a mixture of different genotypes. They also cultivate two different species, usually barley and wheat, in a system known as hanfets or hanfetz (a Tigrigna word which means mixture of different things).

Woldeamlak Hanfets, which is also common also in Tigray, the most northern region of Ethiopia, is a highly sophisticated way to cope with the very unpredictable nature of dry lands that will become increasingly more unpredictable with climate change: wet years favour the higher yield potential of wheat, dry years favour the better drought tolerance of barley, the incidence of diseases (particularly rusts in wheat) is reduced, and, as farmers claim, the bread (Kitcha) made out of the mixture tastes much better (and is more digestible) than wheat or barley bread. Pictured left, Professor Woldeamlak Araia ((woldearaia at yahoo dot com)) of the Hamelmalo College of Agriculture is a pioneer in working with hanfets.

The Challenge Program on Water and Food of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is funding a project ((The project is managed by Dr S. Grando, barley breeder at ICARDA, in partnership with the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), other departments of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Hamelmalo College of Agriculture.)) to enhance food security and alleviate poverty in the Atbara river basin (which drains into the Nile). The project’s activities include selection, development and adoption of improved varieties of barley, wheat, and legumes, establishment of systems for rapidly providing locally adapted improved varieties, and strengthening the capacity of the national researchers to undertake participatory research. The project has four major features:

  1. the use of participatory research approaches, centered on participatory varietal selection and plant breeding;
  2. the use of the local germplasm available in the National gene bank;
  3. all the trials are conducted in farmers’ fields in 12 villages and all the key decisions are taken by the farmers (both men and women);
  4. all the work is implemented by Eritrean scientists, and therefore it has an important training component.

Among the major achievements, farmers have increased yields by up to 20% in barley, 31% in wheat, almost double in lentil, and 6% in faba bean. They have done so by selecting within their local landraces, under their usual system of management. As the genetic resources available in the National Gene Bank are being evaluated, new collections as well as crosses between the superior landraces are planned to generate a continuous flow of germplasm into the participatory breeding programs.

The introduction of additional genetic diversity into farmers’ fields, from which farmers will select the best locally adapted material, corresponds to the habit of Eritrean farmers of going out of the village to seek novel cultivars of the various crops, bringing few seeds back to the village, and starting to experiment with them: a number of cultivars were produced in the past in this way.

Farmers are being progressively empowered, as indicated by one of the participating farmers who said, “we feel we have taken back science into our own hands.”

For more information, contact Stefania Grando: s dot grando at cgiar dot org