- Climate change shrinking sheep, exploding insect populations.
- Japanese boffins sequencing tuna genome, planning super-tuna. Godzilla unavailable for comment.
- Birds eat beetles which eat seeds. So no birds, no forest. Such is the wonderful web of life.
- Buffalo cloning and its future. But what is that guy in the picture doing?
Agribusiness at the trough
I’m not fully up-to-date with the latest wiles of industrial agriculture in the US, but I do have the feeling that they are spoiling things for everyone with their subsidies and special exemptions. Fortunately, I can read Susan Schneider’s latest post at Agricultural Law: Agriculture’s embarrassment. She refers to a column by Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post that lays bare the self-serving antics of the farm lobby, and I’m pretty sure that what happens in the US happens in most other developed countries (but maybe not New Zealand).
Two things seem to be at work here. One is the public view — fostered by all those little-red-barn-and-mixed-livestock-in-the-kindly-farmer’s-yard books for children — that just about everything is fine on Old MacDonald’s farm, and that to thank Old MacDonald for the loving care he takes over our food supply we better give him what he asks for. The other is the reality of industrial food production, which nobody — least of all the food industry — wants anyone to know about.
The eating public — and what does consumer mean, after all? — really needs to open its eyes to what is being done in its name.
Meantime, Susan Schneider has the last word:
The agricultural community should stop to consider not only its own long range interest in climate protection, but to consider the public good that we all need keep in mind in order to address the issue of climate change. And, if it really wants to be selfish, it can also consider the backlash that may well be coming. Pearlman concludes his article with the following:
“The next time the world’s most selfish lobby comes to Washington demanding drought relief, someone ought to have the good sense to tell them to go pound sand.”
An industry so wedded to government support and special treatment should pick its battles wisely.
It is time for the agricultural industry to grow up and acknowledge that there are environmental problems that EVERYONE needs to work together to address.
Cold comfort on climate change
We face a serious scientific gap in understanding crop substitution, current models assume that a maize farmer today will be a maize farmer tomorrow. In reality, many will need to select a different crop to what they have now.
Perhaps Marshall Burke and his team will now crank the machine and make some genetically nuanced predictions about how much change of crops — rather than varieties within a crop — might be needed. But that will require some pretty fundamental understanding of how and under what circumstances farmers adopt new (or old) crops and how best to facilitate that process. How much do the social anthropologists know about this?
Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, which I’ve mentioned before, has many insights into the factors that resulted in the rapid uptake of maize in Africa. But can the factors that promoted maize be easily reversed to favour sorghum or pearl millet? I have no idea, but I doubt it. How many crop failures will it take before either farmers or their advisors are willing to try something new?
And in other climate change news, a series of policy briefs from the International Food Policy Research Institute sets out An Agenda for Negotiation in Copenhagen. Detailed proposals are in the briefs. Executive summary:
- Investments. There must be explicit inclusion of agriculture-related investments, especially as part of a Global Climate Change Fund.
- Incentives. There must be a deliberate focus on introducing incentives to reduce emissions and support technological change.
- Information. There must be a solid commitment to establishing comprehensive information and monitoring services in soil and land use management for verification purposes.
Stay tuned.
Nibbles: Bamboo, Methane, Obama, Pests
- Fiat ghost paper. From bamboo.
- “If a cow burps, how do you measure it?“
- Recruiting drive: “I want you to continue to be my little ambassadors in your own home and your own communities.”
- “Insects and humans compete for food.” Say it isn’t so, Lubin Library.
Climate change: predictions hotting up
Faced with pessimistic predictions of the impact of climate change, it’s too easy to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s nothing to be done”. Or, as a few people still do, to throw your hands up in the air and cry “there’s no need to do anything”. But if they turn to the latest issue of Global Environmental Change, policy-makers, plant breeders and genebank managers should be able to throw their hands in the air with a cry of joy: “This is what we need to do.”
The authors of Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation are Marshall Burke and David Lobell of the Program on Food Security and the Environment, at Stanford University, and our own Luigi Guarino, wearing his Global Crop Diversity Trust hat. ((Burke, M., Lobell, D., & Guarino, L. (2009). Shifts in African crop climates by 2050, and the implications for crop improvement and genetic resources conservation Global Environmental Change DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.04.003. And though the article is beyond a paywall, which is why I am quoting extensively, I’m sure one of the authors would be able to send you a reprint.))
The approach is quite straightforward. First, they ask how crop climates will change across Africa. This involves taking historical data for a particular place and comparing the climate there to the predictions of a whole bunch of climate change models. They then ask how quickly the predicted changes will push local climate outside the limits of recent local experience. In addition, they looked at different climates across the continent, asking whether future climates are currently present somewhere in the country, or elsewhere on the continent. The goal is
[T]o identify both future problem regions with no analogs on the continent in today’s climate, and countries whose current crop areas appear likely analogs to many future climates, with the latter case representing promising areas for genetic resource collection and preservation.
They do so for the three primary rain-fed crops of sub-Saharan Africa: maize, sorghum and pearl millet, which provide roughly a third of the calories consumed, and almost two-thirds in some countries.
The big predicted change of all the models is in temperature, which gets hotter almost everywhere, with much less agreement among the models of how much rainfall will change. Skipping over just how fast climates are changing (“rapidly”) and keeping in mind the large time lags involved in breeding crops suited to changed climates, Burke et al. warn that their results “suggest a pressing need to develop breeding programs that anticipate these rapidly warming growing environments.”
So there’s one thing people can do, now.
Where will the raw material for those breeding programmes come from? Genebanks, natch. Alas,
African cereals are often poorly represented in international genebanks, and national genebanks on the continent are frequently resource-constrained and not always representative of the crop genetic diversity in the country.
Burke, Lobell and Guarino look at the spatial distribution of climate analogues and calculate “self-overlap,” overlap of the extremes of projected climate with today’s climate within the country. ((Actually, with the average of the past 10 years of observed climate, long enough to average out extremes but short enough to capture the current climate.)) There’s a nifty graph of the overlap for each of the three crops in all the countries, but the take home message is that despite the lack of overlap in some places, there’s still enough variation that a country might be a good source of variability for its own needs. On the other hand, future temperature regimes are likely to be so hot that even those countries that have large self-overlaps will likely have to look outside their own borders for varieties that will thrive in their expected climates.
Many countries with low self-overlap nevertheless have five or more countries that overlap 75% with their new climates.
For these countries, breeding efforts to cope with warming could greatly benefit from accessing genetic resources beyond their own borders.
Something else to do, now.
There are, however, also countries, most of them in the Sahel, that have low self-overlap and fewer than 5 analogs in other countries. They’re already the hottest climates in Africa, and likely to become hotter, so it ought not to be a surprise that their options are going to be limited.
Unfortunately, primary centers of maize diversity outside Africa, such as in Mexico, enjoy much cooler climates than much of Africa. If breeding efforts cannot sustain yield for maize for these hottest climates in the face of warming temperatures, switches to potentially more heat- and drought-tolerant crops, such as sorghum and millet could be necessary.
Then there are the happy countries whose current climates contain analogues to many future novel climates. Their genetic diversity will be valuable for future breeding efforts. Are they safe?
Sudan, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Mozambique … are particularly poorly represented in national and international genebanks. The top ten analog countries for maize — those which overlap most with anticipated novel climates on the continent — each have fewer than 150 landrace accessions in major genebanks. These countries appear as particularly high priorities for urgent collection and conservation of maize genetic resources. … The results for sorghum and millet show qualitatively similar patterns as the results for maize.
There’s a lot more meat in the paper, which repays close reading. It really does contain evidence-based policy advice, on how best to make use of a limited pot of cash by setting the right priorities and establishing the right kinds of cooperative efforts.
Is anyone (who matters) listening?