Category: Climate change

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Africa, agriculture and climate change

“If agriculture in developing countries becomes more sustainable, if it increases its productivity and becomes more resilient against the impact of climate change, this should help to reduce the number of currently around one billion hungry people and offer better income and job opportunities,” said Alexander Mueller, FAO Assistant Director-General.

“Millions of poor farmers around the globe could help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Peter Holmgren, FAO focal point for the UN climate change negotiations. ((Agriculture is essential for facing climate change.))

OK. But what about preparing those self-same farmers to cope with climate change by giving them access to agricultural biodiversty?

Africa’s market for milk, meat and staple food crops such as maize, banana, sorghum, rice and millet stands at over $150 billion a year which is more than what it fetches from pet cash crops like coffee, tea and flowers.

Researchers say that seven out of ten Africans earn their living by engaging in subsistence farming making the sub-sector to be the continent’s market leader.

It is for this reason that the farmers are encouraged to embrace modern farming methods to produce more food in order to make economic sense.

On the other hand, governments are obliged to ensure that farm inputs are affordable and farmers have access to markets to sell their harvests at competitive prices to reap fruits of the labour. ((Food crops edging out cash crops on rural Africa’s incomes.))

OK. But does “modern farming” mean abandoning their agrobiodiversity and the skills to use it? And why is it government’s responsibility to make sure inputs are affordable? If government distorts price signals, we can’t blame farmers for doing the most profitable thing in the short term, even if it means losing their agricultural biodiversity and the skills to use it in the longer term.

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Climate change to devastate crops, promote livestock

[B]y 2050, hotter conditions, coupled with shifting rainfall patterns, could make anywhere from 500,000 to one million square kilometers of marginal African farmland no longer able to support even a subsistence level of food crops. However, the land, on which some 20 to 35 million people currently live, may still support livestock.

Boosting livestock production could be an attractive alternative for millions of poor farmers across Africa who, in the coming decades, could find that climate change has rendered their lands unsuitable for crop cultivation yet still viable for raising animals, according to the study that appears this week in a special edition of the journal Environmental Science and Policy.

That’s from a press release put out by ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute. The paper is from a special issue of Environmental Science and Policy on Food Security and Environmental Change, Food Security and Environmental Change: Linking Science, Development and Policy for Adaptation. Just skimming the contents gives me the willies.

By the way, Wikipedia says sub-Saharan Africa covers an area of 24.3 million square kilometers. It doesn’t say how much of that supports a subsistence level of food crops. So it is hard to know how much difference this prediction will really make.

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Short-haired bumblebee goes home

The bumblebee Bombus subterraneus is extinct in the UK — it was last seen in 1988 at Dungeness nature reserve on the south Kent coast — but has been thriving in New Zealand.

The short-haired bumblebee was exported from the UK to New Zealand on the first refrigerated lamb boats in the late 19th Century to pollinate clover crops.

It has disappeared in Britain (though it apparently is still to be found on the continent) because of “[l]oss of extensive, herb-rich grasslands, especially those containing good stands of plants of the families Lamiaceae and Fabaceae, through agricultural intensification.” But now there’s a plan to set up a captive breeding programme using the expats, with a view to reintroduction, including in restored habitats.

I could not find any information on whether the decline of the short-haired bumblebee affected the pollination of any plant species, or whether the slack has been taken up by other bumblebees. But be that as it may, this is an interesting example of assisted migration, of a sort, though I don’t think climate change has been implicated in the fate of the insect in Britain. It’s also an example of going back to former colonies to look for genetic resources that are no longer to be found in the “mother” country. Like those Hopi peaches of a few days back. Uhm, I feel another post coming on…

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“Global human sensor net” to be cast for biodiversity

Another attempt to harness the “wisdom of crowds” is in the offing. The eBiosphere informatics challenge is asking people around the world to send in observations of “species of interest.” That basically means mainly invasives and threatened species, for now. You can contribute photographs to Flickr or use Twitter or send an email. You don’t have to be a taxonomist: you’re asked to do your best on the identification, and they’ll bring experts in for confirmation. All the observations coming in will be integrated it with other scientific knowledge (e.g. taxonomy, maps, conservation status) on the species.

Now, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know this kind of approach is one we’ve occasionally contemplated here for crop wild relatives, landraces and other agrobiodiversity, in particular to monitor threats and erosion. So I’ll be watching closely.