SBSTTA [decides]

SBSTTA’s recommendations on the review of the CBD’s programme of work on agrobiodiversity are out, after last week’s smackdown. As usual, there are analyses at UKabc and IISD. The general consensus seems to be that the recommendations have been weakened, but I talked to one person familiar with the negotiations who thought the text was actually clearer and more focused now. But a lot of square brackets remain, in particular the whole section on biofuels. One thing that struck me is the invitation by SBSTTA “to evaluate and characterize germplasm potentially suitable for adaptation to climate change.” I didn’t find that in the original document, so I am assuming it was added during the negotiations. It seems unusual for a CBD document in recognizing — albeit implicitly — the importance of ex situ conservation, at least in the context of climate change. But I don’t really know how these things work. I hope someone will explain it to me.

Agrobiodiversity and climate change in Madagascar

There’s a workshop going on in Antananarivo on the Impacts of Climate Change on Madagascar’s Biodiversity and Livelihoods. My friend Robert Hijmans is there and he sent me the link to the flickr site of one of the participants, Ratoza Harinjaka, who’s got some photos of the meeting up. Including this one of Robert.

robert.jpg

Ratoza has kindly given his permission for us to use the photo. He has blogged about the workshop. Thanks for the use of the pic, Ratoza. If either you or Robert would like to write something for us on the meeting, you’re most welcome to do so. It sounds like the recommendations will be on the Foko website in due course. But it’s always nice to get it from the horse’s mouth.

Scary climate change story

ResearchBlogging.orgA paper ((Lobell, D.B., Burke, M.B., Tebaldi, C., Mastrandrea, M.D., Falcon, W.P., Naylor, R.L. (2008). Prioritizing Climate Change Adaptation Needs for Food Security in 2030. Science, 319, 607-610.)) and commentary ((Brown, M.E., Funk, C.C. (2008). Food Security Under Climate Change. Science, 319, 580-581.)) in the latest Science make pretty compelling reading for anyone with an interest in how climate change will affect agriculture and food security. Long-standing readers will remember a little round-up that included the work of our chums Andy Jarvis and Annie Lane. They predicted the effect of climate change on the suitability of different areas for different crops. David Lobell and his colleagues at Stanford University take a different tack, to answer a slightly different question: what are the top priorities for investing in agriculture to cope with climate change.

They isolated 12 regions where most of the world’s malnourished people are concentrated. Then they analyzed 20 different climate change models to get a feel for how temperature and rainfall would change in those areas. And finally, they looked at the specific crops that people in those regions eat and used past correlations between yield and temperature and yield and rainfall to predict how those crops might respond to the predicted changes in climate. This is an important step. As the researchers point out, “Rice, maize and wheat contribute roughly half of the calories currently consumed by the world’s poor and only 31% of the calories consumed by those in sub-Saharan Africa”. There’s a whole bunch more jiggery-pokery in there that ends up allowing the researchers to come up with best and worst case scenarios for each of the regions they consider, and some sharp conclusions.

Southern Africa and South Asia are going to be hit hard. Maize in Southern Africa and wheat and millet in South Asia are likely to show large declines. But there are also regions with large uncertainty, with some models predicting an increase and others a decrease. Groundnut in South Asia and sorghum in Southern Africa are examples of these, probably because the historical data on yield correlations are poor.

The results are summed up in a table that, the authors point out, could help agencies decide where to invest scarce resources. Those that are really risk averse might focus on wheat in South Asia, rice in Southeast Asia and maize in Southern Africa, all of which are predicted to drop by all the models. An investment in those crops is most likely to generate “some benefits”. A different view would be that investment should focus on crops and regions where at least some of the models predict strong depression of yields, because even if the projection is unlikely, if it does happen the consequences will be great. Many crops in South Asia, along with sorghum in the Sahel and maize in Southern Africa fall into this group.

The bigger question is, what form should those investments take? This is where the commentary adds its 2 cents worth. Molly Brown and Christopher Funk point out a double-whammy awaiting poor farmers:

In food-insecure regions, many farmers both consume their product and sell it in local markets. This exposes farmers to climate variations, because when they produce less their income goes down while their costs go up to maintain basic consumption. Large-scale hunger can ensue, even when there is sufficient food in the market that has been imported from elsewhere.

The solution that Brown and Funk see is largely technological; irrigation, fertilizers, improved varieties. Indeed, they aver that “technological sophistication determines a farm’s productivity far more than its climatic and agricultural endowments,” and of course at one level they are right. They also say that “poor farmers in the tropics will be less able to cope with changes in climate because they have far fewer options in their agricultural systems to begin with”.

I wonder whether that is correct. For the most marginal farmers, without irrigation or fertilizers or improved varieties, options — in the form of agricultural biodiversity — is all they do have. Development agencies are again starting to pay attention to agricultural research, and the Lobell paper and others on climate change are going to help them focus their efforts. It is clear that all approaches will need to be explored, among them helping people to adopt new foods in their diets and cultures. Will that include helping the most marginal farmers to use agrobiodiversity — local and exotic — to secure their food supplies in the face of climate change?

Monopsony

Thanks to our occasional contributor Jacob van Etten for the following article on markets and agrobiodiversity. 

Monopoly happens when there is only one seller for a certain product. Monopsony, this week’s new word, happens when there is only one buyer. And when this happens, it is also likely that this single buyer will impose some rigid standards. And then the industrial buyer makes fake diversity by making slightly different mixes of standard components:

One technique retail oligopolies use is flood the shelves with a pseudo variety of similar products made in almost exactly the same way, so that minor vendors that offer real variety can be elbowed out. The beer industry is a great example of this trend.

In other words, agricultural biodiversity is being replaced with industrial diversity. Monopsony is growing in the US wine market. If climate change will push wine production to the north, will Canadian and Swedish vineyards become planted only to the few grape varieties demanded by the monopsonists ((There was a nice map in the November 2007 French National Geographic that shows how viticulture will move northwards, based on data by Gregory Jones, whose home page has a number of interesting articles on this, but none as the NG map.))?

The role that markets play in biodiversity conservation as well as local food provision is also the subject of a recent article, published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability. The article is behind a pay-wall, but the PhD dissertation (in Spanish) on which it based and a colorful brochure are available for free.

Neus Martí and Michel Pimbert explain that in the Peruvian Andes, local communities organized barter markets to exchange local food products, while the economy of the region was pushed towards commercial agriculture. The barter markets permit a commercial exchange of agricultural products that is economically horizontal (between equals) and ecologically vertical (between ecological floors in the mountain landscape), whereas neo-liberal policy promote something that is the other way around.

The barter markets also happen to be good for biodiversity. All crops that are sold for money may also be bartered, but the reverse is not true. Many crop landraces and wild foods exchanged in barter markets are never sold in money-based markets.

So, don’t blame the market. Blame the monopsonists.