Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
The BBC’s Dig In programme is asking people to apply for a “free Dig In pack, containing seeds for five easy-to-grow veg varieties, full instructions and stickers.” A nice enough idea, but why not take the opportunity of promoting some rare and endangered heirlooms? Not everyone is content with easy-to-grow…
LATER: News of another British planting material give-away just out…
Because right now, still, the planet is blind. In other words I can step into the genebank of Brazil and understand it. But 99.9999 percent of the planet cannot. And so whether you’re eating in a restaurant in New York City, whether you’re a Nigerian farmer, or whether you’re a school kid walking to school in Arizona — it doesn’t matter. You are blind; you are illiterate. And this gives you the chance to be able to read. That will change our relationship to agrobiodiversity enormously. And I feel that’s the only chance for [combating] apathy. If people can “read” agrobiodiversity, they will then, for their own reasons, find it much more valuable to be interested in it, and as a consequence, [are] much more likely to be willing to save key pieces of it… And the only way that societies will be tolerant of big genebanks is if those big genebanks are offering them something. And if you’re blind to what’s in it, you’ve suddenly cut the list of what it can offer you down very severely…
The world has 1700 different crop genebanks. Every one of those things is someone’s salary, someone’s career, someone’s motivation. And they couldn’t care less about the whole thing. They care about the pieces in their backyard. And so the outcome is that you have 1700 collections which add up to x percent of the whole genepools. Well, if you ask me, I will tell you brutally that 50 percent of those will be dead and worthless in 50 years. But that doesn’t help the guy whose job it is to protect it, to raise money for it. He wants his income now. And the fact that it’s going to die 50 years from now couldn’t matter less…
I had to give a five-minute talk in California a few months ago, and I found myself saying, “Look, the threats are fragmentation, apathy, climate change, and small size.” Those are the threats. And the solutions are endowment, bigger size, and information systems…
Well, the legendary conservationist Daniel Janzen didn’t say these things. Not quite, anyway. But I didn’t change many words, and not by much. He was talking about protected areas, but it is quite amazing how similar are the problems of ex situ conservation of crop diversity. Too bad the two things are so often seen as antithetical.
A salutary tale from Fred Bahnson over on the Nourishing the Planet blog. He describes how the farmers of Quintana Roo in Mexico managed to recover from disastrous advice. More than 15 years ago, government extension agents told the farmers to grow pitaya, one of the epiphytic cacti also known as dragonfruit. Unfortunately the extension agents knew only one way to grow them, on concrete and wire trellises. And that collapsed, leaving the farmers high and dry.
Bahson relates how, instead of giving up, the farmers adapted their traditional milpa system to grow pitaya, a story with a very happy ending, at least for the farmer Bahnson visited:
On his three hectares he harvests around 12 tons of dragonfruit per year. At $1/kilo, he’s earning $12,000 annually, almost double Mexico’s median annual household income of $7,297. And all that food coming from his milpa means a lower grocery bill than most city dwellers.
The “experts” have apparently returned, to learn how the farmers did it.