Category: In situ

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Can biodiversity research change the future of agriculture?

Our friend, colleague and, apparently, occasional reader Pablo Eyzaguirre, an anthropologist at Bioversity International, by all accounts gave a barnstorming performance in an internal seminar recently, but alas all that is available of it at the moment for those of us who were not there is his PowerPoint presentation, whose title we have stolen for this post. That is, of course, better than nothing, and I’m certainly not complaining. ((Or not much. Ed.))

It’s worth going through the whole thing, imagining Pablo in full flood. But if one were to boil his argument down to essentials, something that I feel sure Pablo himself would abhor, it might go something like this, and I use Pablo’s own words from the slides, only slightly re-arranged:

  • You cannot solve problems with the same mentality that created them: intensification through simplification and increased inputs.
  • Agrobiodiversity provides an answer as a source of inputs to address the problems arising from simplification of agriculture and depletion of the natural resource base.
  • But diverse traditional agricultural systems are also crucibles for the development of innovative new ways of producing food linking agriculture more responsively to consumers and emerging movements on food culture, health and territory, and building on synergies among crop varieties, species and breeds, wild and cultivated spaces.
  • So where can we find, and scale out, the new models for bio-intensification and increased resilience in agriculture? Where local institutions and knowledge systems exist to embed, govern and transmit the value and potential of their agricultural biodiversity and biocultural landscapes to young people and allies in conservation and development.

Well, there’s much more to the presentation than that, of course, and lots of wonderful examples to reinforce each point. Go check it out for yourself. And Pablo, if you’re reading this, maybe you’d like to write a summary for your fellow readers?

The question it leaves me with is this: with no agrobiodiversity “megaprogramme” in the CGIAR, will there be enough of the “alternative” mentality around to take up Pablo’s gauntlet?

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Safeguarding tangible agricultural heritage

There’s a great set of pictures of Kenyan traditional crops and food preparation on UNESCO’s Facebook page, in their Documenting Living Heritage series. This is part of an exhibition currently on at UNESCO’s HQ in Paris to raise awareness of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. I doubt there’s a photograph of the Gene Bank of Kenya, but that surely contributes to that goal too.

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Feria del Elote

Untitled by CIMMYT
Untitled, a photo by CIMMYT on Flickr.

From CIMMYT’s Flickr feed:

Carts selling tacos made with maize tortillas (traditional Mexican flatbreads) in Jala, Nayarit, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, during the town’s annual two-week Feria del Elote, or maize ear festival. Tortillas are a staple food in Mexico, and are commonly filled to make tacos. For more about maize in Jala, see CIMMYT’s August 2007 e-news story “Pride and pragmatism sustain a giant Mexican maize,” available online.

Photo credit: Eloise Phipps/CIMMYT.

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Plant micro-reserves on Mediterranean islands

A while back we blogged a couple of times about plant micro-reserves in Crete, including one for an endemic crop wild relative. That work is linked to a similar project in Cyprus, and although no CWRs are on its priority list of species, I suspect some of the target habitats may contain some. I mention all this because the Cyprus project happens to have a Facebook page (which is interesting in itself), on which photographs have just been published of the setting up of notice boards at one of the micro-sites. ((The photo of Cape Grecko on Cyprus is reproduced from TeryKats’s Flickr page under a Creative Commons license.))

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How to give agrobiodiversity an even break

ResearchBlogging.orgOur friends at Bioversity have meta-done it again. After a milestone contribution a few years ago on the patterns of landrace diversity in farmers’ fields, now arrives a monumental review of the kinds of things that can be done to keep it there. ((Jarvis, D., Hodgkin, T., Sthapit, B., Fadda, C., & Lopez-Noriega, I. (2011). An Heuristic Framework for Identifying Multiple Ways of Supporting the Conservation and Use of Traditional Crop Varieties within the Agricultural Production System Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 30 (1), 125-176 DOI: 10.1080/07352689.2011.554358)) It comes as part of a special issue of Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences entitled “Towards a More Sustainable Agriculture.”

It’s a long and complex article and impossible to do full justice to here, but the motivation behind it is simple enough: “to understand better the nature and contribution of traditional varieties to the production strategies of rural communities … and the ways in which they are maintained and managed.” That landraces still make such a contribution, despite expectations to the contrary in many quarters, ((Not least much of the rest of the CG system, one is tempted to say.)) is undeniable. As the authors admit, there is a lively ongoing debate about whether this can, or indeed should, continue. The superior adaptation of landraces to marginal conditions, the stability of their performance over time, the socio-economic conditions of small-scale farmers, and growing concerns about reducing agriculture’s dependence on inputs would all seem to point to a continuing, significant role in livelihoods strategies, at least in specific situations. But if so, why do they need help, as the authors also concede?

The problem is that lots of external factors work against landraces being all they can be, from dysfunctional seed systems to short-termist government policies. The diagram in Fig. 1 makes this clear (clearer still if you click on it):

The paper is really about what can be done to make it a more even playing field for landraces, by overcoming these multitudinous constraints. To that end its centrepiece, Table 1, is a huge list of the sorts of specific actions that have been undertaken around the world over the years in support of landrace management on farm.

So, for example, re-introducing landraces from a genebank (be it international or community), based on local adaptation and farmer preferences, would address constraints 1a and 2a, which have to do with the lack of sufficient planting material. Getting breeding programmes to use more landraces and farmer selections would be great for 2d, 3a, 3b, 3c, 3d, 4a, 4b and 4c (which incidentally seems pretty good value for money). Enabling farmer groups to develop a marketing strategy for landrace products would take care of 3a, 4a and 4c. And so on, and on, for 16 pages. The list of potential interventions is nothing if not exhaustive, and each is in turn exhaustively documented with references.

This is, like the previous review, a tour-de-force. If anything is missing from the discussion, it is perhaps a sense of what the best bets might be. That is, having identified a particular constraint or set of constraints, what are the things that are likely to be most effective in different contexts, for different crops? For that, a rearrangement of Table 1 summarizing and prioritizing interventions for each constraint would have been a useful start. Thus, if you find specific constraint X, you can do A, B and C, and B is what has worked best in the past in similar situations. Another area that could have been explored in more detail is how interventions work — or fail to work — when implemented together. But all this would be no more that tinkering with the masses of data that have been put together, which is perhaps already going on in Bioversity’s Maccarese eyrie.

The next major analytical step, surely, is to work out, or document if the information is already available, what these interventions actually cost. That would allow some calculation of possible returns on investment. Whether, and to what extent, any of the things that are so comprehensively described in this paper are ever done on a large scale in support of landrace conservation and use on farm will probably in the end be down to that. After all, those pushing the “alternatives” have already done their sums.