Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
It may not be the thing that’s at the top of people’s agendas in Japan at the moment, but one does wonder what the long-term effect of the tsunami will be on the satoyama of the region, their agrobiodiversity and the people who maintain it. 1 The BBC series on the satoyama from a few years back is no longer available on the BBC’s website, but some of the documentaries can be found elsewhere. 2
Luigi goaded me into watching Stephen Lansing’s presentation on Balinese rice production, and I’m glad he did. It gives me the opportunity to make a couple of points.
A questioner, at about 1.08, finds it fascinating that the system Lansing described “works for monoculture crops,” and asks whether it might apply in any way to the monocultures of the American midwest. She’s using monoculture to mean single species, as do many others people. But it prompts a reflection on the genetic diversity of the Balinese rices. Lansing does say at one point that much of the diversity has been lost, although some survives up in the hills. And the introduction of the high-tech package based on very uniform improved rice cultivars, starting with the canonical IR-8, failed because it didn’t take Balinese practices into account. And yet those practices too depend on uniformity.
The Balinese system works because farmers synchronize their plantings, so that after harvest there’s nothing left for rice pests to eat and nowhere for them to go. But that requires all the local varieties to have the same maturity period. Indeed, the fundamental unit of the Balinese calendar, the master clock, Lansing said, was the growth cycle of old Balinese rice varieties. I guess that the same would hold true today. Neighbouring farmers must grow varieties with similar maturity dates, otherwise all the complexity associated with synchronizing planting and sharing water goes out of whack at the end of the season.
If the farmers all decided to plant a genetically uniform modern cultivar, but stuck with their older rituals for timing the rice cycles, would the system work as before?
Notice of the publication of the new book “African Indigenous Vegetables in Urban Agriculture” by Earthscan allows me to point out that Bioversity has also just published a study of the impact of its interventions in that area of agrobiodiversity.
As the Fourth Regular Session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture gets off the ground in Bali, Indonesia, it may be useful to reflect, as Steve Lansing does in a fascinating talk, on what modern agriculture can learn from Balinese rice production. It turns out to be a lesson about the benefits of cooperation. 3
Synchronised irrigation schedules improve harvest and also reduce variance in harvests. The reduction in variance is potentially significant, because large differences in harvest could discourage cooperation by farmers with suboptimal harvests.