Category: Information

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Indications of lack of progress on agrobiodiversity indicators

Over at the work blog, I’m busy jumping on the biodiversity mainstreaming bandwagon, but I wrote that piece before news came out this morning from the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Cancun of the disappointing lack of progress around the world in meeting the Aichi Targets.

You remember the Aichi Targets, don’t you? We’re supposed to be doing a lot of good things for biodiversity by 2020, including, in Target 13, for agro-biodiversity:

the genetic diversity of cultivated plants and farmed and domesticated animals and of wild relatives, including other socio-economically as well as culturally valuable species, is maintained, and strategies have been developed and implemented for minimizing genetic erosion and safeguarding their genetic diversity.

Here’s how we’re getting on, according to the just-published assessment. Spoiler alert: not very well. Green means “On track to meet or exceed the Aichi Target,” orange is “Progress to achieve the Aichi Target but at insufficient rate,” and red denotes “No progress, or a decline against the Aichi Target.” And remember that not all national targets are necessarily well aligned with the Aichi targets, for Target 13 75% being less ambitious or poorly aligned.

The assessment summarizes how countries say they’re doing. Or rather, how the CBD interprets how countries say they’re doing, in meeting the different targets:

101 parties submitted their National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs) and 5th National Reports between 2011 and 2016. As of July 2016, 5th National Reports have been submitted by 90% of the Parties, and NBSAPs by 52%. These were collated, analysed and scored by the CBD Secretariat (SCBD).

Here’s the raw data, if you’re interested. How does Venezuela, say, know that it is “on track to achieve” Target 13? There are lots of possible indicators out there. The CBD itself suggested a couple early on in its “quick guide” to Target 13:

• Trends in genetic diversity of cultivated plants, and farmed and domesticated animals and their wild relatives
• Trends in genetic diversity of selected species
• Trends in number of effective policy mechanisms implemented to reduce genetic erosion and safeguard genetic diversity related to plant and animal genetic resources

And a little later, in 2016, in the 5th edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook, National Reporting and Indicators for Assessing Progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets (UNEP/CBD/SBSTTA/20/13), it came up with this little lot (click to read better):

Note that a couple of indicators (number of accessions in genebanks, number of livestock breeds at risk) are also being proposed for SDG Target 2.5, which echoes the wording of Aichi 13. Note also that, as we blogged about yesterday, some progress is being made on the indicator on Red Listing crop wild relatives. And finally, the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture did come up with a very thorough assessment of global plans of action for plant genetic resources earlier this year.

But it’s not over, not by a long chalk. The Biodiversity Indicator Partnership seems to have ideas of its own (though it likes the breeds indicator)…

• Proportion of local breeds classified as being at risk, not-at-risk or at unknown level of risk of extinction
• Growth in species occurrence records accessible through GBIF

and it wants to hear from you if you’ve got better ones.

They may well hear from me eventually, because we’ve been thinking about this whole indicator thing at work too. Stay tuned… In the meantime, I don’t know which specific indicator(s) Venezuela (or any other country) used, I’m afraid. I’d have to look at its NBSAP, and maybe I will one day. Or more likely, get an intern to do it. But if we take the CBD assessment at face value, and it’s the best we have at the moment, we do have some work to do on Target 13. 2020 is not that far away. Lots more mainstreaming to do.

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Red Listing crop wild relatives

It’s kind of buried in the IUCN press release, between giraffes and freshwater species, but there’s good news for researchers interested in crop wild relatives.

With this update, the first assessments of 233 wild relatives of crop plants such as barley, oats and sunflowers have been added to the IUCN Red List. Habitat loss, primarily due to agricultural expansion, is the major threat to many of these species. The assessments were completed as part of a partnership between Toyota Motor Corporation and IUCN, whose aim is to broaden the IUCN Red List to include the extinction risk of many species that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.

Crop wild relatives are a source of genetic material for new and existing crop species, allowing for increased disease and drought resistance, fertility, nutritional value and other desirable traits. Almost every species of plant that humans have domesticated and now cultivate has one or more crop wild relatives. However, these species have received little systematic conservation attention until now.

Four mango species have been listed as Endangered, and the Kalimantan mango (Mangifera casturi) has been listed as Extinct in the Wild. These species are relatives of the common mango (Mangifera indica) and are threatened by habitat loss. Native to South Asia, mangoes are now cultivated in many tropical and sub-tropical countries and they are one of the most commercially important fruits in these regions.

A relative of cultivated asparagus, hamatamabouki (Asparagus kiusianus), which is native to Japan, has been listed as Endangered due to habitat loss caused by urban expansion and agriculture. Loss of habitat is also the main threat to the Anomalus sunflower (Helianthus anomalus) which has been listed as Vulnerable and is a relative of the sunflower (H. annuus). Cicer bijugum, native to Iran and Turkey, is a wild relative of the chickpea (C. arietinum); it has been listed as Endangered due to habitat conversion to agriculture.

“Crop wild relative species are under increasing threat from urbanisation, habitat fragmentation and intensive farming, and probably climate change,” says Mr. Kevin Butt, General Manager, Regional Environmental Sustainability Director, Toyota Motor North America. “To conserve this vital gene pool for crop improvement we need to urgently improve our knowledge about these species. Toyota is pleased to provide support for the assessment of these and other species on The IUCN Red List.”

Unfortunately, there’s no way to search the Red List just for all crop wild relatives, but here’s the entry for Anomalous Sunflower for you, because I like the name.

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Nibbles: Diversification, Street food, Forest genetic units, Citrus greening, COP22 roundup, Australian breeding, Temperate Orchard Society, Quinoa conference

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Smallholders are bigger than you imagine

ResearchBlogging.org There’s an awful lot of talk about smallholder farmers and how they hold the keys to food security. Talk, but not a lot of solid data. So I was intrigued to discover a new paper ((Samberg, L., Gerber, J., Ramankutty, N., Herrero, M., & West, P. (2016). Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production Environmental Research Letters, 11 (12) DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010)) that maps smallholdings and estimates their “contributions to global food production”. Bottom line:

[S]mallholder-dominated systems are home to more than 380 million farming households, make up roughly 30% of the agricultural land and produce more than 70% of the food calories produced in these regions, and are responsible for more than half of the food calories produced globally, as well as more than half of global production of several major food crops.

The study, from the University of Minnesota, points out the various failings of much of the existing data on smallholder farming and then takes a new and interesting approach. Household census data generally distinguishes between farming and non-farming families. So the researchers took census data from all the countries they could and looked at the smallest administrative unit in each country’s data and counted the number of households headed by someone whose primary industry was listed as farming. They mashed that up with a recent map of land cover. That gives the number of farming households per hectare of agricultural land, which in turn gives the amount of agricultural land per farming household in each of the administrative units. Bingo.

We refer to this figure as the mean agricultural area (MAA) for each unit, defined as hectares of agricultural land divided by number of farming households. While differing from traditional metrics of farm size, it is designed as a proxy for the prevalence of smaller or larger farms on the landscape.

There’s a lot more manouevring and modelling but in the end they come out with a map that shows the calculated size of farms in each subnational administrative unit.

[U]nits with a MAA less than 5 hectares account for … 28% of agricultural land in the 83 countries, and are farmed by roughly 383 million households.

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As for the contribution of these smaller farms to global production, that’s based on the EasthStat database, which estimates crop areas and yields by combining agricultural census data with remote sensing information. And that’s when, for me, things get a bit sticky.

Can it really be, for example, that 82% of the world’s rice, 75% of the groundnuts and 74% of the oilpalm are produced on farms smaller than 5 hectares? I suppose it must be, until a different analysis comes along.

There are lots more interesting observations in the paper, such as the observation that in Asia smallholders contribute 90% of regional food calories, while in sub-Saharan Africa the figure is closer to 50% and in Latin America less than 7%. Smallholder farms are less than 2% of the agricultural area in Latin America, so even that 7% means they’re punching well above their weight.

Given open access to the datasets, there are probably lots more nuggets waiting to be unearthed.

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Brainfood: Sustainable ag, American ag diversity, Valpolicella and CC, Heritage textiles