Policy

June 25, 2013June 24, 2013

Impact of climate change on business apparently does not include loss of crop diversity

I suppose I should have expected it. A new UNEP report is out, entitled GEO-5 for Business: Impacts of a Changing Environment on the Corporate Sector. GEO-5 being, of course, the fifth Global Environment Outlook, “a consultative, participatory process that builds capacity for conducting integrated environmental assessments for reporting on the state, trends and outlooks of the environment.”

These are the risks the consultative, participatory report highlights for the food and beverage industry:

Changes in availability, quality, price, and sources of agricultural products due to climate change and other environmental changes
Increased cost of fossil fuel-based energy
Reduced crop yields due to water scarcity
Conflicts among different users of limited water resources
Increased competition for arable land
Depletion of seafood stocks
Increased consumer and regulatory pressure to reduce environmental impacts of meat production and of chemicals and fertilizers

And these are the opportunities:

New markets for alternative supplies or more climate-resilient food varieties
Opportunities for businesses in new agricultural growing zones
Expanded markets for organic foods and sustainable food production
Reputational benefits from sustainable food product certifications

Nothing, however, about the risk of loss of crop diversity, and how this would impact the ability to supply those burgeoning, beckoning markets with the needed “climate-resilient food varieties.”

Which, as I say, should probably not have surprised me. But still.

June 25, 2013June 25, 2013

Nibbles: Assam and CC, China ag landscape, Breeding for CC, Patenting pros & cons, Quinoa sustainability, Nordic cheeses, Italian endangered breeds

Rethinking rice-based agriculture in Assam.
And China, maybe?
By breeding your way out of the problem, maybe?
And then patenting the result? Well, maybe not.
Here comes fair-trade quinoa.
Nordic cheeses to go with those insects from a few days back. Lack of Norwegian representation pointed out, as well as a remedy.
I wonder how many Italian cheeses are made from the milk of endangered breeds. Well, now the relevant association has a Facebook page, so I can ask them.

June 24, 2013June 23, 2013

Brainfood: Pear history, Markets & biodiversity, Conserving small populations, Niche & range, Sustainability in the US, Production forecasts, Sheep differences

The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art. An oldie, but worth reading just for the analogy between the pear connoisseur and the opera aficionado.
Effects of market integration on agricultural biodiversity in a tropical frontier. Darien, Panama. Roads are bad for crop diversity, of the interspecific kind at least.
Conservation genetics and the persistence and translocation of small populations: bighorn sheep populations as examples. Bigger is definitely better.
Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Specialist species tend to have small range sizes, making them doubly vulnerable. Trebly so if they have small populations too, I guess (see above).
Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest. …depends on on-farm diversity, and here’s three things you can do to promote it, because it ain’t getting any better: collect statistics, redirect subsidies, and think beyond peak yield. Ah but wait, you may have to change the IP system. As you were.
Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. For rice, wheat, maize and soybean, current rates of yield increase, if they continue, which I suppose is a big if, what with climate change and all, would mean about 50% production increases by 2050, rather than the supposedly needed 100%.
Genome-Wide Genetic Diversity and Differentially Selected Regions among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee Sheep. Suffolk is different from the others, which we already knew were related. Ah, but now we know where exactly in the genome the differences are.

June 21, 2013June 21, 2013

Nibbles: Mapping by phone, Samoan greens, Rice podcast, Juniper threat, Wild yams, Food book, Coconut conservation

If you can map neglected diseases by phone, can you map neglected crops? I bet you can.
It’s the turn of Samoans to be chided for not eating enough leafy greens.
I had no idea AfricaRice had a podcast.
Now we gotta worry about G&T too? Enough, already.
Video on the wild yams of Sri Lanka. Not just yams, though, by the look of it.
100 recipes to understand the history of food? Count me in.
More on the Polymotu Concept from our friends at SPC. Great gig if you can get it.

June 20, 2013November 20, 2017

Where exactly is that zeitgeist?

Something is up, Jeremy said a couple of days ago, by way of introduction to a pair of pieces which he suggested, tongue no doubt at least partly in cheek, showed “the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change.”

Well, if something was up, it is now firmly down, and as for the zeitgeist, its name is biotech. Because yesterday some of the masterminds behind GM won the World Food Prize. And, probably not coincidentally, the Rt Hon Owen Paterson, UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave a speech to Rothamsted Research which ended with this rousing call:

GM isn’t necessarily about making life easier for farmers or making their businesses more profitable, although I believe that there are great opportunities for the industry. It’s about finding non-chemical solutions to pests and diseases. It’s about fortifying food with vitamin A so that children in the poorest countries don’t go blind or die. It’s about making crops durable enough to survive sustained drought. It’s about developing new medicines. It’s about feeding families in some of the poorest parts of the world. We cannot expect to feed tomorrow’s population with yesterday’s agriculture. We have to use every tool at our disposal.

Meanwhile, the search for that elusive middle ground, in which every tool at our disposal is not only used, but gets an equal chance to be honed and oiled, continues.

LATER: How would you facilitate a truly constructive debate about that middle ground? Here’s how NOT to do it:

Setting up a debate that is framed around risk, rather than food politics, focused on a single subset of technology, rather than one that explores all the options, structured around science in an area where questions about outcomes are impossible to answer with certainty, about a technology that has unclear benefits to the public and the developing world but very obvious benefits to large firms that the public distrusts (partly because of their unclear relationships to politicians), seems to me at least like a waste of taxpayers’ money.