Category: Policy

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The Economist economizes on the truth about plant breeding

There is a puzzling paragraph in the latest issue of The Economist. Well actually there’s a lot of puzzling paragraphs in the latest Economist, but the one I’m talking about is not in the finance or economics sections. And it is puzzling not so much because of what it says, but because of what it leaves out. Here it is in full. It appears in an article on the effect of climate change on developing countries.

This kind of increasing unpredictability would be dire news at the best of times: hit by drought and flood, the land becomes less productive. It is compounded by another problem. The higher-yielding, pest-resistant seed varieties invented in the 1960s were designed to thrive in stable climes. Old-fashioned seeds are actually better at dealing with variable weather—but are now less widely used. Reinstituting their use will mean less food.

What follows is a long paragraph which starts by saying that “[i]n India the gains from the Green Revolution are already shrinking because of local pollution, global warming and waning resistance to pests and disease…” and ends by quoting a World Bank study to the effect that because of climate change and population growth agricultural productivity will have to rise by 1.8% per annum for the foreseeable future. But there’s nothing in between, or indeed anywhere else in the article, about the importance of plant breeding in ensuring that increased productivity.

Now, many people see the value of moving landraces (or “old-fashioned seeds,” if you must) around, in particular from hot places to ones which are not so hot now but will soon be, for evaluation purposes — and more. And there may be some sense in which landraces are “better at dealing with variable weather” than modern varieties. But I don’t think anyone is seriously contemplating “reinstituting their use” on a massive scale in an effort to adapt agriculture to climate change.

What is needed — and urgently — if adaptation is to have much of a chance is effective breeding programmes, and landraces will be one of the sources of genetic material that these programmes will require, along with crop wild relatives and others. Shame The Economist didn’t say that more clearly.

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“Conservation for a New Era” highlights crop wild relatives

As I just nibbled, IUCN’s book Conservation for a New Era is out. It

…outlines the critical issues facing us in the 21st century, developed from the results of last year’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.

You can download the pdf. Agriculture has a chapter all to itself, starting on page 160. It’s nicely balanced, and worth reading in full.

If we hope to maintain global biodiversity and a reasonable balance between people and the rest of nature, then agriculture needs to be part of the conversation.

On the other hand, conservation has much to contribute to sustainable agriculture.

The high point for me was the stuff on crop wild relatives (and indeed livestock wild relatives), in particular their potential role in breeding for climate change adaptation. Genebanks are mentioned in passing, but the specific need for ex situ conservation in the context of a rapidly changing environment is not, alas, highlighted. Crop improvement is recognized as a key response to climate change, but perhaps the link to diversity is not as explicit as might have been warranted.

Effective responses to climate change will require changing varieties, modifying management of soils and water, and developing new strategies for pest management as species of wild pests, their natural predators, and their life-cycles alter in response to changing climates.

I liked the paragraph on the role of agrobiodiversity in plant protection, though it missed a trick in not mentioning the importance of the genetic diversity of the crops themselves. There is the expected reference to multi-storey agroforestry systems, but also less-expected mentions of perennial crops and underutilized crops. There’s sensible stuff on biofuels, too (though not much in the agriculture chapter, actually).

So, a step forward in the integration of agriculture and agrobiodiversity into the global conservation agenda? I think so, though it could have been a bigger one. At least agriculture seems not to be seen exclusively as The Enemy.

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NGO deconstructs World Seed Conference

This is interesting. Robin Willoughby, Research Officer at Share the World’s Resources (STWR), “an NGO advocating for sustainable economics to end global poverty,” starts his piece in Counterpunch in pretty conventional NGO mode. I don’t know anything about STWR, but the rhetoric is familiar. Taking the recently-ended World Seed Conference and its perceived endorsement of “techno-fixes and monopoly control” as his starting point, Willoughby goes on to say that:

In order to protect biodiversity, adapt to climate change and promote food security, policy-makers must allow farmers to freely save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds in developing countries.

Right. However, he does then go off in an unusual direction.

On the ground, examples such as the Navdanya project in India illustrate the benefits of both storing and sharing seeds as well as the benefits in food security and genetic diversity by allowing open-access to plant genetic resources. Organisations in the global farmers’ movement La Via Campesina also point the way to an alternative agricultural paradigm based on cooperation and reciprocity. In the UK, the Millennium Seed Bank Project at Kew Gardens further illustrates the importance and possibility of the collection, research and development of seeds for the public good. Countries such as Venezuela are also establishing cross-border collaboration and sharing of knowledge on the breeding of plants based on cooperation and for mutual benefit.

What? So, not just sharing of farm-saved seeds to adapt to climate change, then, but “development of seeds” and “breeding of plants.” And genebanks involved in the whole thing. As I say, interesting. Or am I seeing things?

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Nibbles: Goats in Europe, Horse domestication, Food map, IITA training, Asian collaboration, Tom Wagner, Tomatoes

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Malawi on the front line

Criticism of the Gates Foundation’s attempt to re-create the Green Revolution in Africa is not uncommon in some circles, and it will be interesting — if probably not particularly edifying — to see how those circles will parse Norman Borlaug’s legacy now that he’s gone. But the recent article in The Nation, although mostly predictable, is actually more balanced than most. After a description of some of the unintended consequences of the first Green Revolution, the authors admit that these are acknowledged by the Gates Foundation, and also that “[s]ome of the changes made possible by Gates’s funding are welcome.”

The architects of Africa’s new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation’s agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as “smallholders”) and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because “if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse.”

My main comment about all this is one I’ve already made, and that is that it does nobody any good to present the (bio)technology vs “ecological agriculture” debate as a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. Both paradigms have a role to play, they are not mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as “the African farmer,” or even “the African smallholder” for that matter. There are millions of African smallholders, all different, and what they need are options, and lots of them.

But what I specifically wanted to flag about the article in The Nation is its section on Malawi. We talked about the Malawi fertilizer subsidy before, and it has become a sort of “poster child.” Its apparent success is of course mentioned in the article, but so are various critical reactions to it. The point is that Malawi seems to be emerging as a fertile testing ground for the blending — or at least the co-existence — of different kinds of approaches to agricultural development. There was another article recently which brought this home for me. It includes an interesting quote from Amos Tizora, executive director of a Malawian NGO called Circle for Integrated Community Development (CICOD):

“As much as farmers are encouraged to grow hybrid crop varieties due to environmental challenges, they are also encouraged to complement these with indigenous varieties which have high nutrition value, long storage period and can easily be managed by low income farmers.”

Why don’t we get more such public recognition, by everyone involved, of the complementary nature of what are all too often seen as competing visions of the future of African agriculture(s)?