Indian Council of Agricultural Research wishes to close stable door on “theft” of biological resources: bolted horses unavailable for comment.
Scary climate change story
A paper ((Lobell, D.B., Burke, M.B., Tebaldi, C., Mastrandrea, M.D., Falcon, W.P., Naylor, R.L. (2008). Prioritizing Climate Change Adaptation Needs for Food Security in 2030. Science, 319, 607-610.)) and commentary ((Brown, M.E., Funk, C.C. (2008). Food Security Under Climate Change. Science, 319, 580-581.)) in the latest Science make pretty compelling reading for anyone with an interest in how climate change will affect agriculture and food security. Long-standing readers will remember a little round-up that included the work of our chums Andy Jarvis and Annie Lane. They predicted the effect of climate change on the suitability of different areas for different crops. David Lobell and his colleagues at Stanford University take a different tack, to answer a slightly different question: what are the top priorities for investing in agriculture to cope with climate change.
They isolated 12 regions where most of the world’s malnourished people are concentrated. Then they analyzed 20 different climate change models to get a feel for how temperature and rainfall would change in those areas. And finally, they looked at the specific crops that people in those regions eat and used past correlations between yield and temperature and yield and rainfall to predict how those crops might respond to the predicted changes in climate. This is an important step. As the researchers point out, “Rice, maize and wheat contribute roughly half of the calories currently consumed by the world’s poor and only 31% of the calories consumed by those in sub-Saharan Africa”. There’s a whole bunch more jiggery-pokery in there that ends up allowing the researchers to come up with best and worst case scenarios for each of the regions they consider, and some sharp conclusions.
Southern Africa and South Asia are going to be hit hard. Maize in Southern Africa and wheat and millet in South Asia are likely to show large declines. But there are also regions with large uncertainty, with some models predicting an increase and others a decrease. Groundnut in South Asia and sorghum in Southern Africa are examples of these, probably because the historical data on yield correlations are poor.
The results are summed up in a table that, the authors point out, could help agencies decide where to invest scarce resources. Those that are really risk averse might focus on wheat in South Asia, rice in Southeast Asia and maize in Southern Africa, all of which are predicted to drop by all the models. An investment in those crops is most likely to generate “some benefits”. A different view would be that investment should focus on crops and regions where at least some of the models predict strong depression of yields, because even if the projection is unlikely, if it does happen the consequences will be great. Many crops in South Asia, along with sorghum in the Sahel and maize in Southern Africa fall into this group.
The bigger question is, what form should those investments take? This is where the commentary adds its 2 cents worth. Molly Brown and Christopher Funk point out a double-whammy awaiting poor farmers:
In food-insecure regions, many farmers both consume their product and sell it in local markets. This exposes farmers to climate variations, because when they produce less their income goes down while their costs go up to maintain basic consumption. Large-scale hunger can ensue, even when there is sufficient food in the market that has been imported from elsewhere.
The solution that Brown and Funk see is largely technological; irrigation, fertilizers, improved varieties. Indeed, they aver that “technological sophistication determines a farm’s productivity far more than its climatic and agricultural endowments,” and of course at one level they are right. They also say that “poor farmers in the tropics will be less able to cope with changes in climate because they have far fewer options in their agricultural systems to begin with”.
I wonder whether that is correct. For the most marginal farmers, without irrigation or fertilizers or improved varieties, options — in the form of agricultural biodiversity — is all they do have. Development agencies are again starting to pay attention to agricultural research, and the Lobell paper and others on climate change are going to help them focus their efforts. It is clear that all approaches will need to be explored, among them helping people to adopt new foods in their diets and cultures. Will that include helping the most marginal farmers to use agrobiodiversity — local and exotic — to secure their food supplies in the face of climate change?
Survey of European attitudes to biodiversity loss published
Europeans worried about biodiversity loss. Agrobiodiversity unavailable for comment.
Animal Genetic Resources on the ground in Uganda
A dying breed. Huge article in the New York Times magazine that looks at the general issue of disappearing livestock diversity through the particular lens of cattle in Uganda, where the local Ankhole cattle are threatened by high-yielding but fragile Holsteins. All the arguments and counter-arguments are there in a well-written piece that pulls no punches and yet, in the end, left me wondering what the solution is. Farmers who do use Holsteins profit thereby, setting off an arms race among fellow farmers, whose primary victim is the local livestock breeds. But when trouble strikes, in the form of drought or civil strife, it is the local breeds that gallop back to the rescue. As long as they remain alive …
Time for a test?
A few things have come together at the same time in that serendipitous way that makes me value even more the pattern detecting abilities of dear old Homo sapiens. First, I blog a feature that takes quite a close look at what the Gates Foundation is trying to do with (for?) agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Then I read a post from Marcelino over at Biopolitical arguing that the best way to help the poor may be to give them money. And finally, Karl over at The Inoculated Mind, introducing our post on high-carotene maize, says this: “Grrr, the opposition to humanitarian efforts such as golden rice sure gets my blood boiling … perfect for this weather”.
And I think, hmmmn, I feel a hypothesis creeping up on me.
Let’s go back first to Marcelino. He quotes Robin Hanson, an economist, who says:
A suspiciously large fraction of people who claim to care about the third world poor believe that the best way to help is to pursue their favorite hobby or career, and not to just give the poor money. Medical researchers seek disease cures, computer folk build laptops or subversive software, musicians hold concerts to inspire donations, policy wonks lobby governments to build schools, and so on.
That certainly seems true of the Golden Rice effort. The reasons it is unlikely to help the third world poor are many. Even the new improved version does not contain very much in the way of vitamin A precursors; you would have to eat an awful lot of it each day — probably an amount impossible to ingest in a day — to overcome the levels of malnutrition seen among the poorest children. The people who need it most are not going to be able to afford it — indeed, they are often out of the cash economy completely. And as for giving them seed and expecting them to grow it, their effort would probably be much more successful ploughed into more diversity in their fields and in their diets. Dark green leafy veg and orange fruits could make a much greater contribution than golden rice.
So the idea that Golden Rice was created, or given away, to help the third world poor does seem a little far-fetched. At the very least, the idea wasn’t thought through very carefully.
Then there’s the Gates Foundation’s support for agricultural research, which to me on the outside often seems to be suspiciously like using the previous generation’s weapons to fight the generation before that’s battles. Now, Gates wants results, and he wants impact. So, why not let two (or more) methods fight head to head?
Take two villages, or even two countries. Give one a bunch of cash to spend with scientists and others solving problems in a genuinely participatory way, trying some weird stuff (like agricultural biodiversity) along the way. For the other, put the usual advice to work in the usual ways. Give them both, say, five years. Then see which has improved most.
Simplistic, I know, but what, actually, is wrong with the idea? Smart people (not just me) are criticizing current approaches with sensible suggestions. Humour them, listen to them, do the experiment; then one way or another we’ll know. And smart people, as opposed to those who merely have an axe to grind, will change their opinion based on the results.
Something like this could have been tried with the Millennium Villages, but as far as I know it hasn’t. I wonder what would happen if you created the equivalent of a voucher system for research and development, and gave poor people in rural areas a choice of how to use their vouchers.