A LinkedIn post by CGIAR stalwart Dr Carlo Fadda convinced me I should give a bit more exposure to a recent paper than the brief Brainfood entry I wrote about it a few weeks ago. The paper is Long-term agricultural diversification increases financial profitability, biodiversity, and ecosystem services: a second-order meta-analysis. Its authors are Estelle Raveloaritiana and Thomas Cherico Wanger, and it was published in Nature Communications this past January.
In that Brainfood, I tried to bring together in a logical thread various studies on different aspects of farm diversity and its benefits. In particular, its effects on diet diversity, and hence health outcomes.
But better diets and human health are not the only pluses of diverse farms, and the paper in question in fact suggests that intercropping, organic farming, and other diversification strategies also increase incomes, biodiversity, pollination, soil quality, and carbon sequestration significantly over 20 years. With, importantly, no downward hit on crop yields. So going diverse — organic, if you will — has many advantages that are not overall associated with a yield tradeoff. And that’s from a meta-analysis of 184 meta-analyses and 120 years of data, so it’s a pretty robust result.
As Dr Fadda points out in his excellent summary of the paper, good evidence that diverse — including agrobiodiverse — farms are good for farmers, consumers and the planet is clearly there. The challenge is to find the institutional will to act on it.
I’d like to add that genebanks around the world are ready, willing and able to do just that. It’s literally their job, or at least a big part of it. I hope they are given the chance — and the resources — to do it.