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Those missing bees: a round-up

Over at The Daily Kos Devilstower has produced an entertaining and (I think) fair and honest appraisal of the hypotheses swirling around colony collapse disorder. What I found most interesting about the summary is that Devilstower gives his/her own estimates of each one being right or wrong and then offers a poll where readers can give their own estimates. When I voted, the results were:

  • The way commercial hives are handled 10% 785 votes
  • Infection & Infestation 22% 1731 votes
  • Pesticides 19% 1487 votes
  • GM Foods 9% 741 votes
  • Drought & Bad Weather 4% 324 votes
  • Global Warming 12% 946 votes
  • Electromagnetic pollution 14% 1134 votes
  • Other 6% 499 votes

That strikes me as eminently sensible (because it fits with my own prejudices, obviously). But what would have been really neat — though perhaps impossible to do on Daily Kos — would have been a before and after poll. Give and estimate before reading the piece, then after reading the piece, and see whether all that fine work by Devilstower had any impact. I would hope it did, but a skeptical voice deep within whispers “no”.

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More on trade liberalization

Before you all start responding to my recent post by pointing me in the direction of the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity paper on the impact of trade liberalization on agricultural biodiversity, let me say that I have read it, and that I stick to my call for more thorough analysis. First, despite its title, the CBD paper concentrates on the presumed effects of liberalization – via changes in land use and production intensification – on biodiversity in general rather than agricultural biodiversity in particular, something that was also discussed by an older IUCN paper. Second, it repeats a few too many times how complicated the issue is. And finally, it provides little in the way of empirical data.

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Subsidise this

There is plenty of analysis out there on the topic of agricultural subsidies and their actual or potential effect on things like growth of the farm sector, productivity, rural population levels and employment rates, farmers’ incomes and the number and average size of farms. But I haven’t seen much empirical data – or even theoretical discussion – of what subsidies (or the lack of them) mean for agrobiodiversity on farms. The data and discussion must be out there, it’s just that I don’t know the agricultural economics literature well enough to even know where to look.

So it was kind of interesting that I happened across two pieces of work in the past couple of weeks that shed some – albeit oblique – light on the subject. A 2003 article on The New Farm looks at what happened in New Zealand when agricultural subsidies were phased out: starting in 1984, the kiwis kept “a basic social security framework … funding for agricultural research, … and measures to keep agricultural pests from leaping around the world, and (did) away with the rest.” 

The New Zealand experience strongly suggests that most supposed objectives of agricultural subsidies and market protections – to maintain a traditional countryside, protect the environment, ensure food security, combat food scarcity, support family farms and slow corporate take-over of agriculture – are better achieved by their absence.

The paper suggests that the end of subsidies forced farmers to diversify, embrace organic methods, let marginal land revert to bush and innovate furiously, including by adopting new varieties. It’s hard to be entirely sure from the information presented, but on balance it would seem that (agricultural) biodiversity was better conserved and better used after subsidies ended.

I also came across a newly-released FAO paper entitled “Long Term Farming Trends. An Inquiry Using Agricultural Censuses,” a meta-analysis of 43 agricultural censuses across 17 countries. The authors look at differences among countries, and changes in the last 30 years or so, in things like land inequality and farm size, but also crop diversification, by which they basically mean the extent to which non-staple crops are being grown. They found, for example, that small farms tend to concentrate on staple crops more than bigger farms do, and that agricultural openness (i.e. lack of subsidies) “is correlated with diversification away from staple crops.” Though this relationship did not hold for countries with high population levels, the result concords with what happened in New Zealand.

You see what I mean when I said that the light being shed is at best oblique. Neither paper discusses diversity within crops much (or at all!), and their concept of “diversification” was somewhat crude. That wasn’t really their aim, so you can’t blame the authors. But with WTO members discussing the freeing up of agricultural markets (when they manage to discuss anything at all), I do wonder whether agricultural economists are devoting enough (or any) thinking to the possible effects on agricultural biodiversity. I look forward to being reassured by someone out there.

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Buffett sweet potato balls

Lets get this part out of the way: search Google for “Buffett sweet potato,” having seen an announcement at Papgren, and the number 3 link is for Buffett sweet potato balls. But that’s not what I was after.

I was after details of a US$3 million grant from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation to the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to enhance sweet potato for Africa. The project has two aims: to boost resistance to a couple of diseases — sweet potato feathery mottle virus and sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus — and to improve the nutritional content of sweet potatoes, most notably by increasing folate, iron and zinc.

Excellent. Africa needs higher yields and more nutritious diets. I don’t know what approach the Danforth will take, but as they’ve teamed up with the Monsanto company it is possible that there will be some direct manipulation of DNA involved. Again, excellent, because sweet potato is generally reproduced by taking clones — cuttings, actually, often called slips — from parent material, so farmers should be able to distribute any material they receive. But, I wonder, just how many different varieties will the project engineer? And isn’t there a risk that this effort, particularly if it is successful, will blanket Africa with a few genetically similar varieties that do not have the diversity to withstand the next disease epidemic, making that, when it comes, all the more disastrous?

Rhetorical questions, I know, and ones that I’ve asked before. The funny part is, nobody else seems to be asking them. That Google search, in news? Precisely two items, and one of those is essentially the press release. The other is kinda fun.