Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Here we go again. Potatoes, naturally low in carotenoids, the precursors of vitamin A, have been genetically engineered to make them richer, to the point where 250 grams of fresh potatoes might supply half the recommended daily allowance.
Pinchbeck is a “cheap or tawdry” imitation of gold.
Biofuel boosters have admitted that what we really need is cellulosic conversion — turning the bulk of plants like corn, not to mention inedible plants, into ethanol rather than relying on their seeds. Now comes news from the USDA that to do so threatens the soil in which those biofuels will grow. If farmers harvest the stovers, or corn stalks, rather than leaving them on the land, they risk depleting the organic matter in the soil in addition to severe soil erosion. That cuts the value of maize for ethanol even more.
Meanwhile, AllAfrica.com carries a long report on the recent FAO meeting on biofuels. FAO tried very hard to be balanced:
Joseph Schmidhuber, Senior Economist at FAO’s Agricultural Development and Economics Division, explained that the impact of the new bioenergy market on food security could be negative or positive, depending on whether a country’s economy was a net exporter or importer of food and energy. The same held true at household level, indicating that the rural landless and the urban poor were most at risk, and special measures would be needed to protect both countries and groups.
Everything is possible, no? But I find it hard hard to conclude that the emphasis on turning food for people into fuel for cars and trucks will be a good thing on balance.
Vandana Shiva has a long post at countercurrents.org outlining some of the ways in which small but biodiverse farms could make a greater contribution to food security in India. She lambasts the government for its policies and quotes some very favourable figures for harvests and incomes, alas without supporting references.
The Guardian reports that the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, recently deposited the billionth seed in its genebank. Note, that’s not a billion species, or even a million, but the billionth seed ((Which is to say, an entirely manufactured reason, which worked, for getting a bit of press coverage.)). Normally such blatant manipulation would be beneath our exalted notice, but Kew wisely chose a useful plant on which to bestow this singular honour.
All from FAO, which does not seem to think it is all that endangered. Still, Kew thinks it is worth banking, and that’s good enough for us.
Someone called Bradford Plumer, whom I had not previously come across, has a longish post asking why people don’t seem to care about the ongoing mass extinction and wishing that more writers on the subject “would really hammer home why humans should care about the loss of biodiversity”. Funnily enough, he couches his entire argument in terms of natural processes and ecosystems and what their collapse might mean. And he quotes agriculture, and especially monoculture, exclusively as problem, not solution. But the only example he gives of the sort of example that might might “get people to perk up” is the possibly looming pollination crisis caused by a shortage of bees.
Until there is a wider understanding that agriculture is part of nature, and not separate from it, and that we humans are far more dependent on the food providing services of agriculture than on any other ecological service, I doubt that there’s going to be much perking up anywhere.
There’s not a lot of understanding of that in Brad’s posts or the comments on it, but I live in hope.