Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Jacob throws a spanner in the whole choose-a-crop-to-save thing:
Maize is also my choice, because we have the whole industrial machinery in place to process it into a wide range of products.
If I had to let one plant go extinct, it would probably also be maize. It would make the world a lot more agrobiodiverse.
Jacob van Etten continues our coffee-table conversation about whether crops determine everything.
All of this started off with Wittfogel’s Oriental despotism and how crops (rice) and cropping technologies (irrigation) give shape to whole societies. Jeremy mentioned Malcolm Gladwell, who argues in Outliers that Asians are good in math because they grow rice. Crops determine everything?
Wittfogel first. Some more recent opinions nuance the point about hierarchical rice societies. Yes, irrigation tends to give rise to more hierarchical societies. Dorian Fuller and Ling Qin write that the rise of water management in China in archaeological times went hand in hand with the development of social hierarchies. 1 But rice irrigation is not as hierarchical as if Henry Ford had organized it. A lot of ‘participation’ goes on, as most water management ultimately relies on the efforts of both big and small players. Francesca Bray writes:
One of the main arguments that underlies such theories is that only a highly centralised state can mobilise sufficient capital and technical and administrative expertise to construct and run huge irrigation systems. It is certainly true that both Hindu and, later, Buddhist monarchs all over Southeast Asia saw it as part of their kingly role, an act of the highest religious merit, to donate generously from the royal treasuries to provide the necessary materials and funding. But kings were not the only instigators of such works. Temples, dignitaries, or even rich villagers often gave endowments to construct or maintain irrigation works on different scales.
Malcolm Gladwell actually argues something similar:
By the 14th and 15th centuries, landlords in central and southern China had a nearly hands-off role with their tenants, collecting only a fixed amount and letting farmers keep whatever yields they had left over. Farmers had a stake in their harvest, leading to greater diligence and success.
Kew asks people in Trafalgar Square what plant they would save, if they could only save one. Nice idea. Interestingly, some actually choose a crop. What would you choose? Agrobiodiversity only: leave your selection in comments.
Our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis received GIBF‘s Ebbe Nielsen Prize for innovative bioinformatics research last night in Copenhagen. Andy has been doing his trademark work on the spatial analysis of crop wild relative distributions 2 at CIAT, just outside Cali in Colombia, jointly with Bioversity International. He used the occasion to highlight the contribution made to this effort by his numerous Colombian colleagues. Congratulations to all of them.
LATER: Here’s Andy’s talk.
I’m not quite sure when it became fashionable to point out that there was no global shortage of food, just unequal distribution. Probably around the time I was being urged to clean my plate because there were starving children in India. And it is true; the world does produce enough food for everyone. Not only that, it could produce much, much more food on much, much less land.
At the first climate-fest of the year, in Copenhagen in March, I was somewhat stunned when Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s presentation included two slides, one of agriculture as it was in 1995, all spread out around the globe, and one that concentrated all agriculture into the most promising areas, ignoring all other land uses, which, he said, was all the land needed to feed a population of 12 billion (33% more than we seem to be expecting) with as much food, per person, as had been available in 1995. 3 (Click either one to enlarge.)
Two points I want to make. First, it seems to me that the second map might be fine and dandy for the people who live and work in the areas of concentrated agriculture, but what is the rest of the 12 billion supposed to do? Sit around waiting for that day’s meal to be shipped in? And that’s to ignore the question whether the maps or the average diet cover micronutrients or just calories and protein.
A slightly different point but one that is actually much more germane concerns the concentration of power. I don’t myself trust the geopolitical areas that would be growing all our food to share it equitably, nor do I trust any human institution to make them do so, and if the history of the global food business is anything to go by, they won’t. Concentration of power is the history of the global food business.
All of which is a lengthy throat-clearing before I introduce three posts from The Ethicurean that portray power in action: Meet your greens: National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement hearings, Week 1: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The backstory is simple enough. After E. coli 0157:H7 contaminating spinach greens killed a fair number of people back in 2006, the industry, first in California and now nationwide, went into overdrive to make avoid any blame in future. Right now, this takes the form of a potential Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, which is the subject of government hearings around the country. The lengthy reports from Elanor skillfully examine what is going on and why, and while I could pull out a long series of extracts, I’ll make do with just one, from Part 2:
Witnesses speak from their experiences with the California LGMA, which was developed by the same industry group after the 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in ready-to-eat bagged spinach, and claim that participating in the California program has improved the safety of leafy greens and boosted consumer confidence in the industry. (No one mentions that since the California agreement went into effect, Salinas-based companies have had four leafy-greens recalls for Salmonella or E. coli, nor that the contamination was caught not by the companies, but by random testing by state departments of agriculture. “Effective,” indeed!) A rep from the Texas Produce Association acknowledges that small farmers will probably have a harder time meeting NLGMA requirements than the big guys but still supports it.
Go, read the whole thing for yourself. And bear in mind, this is not an isolated incident. Throughout North America and Europe (and for all I know other “developed” places too) large industry writes the rules not merely to favour itself and its practices, but also actively to discourage all those who would prefer to find a different way. The Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement is not a one-off. It is just the latest manifestation of what happens when too much power ends up in too few hands.