Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Danny is optimistic about the increasing integration of agriculture in biodiversity conservation, as in the new IUCN book, but ends on a note of caution:
Yet still very much open to interpretation. Compatible forms of agriculture? Compatible for who and for what?
The Evil Fruit Lord defends the rights of plant breeders:
I think a fair amount of the hostility towards GURTs stems from a general hostility towards plant IPR’s.
And that just ain’t right.
There is a puzzling paragraph in the latest issue of The Economist. Well actually there’s a lot of puzzling paragraphs in the latest Economist, but the one I’m talking about is not in the finance or economics sections. And it is puzzling not so much because of what it says, but because of what it leaves out. Here it is in full. It appears in an article on the effect of climate change on developing countries.
This kind of increasing unpredictability would be dire news at the best of times: hit by drought and flood, the land becomes less productive. It is compounded by another problem. The higher-yielding, pest-resistant seed varieties invented in the 1960s were designed to thrive in stable climes. Old-fashioned seeds are actually better at dealing with variable weather—but are now less widely used. Reinstituting their use will mean less food.
What follows is a long paragraph which starts by saying that “[i]n India the gains from the Green Revolution are already shrinking because of local pollution, global warming and waning resistance to pests and disease…” and ends by quoting a World Bank study to the effect that because of climate change and population growth agricultural productivity will have to rise by 1.8% per annum for the foreseeable future. But there’s nothing in between, or indeed anywhere else in the article, about the importance of plant breeding in ensuring that increased productivity.
Now, many people see the value of moving landraces (or “old-fashioned seeds,” if you must) around, in particular from hot places to ones which are not so hot now but will soon be, for evaluation purposes — and more. And there may be some sense in which landraces are “better at dealing with variable weather” than modern varieties. But I don’t think anyone is seriously contemplating “reinstituting their use” on a massive scale in an effort to adapt agriculture to climate change.
What is needed — and urgently — if adaptation is to have much of a chance is effective breeding programmes, and landraces will be one of the sources of genetic material that these programmes will require, along with crop wild relatives and others. Shame The Economist didn’t say that more clearly.
Kevin makes a good point about the use of Google in rural Kenya:
Good story but a slight cavil. It wasn’t Google that “helped harvest a bumper crop” but the source of information he found on Google – wherever that was from. And of course, if the crops had failed I doubt whether the news story would have said “Google responsible for disastrous harvest.”
As I just nibbled, IUCN’s book Conservation for a New Era is out. It
…outlines the critical issues facing us in the 21st century, developed from the results of last year’s World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
You can download the pdf. Agriculture has a chapter all to itself, starting on page 160. It’s nicely balanced, and worth reading in full.
If we hope to maintain global biodiversity and a reasonable balance between people and the rest of nature, then agriculture needs to be part of the conversation.
On the other hand, conservation has much to contribute to sustainable agriculture.
The high point for me was the stuff on crop wild relatives (and indeed livestock wild relatives), in particular their potential role in breeding for climate change adaptation. Genebanks are mentioned in passing, but the specific need for ex situ conservation in the context of a rapidly changing environment is not, alas, highlighted. Crop improvement is recognized as a key response to climate change, but perhaps the link to diversity is not as explicit as might have been warranted.
Effective responses to climate change will require changing varieties, modifying management of soils and water, and developing new strategies for pest management as species of wild pests, their natural predators, and their life-cycles alter in response to changing climates.
I liked the paragraph on the role of agrobiodiversity in plant protection, though it missed a trick in not mentioning the importance of the genetic diversity of the crops themselves. There is the expected reference to multi-storey agroforestry systems, but also less-expected mentions of perennial crops and underutilized crops. There’s sensible stuff on biofuels, too (though not much in the agriculture chapter, actually).
So, a step forward in the integration of agriculture and agrobiodiversity into the global conservation agenda? I think so, though it could have been a bigger one. At least agriculture seems not to be seen exclusively as The Enemy.