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IUCN in Wonderland

In a recent article, Jeff Sayer, IUCN’s Scientific Advisor, turns to agrobiodiversity. Here’s the crux of his argument:

In simple economic terms, small diverse farms may be less efficient than specialist farmers with genetically engineered seeds and large inputs of fertilizers and pesticides. But these highly diverse small farms provide many other products for consumption and sale beyond just the key staple.

This diversity provides safety nets in cases of failure of one or a few crops. In addition, conservationists are now recognizing that these small farms can support a lot of native biodiversity, protect watersheds and store large amounts of carbon and so contribute to mitigating climate change.

Which is something we’ve been saying here forever; well, ever since we started. So Dr Sayer is not going to get any of what I believe is sometimes called “push-back” from us. At least not on that broad point. He does, however, lose me on the details. Here’s the take-home message of the article.

Local production of a high diversity of crops with minimal use of fertilizers and pesticides made from fossil fuels is now a boutique industry for the rich. However, it has a lot of features that could make it a viable and attractive option for large parts of the developing world and it could provide much needed resilience in the face of climate variability and other shocks that will certainly shake the world in the future.

Wait, rich world niche ecoagriculture should be adopted in the developing world so that African farmers too can be resilient in the face of climate change? Surely there’s something of Alice in Wonderland’s surreal world about this way of putting things. Maybe I’m missing something. But no, here’s something from earlier in the piece.

Farm conservation schemes in the USA put tens of billions of dollars into the hands of farmers who adapt their farming to favour wildlife. The critical question is whether these multi-functional farming systems are a luxury that only the rich world can afford or whether they might be a model for diversifying the livelihoods of poor people in the developing world and maybe make them more resilient to the economic, climatic and pandemic-induced shocks that they will confront in coming decades.

Right, so US farm conservation schemes are going to teach African and Asian and Latin American subsistence farmers about diversification. Well, that’s something I’d pay money to see.

I suppose the point struggling to come through is that agricultural development in the South should not put all its eggs in the efficiency basket. It’s a good point, which could have been better made. The developing world doesn’t need to look at rich world organic farming for a model. All it has to do is look at itself.

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Ex situ redux

After a period in which ex situ conservation has been downplayed by the conservation community (except for agrobiodiversity where it is still the main conservation strategy) ex situ conservation is now widely accepted as an increasingly necessary complement to in situ forms of conservation (IUCN 2002; BGCI 2000), especially protected areas (e.g. Abanades García & al. 2007).

That’s from a new report for the Council of Europe entitled “The impacts of climate change on plant species in Europe,” prepared by Prof. Vernon Heywood of the School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, with contributions by Dr Alastair Culham. You’ll find it on p. 39 after a very thorough review of the issues. Nice to see such a bold statement. The report is one of several prepared for the Group of Experts on Biodiversity and Climate Change of the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats. Thanks to Danny for the tip.

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More than a nibble, less than a meal

A rapid round-up of some things that caught my eye.

A paper in Crop Science explores the Spanish national genebank’s collection of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) in search of diversity. They find it, plus evidence of two New World genepools and some intermediate forms.

Banana farmers in The Philippines have reported good results from a programme on Enhancing Smallholder Banana Production. There are many components to the programme — which has boosted exports to valuable markets in Japan and Korea. Among them, the use of clean planting material produced by tissue culture, a focus on appropriate varieties, and careful management of fertilizer regimes. Incomes are said to have gone up 25%.

Cary Fowler is described by The Guardian as “one of the driving forces behind an international seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard”. And more besides, we would add. Anyway, he told a TedGlobal audience in Oxford, England, about the threat to agrobiodiversity.

His namesake apple, the Fowler apple, is still cultivated. Pulling out a book from 1904 of apples grown in the state of New York, the Fowler apple is described as a beautiful fruit, but it is also noted that “it fails to develop in size and quality and is on a whole unsatisfactory.”

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A fifty-year Farm Bill

When we nibbled an article from The Land Institute’s Stan Cox a couple of days ago it prompted a heartfelt outburst against the “holier than thou organic only everyting else be dammed mindset”. So I’m wondering what Anastasia and others will make of a Q&A in today’s Washington Post. Three of the wisest men in “alternative” agriculture in the US — Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann — were in Washington to promote an alternative Farm Bill, one that takes a long-term view and that “values not only yields but also local ecosystems, healthy food and rural communities”. The Post took the opportunity to get some answers to pressing questions, such as “Washington doesn’t think in 50-year increments. How do you sell this?”.

Jackson: You sell it the same way as global warming or population growth. Washington thinks it’s going to deal with the global warming problem in 50 years? We will have this if we get cracking.

Kirschenmann: Because of our election cycles, you’re right. People tend to think in terms of two-year, four-year or six-year cycles. But I think the effort to deal with climate change is starting to change with that, because they know they can’t deal with climate change on that timeline. They have to extend the horizon. So we think the time is right to add agriculture to that.

I’d like to think they can do it, but I’m not optimistic.

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Back to sorghum: an African response to climate change?

Another in our series of occasional contributions from Jacob van Etten.

Last week I was at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) to talk about seed systems. To some degree or another, the people around the table were maize experts. We discussed climate change and this led to some reflections on the question:

If maize harvests are failing in Africa, why do most farmers not switch to sorghum?

When you ask the average agricultural scientist for solutions to climate change, the first idea he 1 will come up with is to build drought tolerance and heat tolerance into major field crops. Most CGIAR centres and research programmes are structured around individual crops, so everyone has an incentive to stick to their own crop and stretch and bend it as much as possible to adapt to climate change. But what if simply switching from one crop to another does the trick?

Sorghum is a more drought-resistant crop than maize. Sorghum and maize are otherwise similar enough to make switching technologically fairly easy. Sorghum originated in Africa, unlike maize. Switching “back” to sorghum makes sense in many respects.

Several factors stand in the way of sorghum adoption in Africa, however. Maize seems to have become an acquired taste in many parts of the continent. Therefore, maize has a higher market demand than sorghum. By selling their maize surplus on the market, farmers can earn some money to pay school fees and the like. Sorghum is also more sensitive than maize to bird attacks. In a nutshell, maize lets African children be at school, sorghum pulls them from school to chase after the birds.

Even so, farmers are switching from maize to sorghum in Swaziland. These farmers are growing a bitter variety that birds don’t like. However, perhaps that makes it less marketable as grain for human consumption? The bitter taste of sorghum comes from tannins, which are have anti-oxidant properties. But although birds prefer sweet sorghum, they will still eat bitter sorghum if food is scarce. Also, a high tannin content decreases palatability. It seems that African farmers need alternative ways to deal with birds. Early varieties could perhaps help to avoid migratory birds, and synchrony in planting and maturing could spread the damage. Having the school holidays when sorghum is most vulnerable to bird attacks would be another option. … Any other ideas out there?

In Zambia, CARE is trying to help farmers grow more sorghum. One of the main challenges there is to develop a viable sorghum market. Economic incentives to continue growing maize may well be “climatologically perverse”. For instance, in Zambia, the major maize buyer is the government. Adapting to climate change may require African governments to buy more sorghum in order to develop viable sorghum markets. Liberalization, of course, has diminished the role of government cereal stocks in many African countries. Even so, there may still be a pro-maize bias in agricultural policy. Historically, sorghum hasn’t received the same level of state support as maize.

Creating more commercial demand for sorghum is key. Dietary preferences can change and economic incentives could help a great deal to achieve that. For instance, sorghum could become an obligatory ingredient in school feeding programmes. Sorghum is already increasingly used as a beer brewing ingredient by big brewers. Nigerian Guinness is made with sorghum and is not a bad beer at all.

“Fight climate change, drink more beer,” how does that sound?