Local seeds vital to recovery of crop diversity after natural calamities: study

Seeds of local crop varieties must be included in relief-seed packages distributed to small-scale farmers after natural calamities if indigenous agricultural diversity is to rebound faster. Agricultural relief efforts should also capitalize on existing social networks to distribute seeds more effectively and efficiently.

These are among the findings of a recent study looking into the loss and subsequent recovery of cowpea diversity in Mozambique after massive flooding, followed by severe drought, hit most of the country about 11 years ago.

After natural disasters such as floods and drought that often wipe-out their crops, farmers usually receive relief seed packages to help them recover and restore their food security and source of income. However, most of the seeds in these relief packages are generally of introduced and genetically uniform varieties purchased from markets or from seed companies by well-meaning relief agencies, which slow the recovery of crop diversity.

Interestingly, the study also noted that the speedy recovery of Mozambican cowpea diversity after the double-disasters of 2000 was largely due to the exchange of seeds among farmers through gifting and other social interactions involving friends, family members, and relatives within the same community or adjacent communities.

Dr Morag Ferguson, a molecular biologist with IITA and one of the study’s lead researchers, says farmers in Africa traditionally grow many crops and several varieties of each crop on the same plot of land to cope with unforeseen economic or environmental instabilities. They usually set aside part of their harvest to serve as seed for the next cropping season. They also share or trade some of these seeds with friends and relatives. Therefore, when natural disasters strike, many farmers often lose their seeds and are forced to rely on relief, buy from the market, or receive seeds as gifts from friends and relatives.

“We found that the substantial recovery of cowpea genetic diversity two years after the calamities was mainly due to the informal exchange of seeds among farmers that served as a social-based crop diversity safety backup. It is therefore important that seed relief strategies recognize and capitalize on this existing traditional network based on social relations to help restore diversity especially after natural upheavals,” she said.

The study was initiated in 2002, two years after the flood-drought double disasters and carried out in Chokwe and Xai Xai districts in the Limpompo River Valley –areas that were among those severely affected. The findings of the research have been published in the current edition of ‘Disaster’, a publication of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

The research established that nearly 90% of the farmers in the affected areas received cowpea relief seed immediately after the back-to-back calamities. Two years after, only one-fifth of the recipient farmers were still growing the seeds, while more than half sourced their seeds from markets. However, this did little in restoring cowpea diversity in the affected communities as the seeds bought by farmers from the market were mostly uniform, coming from other districts that grew just one or a few select varieties.

On the other hand, about one-third of the affected farmers obtained seeds from friends and relatives living within the same or neighbouring localities to restock their farms – the same people that they have been exchanging seeds with prior to the disasters. This practice was the main reason why cowpea diversity was restored in these areas, the study showed.

“This approach recognizes that farmer seed systems are robust and resilient, and can provide seed even in emergency situations. And this study shows that such an approach will be more effective in restoring diversity faster and more efficiently than a system based on direct distribution only,” she says.

The study was the first of its kind to investigate in detail the effects of disasters on crop diversity and its recovery. It combined agronomic observations (for example looking at the seeds’ colour, size, pattern, and shape) with biotechnology tools to determine the seeds’ genetic makeup.

CGIAR

Biodiversity plummets, despite growth in protected habitats

by Tom Zeller Jr.


Despite rapid and substantial growth in the amount of land and sea designated as protected habitat over the last four decades, the diversity of species the world over is plummeting, a new study has found.

Over 100,000 so-called "protected areas" representing some 7 million square miles of land and nearly 1 million square miles of ocean have been established since the 1960's, noted the analysis, published July 28 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

And yet, according to a widely cited index used to track planetary biodiversity, the wealth of terrestrial and marine species has seen steady decline over roughly the same period, suggesting that simply protecting swaths of land and sea -- a common conservation strategy worldwide -- is inadequate for preventing the steady disappearance of earth's creatures...

article...Huffington Post

Dwindling West African rainforest threatens food security

by Joe DeCapua

In West Africa, the Guinean Rainforest is rapidly disappearing. A new study says increased production of cocoa, cassava and oil palm has meant more land is being cleared for agriculture. This could have major long-term consequences for climate change and food security.

Since the days of independence, West Africa has done a pretty good job of feeding itself. But scientist James Gockowski said that success has come at a terrible price – the loss of vast areas of rainforest.

Gockowski, who’s lived in the region for 30 years, has written a new report on the Guinean Rainforest for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and the Center for International Forestry Research.

“The forest, for all intents and purposes, is gone outside of the protected areas. And what’s in its place is a mosaic of agricultural land uses and bush fallow land – land that is brought into production every four or five years on kind of a rotational basis,” he said.

It’s estimated only 15 to 20 percent of the rainforest that once stretched across coastal West Africa is still standing. And most of that is in protected areas, such as parks and forest reserves. The loss, he said, has meant biodiversity extinction.

“Mainly with species that really were unknown to science, still waiting to be discovered. These are mainly insect species and microbial species. But, as well, there are things like the forest hippo, pigmy hippo of West Africa. There are about five primate species that are on the most endangered primate species list,” he said.

One primate that has become extinct is Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus Monkey. It hasn’t been sighted since the late 1970s and was declared extinct in 2000.

Gockowski said we’ll never know how many cures for diseases have disappeared along with the forest.

“This amount of deforestation can influence local hydrological cycles and influence the climate at a local level. But it is also impacting climate at the global level because several gigatons of carbon are in the atmosphere now that used to be in the rainforests of West Africa,” he said.

Often forest land is cleared through burning. The ash that’s left contains high levels of nutrients that feed crops and bring good harvests. The problem is those nutrients are depleted over time or simply washed away. The current solution is to simply burn down more forest.

“It’s been an exploitation of the natural capital, the natural resources, with very little substitution of modern agricultural science in the form of fertilizers, improved varieties, improved cultural practices, etc,” said Gockowski.

Using those techniques, he says, would mean greater food production on existing land, with little need for further deforestation. He says that will be necessary with a projected doubling of the population in 40 years.

“These are some serious issues that really require joint decision making between ministries of the environment, agriculture, cocoa regulatory authorities and ministries of finance or commerce,” he said.

The study says cocoa production in West Africa’s Guinean Rainforest doubled between 1987 and 2007. But most of that increase was gained by clearing large areas of forest.

VOA

Gene modification: more, better crops or imperiled food system?

Two weeks ago, Monsanto announced the latest genetically engineered crop it hopes to bring to market: a soybean rejiggered to resist the herbicide dicamba. The new product, says Monsanto, will aid in weed control and "deliver peace of mind for growers."

Meanwhile, half a world away, La Via Campesina, a farmers' movement of 150 organizations from 70 countries, had a slightly different idea about what would bring peace of mind to its millions of members: protecting biodiversity. In its statement to those gathered in Bali for the United Nations treaty on plant genetics, the organization urged treaty drafters to reevaluate the legal framework that allows seed patenting and the spread of genetically engineered crops, like those Monsanto soybeans. These genetically modified crops and the international patent regime, La Via Campesina said, block farmers' ability to save and share seeds, threatening biodiversity and food security.

In 2004, half of global seed sales were controlled by 10 companies. Today, those companies control nearly three-quarters of sales.

Monsanto and La Via Campesina represent two distinct worldviews. According to Monsanto and other chemical and seed giants like Syngenta, BASF, and Dupont, corporate control of seeds and relaxed laws for biotech promotion spur innovation and productivity.

That may sound good, but La Via Campesina and many other groups around the world look at the real-world effects of 20 years of patent approvals and the spread of biotech crops. These critics argue that corporate power over seeds has actually undermined biodiversity and food-system resilience.

This debate is significant. Which side we listen to will largely determine just how well we can continue to feed the planet, especially as we contend with ever greater weather extremes brought on by global warming when crop resilience will be paramount.

Since the 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty Supreme Court decision, companies in the U.S. have been able to patent life forms, including seeds. In Europe, since 1999, nearly 1,000 patents on animals and 1,500 on plants have been approved; thousands more are pending, and not just for genetically engineered crops, but for conventional ones, too. Monsanto and Syngenta alone have filed patents for dozens of conventional vegetables, including tomatoes, sweet peppers, and melons. This means tightening control on how and where certain crops can be planted and even whether certain seed lines are continued—or exterminated.

In contrast to what we hear from Monsanto, patents actually restrict innovation, as researchers can no longer freely use patented plants in breeding experimentation. Increasing market concentration in seed ownership has also destroyed true market competition. In 2004, half of global seed sales were controlled by 10 companies. Today, those companies control nearly three-quarters of sales. This concentration has led to higher prices and shrinking choice for consumers.

Add to this corporate consolidation the spread of biotech crops and you see why biodiversity is becoming so threatened. Biotech crops, like other industrial crops, are monocultures, with single varieties planted over millions of acres and sprayed with chemicals. Despite promises about wonder crops that would end Vitamin A deficiency or withstand drought, nearly all commercially available genetically modified foods are just one of two types, designed either to withstand a specific pesticide or to include a built-in pesticide. Fifty percent of all biotech crops planted worldwide are soybeans. Three countries--the United States, Brazil, and Argentina--grow 77 percent of all genetically modified crops, nearly all destined for livestock, not the world's hungry.

Biotech crops also affect biodiversity in ways that "traditional" industrial crops don't: by risking the genetic integrity of cultivated and wild plants. In a 2006 report, Doug Gurian-Sherman, now with the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained: "Genetic engineering ups the ante when it comes to the potential for harm to wildlife from gene flow, because organisms in natural ecosystems have not adapted to many of the genes used in field trials. With the recent approval of genetically engineered alfalfa in the United States, organic farmers here are ever more concerned about such a "genetic trespass."

Among biodiversity's many benefits is that it provides a reservoir of potentially essential genetic material, varieties that might be found to be more resilient in the face of more droughts and floods, for instance. Says Jack Heinemann, a professor of molecular biology at New Zealand's University of Canterbury Heinemann, "If we jeopardize this biodiversity for the sake of a possible wonder trait for tomorrow, then we won't have any wonder traits for the day after tomorrow."

That's not what the biotech industry is saying. Instead, Monsanto, the world's leading manufacturer of genetically modified foods, is spending millions on a PR campaign to convince the public that its technology will be vital to meeting the world's growing food demands.

In early 2009, Monsanto's biotechnology chief, Steve Padgette, claimed that new crops like its forthcoming drought-resistant corn "will reset the bar for on-farm productivity." Never mind that experts in the field say engineering drought resistance is many years off—if even possible—and that biotech crops have not delivered consistently greater yields. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, a multi-year study contributed to by more than 600 experts from around the world, concluded that the benefits of agricultural biotechnology "is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable."

Meanwhile, agricultural projects from around the world—especially in drought-stricken parts of East Africa—are showing the incredible potential of sustainable farming practices. The introduction of agroecological techniques on smallholder plots in hundreds of projects throughout Africa studied by England's University of Essex brought an increase in crop yields of an average of 116 percent. As a means for improving resiliency and sustainability within the global food chain, agroecology is now supported by a "wide range of experts within the scientific community," said Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

Back in Bali, La Via Campesina described its farmer members as being in the midst of a "war for control over seeds." Strong language, yes. But if we don't heed the organization's call for stricter regulation of the biotech and seed industry, biodiversity may just become collateral damage.

The Atlantic Magazine

Organic farms not a conservation cure-all

by Emily Sohn

Organic farms have a lot going for them, but they probably won't solve all the world's food and conservation-related problems, suggests a new study.

In a detailed comparison between organic and conventional farms around England, researchers found that the diversity of wild plants and animals was just 12 percent higher on organic farms -- a much smaller difference than previous studies had led scientists to expect. At the same time, acre for acre, organic farms produced half the amount of crop yield.

The global demand for food will double in the next three or four decades, said lead researcher Tim Benton, a conservation ecologist at the University of Leeds in the U.K. To meet those needs without converting all of the world's wild lands into farmland, his study suggests that intensive conventional farming might be the best strategy in some places.

"When you model what the best way is of generating both biodiversity and food yield, you find very often that the optimal strategy is to farm intensively where you can, and in effect set aside blocks of land where you don't farm at all," Benton said. "The difference between organic land and wild land is so large that it is better to farm intensively and set aside land than it is to farm the whole area organically."

Organic farming methods are appealing to many people because they avoid artificial pesticides and chemical fertilizers, while presumably nurturing a greater diversity of life. When scientists have compared organic farms with conventional farms in hundreds of studies, they've found that organic farms support a 30 to 40 percent more diverse array of plants and animals.

The problem with those studies, Benton said, is that organic farms often occupy variable landscapes full of valleys, streams and hillsides, which don't necessarily lend themselves to large-scale industrial farming. And it may be because they offer such a variety of niches that organic-conducive landscapes have higher levels of biodiversity. In other words, they may have simply started out that way.

To find out exactly how much of a benefit organic farming actually provides to biodiversity, Benton and colleagues spent two years carefully choosing nearly 200 fields from 32 farms around the U.K. Half of the fields were in areas dominated by conventional farms. Half were in areas dominated by organic farms.

Fields were paired so that they matched each other according to 32 variables, including climate, topography and soil type. At both the edges and centers of the fields, the researchers counted species of birds, insects, worms, flowers, butterflies, weeds and more.

The results, some of which appeared in the journal Ecology Letters and some of which will appear in two papers yet to be published, were complicated -- with some groups of organisms doing better in one situation and others doing better in another.

Overall, biodiversity was 12 percent higher on organic farms. But to the team's surprise, a whole suite of birds that have evolved to live on farmland did better on conventional farms. Weeds were one of the groups that did best on organic farms. Meanwhile, crop yield dropped by 55 percent on organic farms.

Organic farms aren't a panacea," said Jude Girard, an avian ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. "They have a really important role to play in farmland biodiversity, but they're not the answer."

The new study also found that diversity was higher on organic farms that were surrounded by other organic farms as opposed to those surrounded by conventional farms. That's an important reminder, Girard said, that boosting both conservation and food production will require cooperation from farmers, managers and politicians to avoid treating farms as isolated plots.

It's also important to note that the best strategies for farming might vary tremendously in different parts of the world, said Martin Entz, professor of sustainable agriculture at the University of Manitoba. He just returned from Central America, where large-scale rice farms are driving diversity out of the tropics, while small-scale organic farms are preserving high levels of diversity.

"There are good organic farms and not-so-good organic farms," Entz said. "It depends entirely on the place."

Discovery News

Treasure trove of nearly 300 new plants discovered by Kew experts

by Lewis Smith

A massive tree that is a relative of the pea yet rises more than 135ft above the ground is among a treasure trove of plants and fungi discovered by botanists.

It is one of a "bumper crop" of almost 300 new species discovered in the past 12 months by scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.

They include colourful blooms such as orchids and passion flowers, giant trees, a yam reputed to cure cancer and a range of plants that have the potential to be cultivated as valuable crops.

The tally by Kew botanists in the past year accounts for more than one in seven of all new plants and fungi recorded around the world.

"We are turning out stuff all the time," said Dr Aaron Davis, a coffee plant specialist. "And there are all sorts of groovy things this year. Looking back on this year it's not just the number we've found that is special but the type of species we've found. It has surprised us. We have big canopy plants, numerous coffees, numerous palms and yams, and many orchids and indigos. The public perception is, 'Surely you know all the palms and coffee and big canopy plants by now?' But obviously we don't."

Most finds have been made in tropical areas of the world where many more types of plant and fungus grow than in cooler regions.

Seven new varieties of coffee plant, most of them in Madagascar, were among the discoveries and could offer growers alternatives to the crops they grow today.

Dr Davis said that the pleasure in discovering a new species remains undimmed even to someone who has uncovered scores: "I must have described over 200 species over the years and it's always exciting, particularly if it's something very, very different and it doesn't look like anything else you have ever seen. It's really exciting." He added: "Most of our new finds are coming from the tropics because the areas have a higher density of plants than anywhere else. And some of these areas are almost totally unexplored.

You would think that we know all the species of something like coffee which is a massively important crop but we've discovered nearly 30 in the last 10 years. And when you consider there are only 100 species in total that's pretty amazing.

"Coffee is the world's second most traded commodity, after oil, with at least 25 million farming families dependent on its production for their livelihoods, yet we still have much to learn about its wild relatives. Conserving the genetic diversity within this genus has implications for the sustainability of our daily cup, particularly as coffee plantations are highly susceptible to climate change."

The biggest new species to be discovered in 2009 by Kew botanists was the tree Berlinia korupensis, which is related to a pea. It boasts pods that grow a foot long and explode when ripe to hurl the seeds across the forest floor far from the parent tree. It was found in the Korup National Park in Cameroon, but only 17 specimens were pinpointed, making it critically endangered.

Two other big trees, Talbotiella velutina and Lecomtedoxa plumosa, were also discovered in the Cameroon rainforests. Both grow to 100ft tall.

In South Africa botanists discovered the "cancer cure" yam, Dioscorea strydomiana, which is held by locals to have healing properties. Despite being known locally it had escaped identification by scientists.

Only 200 of the plants have been pinpointed, and Dr Paul Wilkin, Kew's yam expert, said: "This is the most unique and unusual yam I have come across, and probably the most threatened."

An unexpectedly small plant was a knee-high dwarf eucalyptus in Australia named Eucalyptus sweedmaniana which, along with a second, Eucalyptus brandiana, was discovered by Professor Stephen Hopper, Kew's director. He said: "It is not widely known that 2,000 new plant species are discovered worldwide each year.

The Independent

Doomsday seed vault's stores are growing

The stores of seeds in a "doomsday" vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.

The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation," Fowler said. "You can't imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity."

That's because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said.

One recent study found that corn yields in Africa will fall by 30 percent by 2030 unless heat-resistant varieties are developed, Fowler noted. "Evolution is in our control," he said in an interview. "It's in our seed bank. You take traits form different varieties and make new ones."

That process currently takes about 10 years. But Fowler said his organization is hoping to speed up the development of new varieties by cataloguing the genetic traits of the seeds that it stores.

Their gene bank -- dug into a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the Svalbard islands in the far north of Norway -- will be made public to help spur research, which Fowler says is woefully inadequate.

"Six people in the world are breeding bananas. Ditto for yams, a major crop in Africa," Fowler said ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fowler said the Global Crop Diversity Trust has agreements with 49 institutes in 46 countries to rescue some 53,000 of the 100,000 crop samples identified as endangered.
Agreements for preserving the remaining varieties are expected to be completed soon. They include rare varieties of barley, wheat, rice, banana, plantain, potato, cassava, chickpea, maize, lentil, bean, sorghum, millet, coconut, breadfruit, cowpea and yam.

The varieties most at risk are being stored in poorly funded seed banks in Africa and Asia where varieties are being lost due to inadequate refrigeration and the destruction of the facilities as a result of civil strife and natural disasters.

Researchers do not know how many varieties of crops have already been lost. But the industrialization of farming has had a major impact on crop diversity. In 1903, US farmers planted 578 varieties of beans. By 1983 just 32 varieties remained in seedbanks.

"When you lose one of these samples you're losing something you can't find in a farmer's field," Fowler said. "We can't afford to lose this diversity when it's so easy and cheap to conserve it."

AFP

Over-reliance on a few crops threatening world crop biodiversity

Jeff Bentley

Centuries of crop diversification are at risk of being lost forever, warns Jeff Bentley. A growing dependency on just a few modern, high-yielding varieties is leaving the world's food supplies exposed.



A potato is not just a potato; there are thousands of local varieties still grown in their birthplace in the Andes. Some are long, thin and purple; others are lemon yellow and floury, or shaped like a bull's horn. Most crops have many varieties, a rich heritage that most urban dwellers are no longer aware of. The cultivated potato comes in six different species and perhaps 3,000 varieties, most found only in the Andes. That is a lot of genetic information. Until recently these local, native varieties were safe on the farm, but as farmers turn increasingly to modern, high-yielding varieties, the old ones are being abandoned.


For example, in the 1970s near Lake Titicaca, agronomists collected more than 200 varieties of quinoa, a native Andean grain. Now, no more than 50 of these are still grown. Our generation is snuffing out ancient races of crops which fed the Incas, the Mayans, the Sumerians, and the Tang dynasty.


The impoverished smallhold farmers who nurture crop diversity need to sell some of their harvest to make a living, but selling can be stressful. Villagers struggle to understand why the harvest that was so much work now fetches such a low price. The person who buys the product often gets the blame.


Researchers in Peru and Bolivia found that farmers and other people further up the food chain hardly knew each other. But when farmers, wholesalers, even chefs and supermarket staff all sat down together they learned about each others' concerns.

The invisible hand of the market, it seems, can favour the farmers and crop diversity. For example, heirloom potatoes are being sold to upscale Andean shoppers in smart little net bags. Because farmers can sell native spuds at a good price, they are planting more of them.

If humanity mourns the loss of wild plants, we should really worry about the extinction of cultivated ones.


West Africans domesticated a native species of rice, called Oryza glaberrima, 3,500 years ago. The grain was relative of the Asian rice Oryza sativa. Yet 450 years ago, the Asian species reached Africa and all but displaced the native rice, which had a thinner head of grain and thus brought in a smaller harvest. By the 1990s, native African rice was reduced to a few pockets on scattered farms.


Then in the 1990s, Sierra Leonean plant breeder Monty Jones and colleagues found a way to create a fertile hybrid between African and Asian rice. Called "Nerica" (New Rice for Africa), it could yield a bumper harvest like its Asian parent, but it was as tough as its African side, resistant to drought, pests and disease. Scientists have bred many varieties of Nerica and farmers all over West Africa are starting to grow them. This new rice, descended from an endangered species, is helping Africa to feed itself, yet this opportunity would have been lost if O. glaberrima had gone extinct.


As the Earth gets warmer, we will need to breed other hardy new crop varieties. Plant breeding is like playing cards: more hands are possible with a full deck. We'll only be able to create new varieties in the future if we save the old ones we have now. Many rare crop varieties are now grown on just a few farms, often by elderly people. The crops will be lost forever unless young people start to grow them.


BBC

Food crisis drives more attention towards long neglected traditional crops

Latin America's vast biological diversity has contributed little to the region's commercial agriculture, despite being the birthplace of two of the world's four most widely consumed food crops: maize and potatoes.

The current global food crisis has fuelled the debate about agricultural production and trade, including the sharp decline in the diversity of commercial crops.

Over the course of human history, people have consumed more than 7,000 species of plants. But in the last 100 years, about 75 percent of food crops have fallen by the wayside and now just three staples -- wheat, maize and rice -- make up about 70 percent of our caloric intake, according to United Nations figures.

Many ancient crops, like amaranth (Amaranthus) and quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), both promising Latin American species, are grown by few farmers today, while rice and wheat cultivation continue to expand. As the older crops disappear, the knowledge associated with them vanishes too, weakening farming and nutrition, say experts.

Amaranth was declared "the best food of plant origin for human consumption" in 1979 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences because of its unique proteins and amino acids and because it is relatively easy to grow, not requiring much water or especially fertile soil. Extensively cultivated by the Maya, Aztecs and Incas, it had been largely forgotten until the 1960s, and today it is only planted on 2,000 hectares.

"There is a culture that creates a preference for other products with fewer nutritional benefits," said Alberto Martínez, secretary of the Amaranth Product System, a cooperative of 250 low-income farmers who live in an area south of the Mexican capital. In 2007, they sold 300 tonnes of amaranth, whose current price of 1,000 dollars per tonne is twice the 2006 price.

Amaranth is also grown in the United States, China and India, but only on a small scale.

"In relying on no more than six crops, the population is more vulnerable to crises of stocks, supply and demand," especially the poor, according to Juan Izquierdo, senior plant production officer for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Latin America.

That is what is happening now, with the dramatic hikes in food prices around the world, which threaten to drive up the number of people suffering hunger globally from 850 million to 950 million, according to the World Food Programme. Violent protests over food shortages and high prices have already broken out in dozens of countries.

This panorama is the result of processes that have made more than 100 countries heavily dependent on imported food, starting with food aid. Since the 1950s, food production patterns have been transferred to poor countries, says Jean Marc von der Weid, coordinator of the non-governmental Alternative Agriculture Project Consulting and Services, in Brazil.

Then, the "unequal" trade liberalisation of the past few decades allowed Europe and the United States -- girded with their protectionist policies -- "to flood the world with cheap foods," which was welcome for a time, until the crisis revealed the trap, Von der Weid told Tierramérica.

The loss of crop biodiversity is another consequence. Fonio, or finger-grass (Digitaria), is a nutritious and tasty cereal from West Africa, which ended up confined to rural areas. In Brazil, wheat replaced most of the manioc, maize and bean consumption.

The problem affects crop species and varieties, causing genetic "erosion" that makes them more vulnerable to disaster. Just two types of black beans dominate the Brazilian market, for example, said Von der Weid.

THE ROLE OF PEOPLE

Women play contrary roles in food diversity. As consumers, and often overwhelmed with long hours of work, "they contribute to homogenisation," because they look for foods that are quick and easy to prepare, Emma Siliprandi, an agronomist and sociologist who researches the relationship between gender and food, told Tierramérica.

But in agriculture, women are "depositories of biodiversity, seeds and knowledge" about numerous foods, infusions, and household gardens, while men tend to follow the logic of the market, casting aside the "trifles", she said.

It was women who, as part of the Vía Campesina international network, launched the movement in defence of seeds as a heritage of humanity, added Siliprandi.

Meanwhile, the concerns of indigenous peoples go beyond that.

"Not only is it essential to recover the erroneously named 'old crops with high nutritional value', but also to reaffirm our conception of Mother Earth," Senator Ramiro Estacio, of the Indigenous Authorities Movement of South-western Colombia (AICO), told Tierramérica. That means "recuperating an entire system that implies reinforcing knowledge, culture, and productive and nutritional variety, and which allows the reaffirmation of millennial wisdom," he said.

Recovering diversity depends on efforts in family farming and requires agro-ecology practices and agrarian reform, said Von der Weid. Also indispensable is food education, because entrenched eating habits prevent the diversification of food, as has been seen in the failed attempts to disseminate vegetable crops in Brazil, he added.

However, a Chilean project for urban gardens, which included education about nutrition and vegetable types to be grown in different seasons, was highly successful.

Agro-ecology, which rules out the use of chemical or synthetic inputs, is "an interesting proposal," but only serves niche markets and does not replace large-scale commercial farming, said Ariovaldo Luchiari Junior, assistant director of the environment centre at the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA.

Luchiari noted the increased demand for less harmful farming products, the decreased demand for non-renewable fertilisers, and the positive results in agrosilvopastoral combinations and vegetables. The demands of today's market, he said, show preferences for products of higher quality, security, tradability and added value, ranging from shredded and packaged carrots to soybeans with higher content of isoflavone, which eases symptoms of menopause in women.

Meanwhile, commercial crops have an increasingly wide array of uses: maize provides food for people and livestock alike, and is a raw material for many products, including ethanol fuel. Sugarcane has long been produced for more than sugar. It is a fertiliser and the source for some types of plastic. Wheat is not just bread, but also crackers, pastas and sweets.

Latin America's biodiversity could generate new products of mass consumption, but it will be a long process of investment and research to respond to nutritional and environmental standards -- "not an easy road," said Luchiari.

FAO expert Izquierdo said that productivity, uniformity and processability are the necessary traits of a "useful" crop.

Enough awareness to take advantage of opportunities is another factor, he says. The United States is the world's leading producer of quinoa because in one county of the central state of Nebraska it is planted on 25,000 hectares. The harvest is destined for one of the Nestlé Corporation's foods for infants.

"The crops that have been subject to the most intense genetic improvement, like maize, rice and wheat, yield much more per surface unit," said Edmundo Acevedo, expert in agricultural production at the University of Chile, adding that without similar improvements, it would be difficult for native species like amaranth and quinoa to compete on the market.

In Mexico, despite maize shortages, corn tortillas are still the dominant staple food. "If maize prices climb higher, it will hit everyone’s pocketbook, but it is impossible to imagine that people will stop eating tortillas, because a millenniums-old culture sustains that diet," Marcelino Vela, a consulting economist to food companies, told Tierramérica.

IPS

Africa must safeguard its biodiversity, resist biofuels production

by Sifelani Tsiko

AfricaA must safeguard its economic and social interest at the forthcoming ninth Conference of Parties to the Convention of Biological Bio-diversity and ensure that industrialised countries in the North do not sideline its concerns on agriculture, food security and agricultural bio-diversity conservation.

Participants to a three-day regional consultative workshop on preparations for the COP9-CBD scheduled to be held in Bonn, Germany (May 19 - 30) said African negotiators must take a firm stand particularly on issues related to the global agro-fuels production push, biosafety, farmers rights, emerging technologies and climate change.

These issues, the participants said, have serious implications on food security, agricultural bio-diversity conservation and sustainable use of the continent's biological resources.

The regional workshop was organised to discuss critical issues affecting the continent's agro-bio-diversity and make recommendations to state parties and civil society going to COP9/MOP4 of the CBD.

"The main objective of this workshop is to deliberate and formulate positions on some of the critical issues that will be coming up for discussion during the COP9 such as agro-fuels production, biosafety, farmers rights, climate change, emerging technologies and access to and benefit sharing mechanism of genetic resources," said Mr Andrew Mushita, an agronomist.

"We hope this workshop will enable us to critically analyse and make recommendations into issues affecting agro-bio-diversity within the country and also contribute to Zimbabwe and indeed other African member-states position at COP9/MOP4."

The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is the first global agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of all components of bio-diversity including plant genetic resources and species. Governments from different parts of the world first signed the agreement at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The CBD is made up of 188 national governments and one regional economic bloc.

The main objective of the CBD is the conservation of bio-diversity, the sustainable use of its components and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

COP7 was held in Kualar Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2004 while COP8 was held in Curitiba, Brazil, in March 2006.

"We need to influence our delegates to take the right positions. We should know the delegates before hand and influence them to take our concerns on board to the negotiations," said Mr Patrick Kasasa, an agronomist and Africa region programme co-ordinator of the Community Bio-diversity Development and Conservation Africa.

Prof Carol Thompson, a visiting political economist from the University of Arizona in the US, said African countries should reject the growing push for agro-fuels production arguing that it will lead to loss of land, food security and sovereignty and perpetuate a model of industrial agriculture that is not environmentally sustainable.

"The science behind agro-fuels is as controversial as the science behind genetically modified organisms. They (industrial North) have started calling Africa the "Green Opec of Africa," she said. "Agro-fuels pose a huge threat to smallholder farmers. Land use in Africa will be firmly under foreign control and this will be for foreign consumption and not for Africa. This is something that needs serious discussion."

She said the push by the industrial North for agro-fuels would lead to the extensive growing of food crops for fuel leading to food insecurity, poverty and hunger. "The impact of agro-fuels will be huge, the practice of monoculture will destroy bio-diversity, the growing of agro-fuel crops will open the way for the bulldozing of GM crops and trade agreements will be used as weapons of control. Labour will be subordinate to the whims of large and powerful conglomerates," Prof Thompson said.

She added that: "It's not about market issues, but profit. The single goal is profit, not sustainable and efficient use of resources. It is certainly not about people. Africa should not give land back to foreign control."

The Herald

Monocropping is contributing to world food crisis

By Alex Roslin

Move over, peak oil and global warming. A new crisis is exploding right now across the developing world: peak food.

Rising costs for staples like rice have sparked unrest across Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa this month, including food riots in Haiti that have killed five, strikes in Jordan, and rice-hoarding in the Philippines and Hong Kong.

Exploding fuel prices are largely to blame for a 65-percent jump in the cost of food globally since 2002. But that’s not the main reason for the current crisis. Ground zero is in the world’s rice bowl in Southeast Asia. A nasty epidemic of disease and pests has struck Vietnam, the world’s third-largest rice exporter, sharply cutting supplies of the food staple of half of the world.

The problems in Vietnam have quickly rippled beyond its borders. In neighbouring Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, the price of medium-grade rice for export has doubled since the beginning of the year. In the Philippines, the world’s largest importer of the staple, the government has deployed soldiers to guard rice stocks, while President Gloria Arroyo has threatened to jail for life anyone who steals supplies.

Some exporting countries have started to limit rice sales abroad in order to build up domestic stocks, and the UN says food riots due to exploding prices for rice and other staples have hit a dozen countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, with 37 countries altogether facing food crises.

What caused the disease and pest outbreak in Vietnam? Some rice experts have said that’s unclear. “We’re faced with a lot of unknowns,” said Robert Zeigler—head of the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, which developed high-yield rice strains in the 1960s—in an Agence France-Presse dispatch. “The fact is, they got taken by surprise and they had some significant yield losses that they were just not expecting.”

Devlin Kuyek begs to differ. He says the cause is no big mystery. It’s monoculture. Kuyek is the author of a book titled Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada, which came out in December. He says the rice crisis is an example of the food-related calamities we can expect in growing numbers due to a looming “perfect storm” combo of self-imploding crop monocultures and global warming.

Remember the Irish potato famine of the 1840s that wiped out up to a quarter of Ireland’s population and changed the Emerald Isle’s history. It started when the British took over Ireland’s best farmland for beef-grazing pasture, pushing the Irish onto marginal land where they became virtually dependent on the potato for survival.

Today’s rice crisis has disturbingly similar roots. Vietnam was one of the major recipient nations for the monoculture craze that swept the non-Communist world in the form of the U.S.–sponsored “Green Revolution” in the 1960s. The stated goal was to reduce poverty by spreading the economies of scale of U.S. mass agriculture. Monoculture would be to farming what the Model T had been to auto production.

The Green Revolution provoked a sea change in centuries-old farming practices worldwide. It meant dropping millenniums-old farming practices of planting diverse fields of frequently rotated, native-adapted crops that evolved as local soil and environmental conditions changed. Those methods based on diversified seed varieties and varied crops were developed during the earliest days of human farming in order to prevent plant diseases, pest infestations, and soil degradation. Now governments would subsidize farmers to grow vast tracts of single crops from uniformly produced seeds.

The new crops were bred in government labs—and today, by a half-dozen large seed companies that control the bulk of the $30-billion U.S. annual seed business worldwide—in order to maximize yield, not other characteristics, like, say, nutritional value. “They try to do the Coca-Cola or Pepsi of corn: one crop that could be sold everywhere,” Kuyek says. “What you see in corn today is nothing like what you saw before, traditionally. They’ve industrialized that crop to the hilt. It’s quite sad because it had so much nutritional value. You could essentially just live on corn.”

Because the new monocrops were poorly adapted to local conditions, the plants didn’t do so well unless sustained by massive amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Little wonder that almost all of the world’s largest seed companies, including the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont, got their start as chemical manufacturers.

“A lot of diseases that had never been a problem started appearing during the Green Revolution,” Kuyek says. “All of a sudden, instead of adapting seeds to local conditions, the farm had to be adapted to the seed variety.”

The result of all this has been a tremendous loss of biodiversity. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says 75 percent of crop varieties have disappeared since 1900. Nine-tenths of the world’s calories now come from 20 crop species, with four making up half of total calories: rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes.

Soaking farmland with chemicals has had other impacts as well. It meant only a few larger farming operations could afford the astronomical costs of the new type of farming. Small farms were crowded out, making communities less self-reliant. As well, the chemicals produced environmental problems, like the explosion of toxic blue-green algae in Canadian lakes, due largely to fertilizer runoff.

Monocrops also deplete soil of key nutrients and billions of microorganisms that help keep plants disease-free, reducing soil productivity 18 times faster than natural processes can rebuild it on average in the U.S., says John Jeavons, a Willits, California–based author and farming researcher who teaches small-scale food-production techniques. “We’re putting extraordinary pressure on our soil base,” he says.

Jeavons ... says peak food is actually related to four other intertwined crises: peak farmable land, peak water, peak oil, and global warming.

This unholy gaggle of calamities comes together like this: farmland globally is declining due to soil depletion, erosion, urban development, and the diversion of land to biofuel production. Throw in the depletion of aquifers, rising energy costs for farmers, and global warming flinging unprecedented environmental conditions at poorly adapted monocrops, and Jeavons says it’s just a matter of time before we get a lot more Vietnams.

The irony of all this is the Green Revolution looks like it was barking up the wrong tree. Evidence is starting to show monocultures aren’t the only way to feed the planet—and aren’t necessarily the most efficient. “I’m quite confident we don’t have to do mass agriculture,” says Mark Winston, a former professor of apiculture at Simon Fraser University.

Winston coauthored a groundbreaking study of monocultures published in 2006 in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment. It found that canola farmers in Alberta who let some of their land go fallow dramatically improved their yield compared to those who planted their entire farm. The reason: the uncultivated land became an oasis for bees, which, in turn, helped the canola flourish with improved pollination. With 33 percent of land left unplanted, a farmer’s profit would have more than doubled from $24,000 to $65,000 on a 1,400-hectare piece of land.

“The data is very strong: plant less and make more money,” says Winston, now director of SFU’s undergraduate semester in dialogue. “It’s a whole different mindset. Monocultures create pest outbreaks that are greater than natural predators [like ants and wasps] can deal with. In a balanced crop, natural predators balance pest insects.”

A growing movement of farmers, agronomists, and environmentalists is trying to revive traditional farming methods in reaction to the monocrop steamroller. Nestled in the Pacific Coastal Range 220 kilometres north of San Francisco, Jeavons is busy trying to teach the world about his “grow biointensive” mini-farming techniques from his base at the 20-acre spread of his nonprofit organization, Ecology Action.

His book How to Grow More Vegetables (and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine has sold 500,000 copies in seven languages and several editions. He travels worldwide, giving three-day workshops on his techniques, and he is currently hosting seven interns and apprentices at his farm, including some from Africa and Mexico.

Jeavons says mini-farming can feed a person a nutritious vegan diet with 4,000 square feet of land, compared to 7,000 square feet needed for a vegan diet with conventional farming and 30,000 square feet to produce the average American diet.

How does it work? He starts with double-dug, raised beds tilled two feet down in order to create what he calls a “soil sponge cake” or a “living, quadridimensional tapestry in your soil.” Other tips: plenty of compost; close spacing of plants to reduce erosion, the need for watering, and room for weeds; companion planting; and carbon-heavy legumes to replenish the soil so it requires no fertilizer. And above all, no chemicals. “You’re feeding the soil and yourself,” he says.

Jeavons says the approach simply revives techniques first used in China and Greece thousands of years ago. North American farms, Kuyek says, used to be hotbeds of efficiency and biodiversity before the advent of modern agriculture. Agricultural fairs played a central role, with awards showcasing farmers who bred high-performance seeds. “There was a lot of innovation on farmers’ fields,” he says.

Another part of this movement is growing networks of small-scale farmers selling their wares locally. “Small, diverse farms can feed the local population,” says Heather Pritchard of Farm Folk/City Folk, a nonprofit concerned with agricultural issues that encourages consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores to buy food locally at farmers markets or directly from local producers.

Pritchard lives most of the week at the Glorious Organics Cooperative in the Fraser Valley, where she grows herbs and flowers and balances the books. Her group’s idea has caught on big-time, with demand so great that suppliers are struggling to keep up. “We don’t have enough supply. We’ve done our job too well,” she says, laughing.

Other activists are working to create seed banks to save locally grown crop varieties from extinction. One example is the Salt Spring Island–based Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. It hopes to collect, study, and preserve the seed of every edible, medicinal, and other potentially useful plant in Canada before it’s too late and they’re gone.

Apart from its own seed bank of more than 600 varieties of herbs, grains, peppers, tomatoes, and garlic, the sanctuary also coordinates a network of small-scale farmers who preserve “heirloom” seeds—endangered traditional varieties grown for centuries until they were crowded out by monocultures. “It’s kind of a living gene bank spread through the country,” says the sanctuary’s Dan Jason in a phone interview.

The goal of all this is to resupply farmers struck by crop failure, natural disaster, or genetic contamination. “Monocultures have little in-built adaptability, especially with climate change,” Jason says. “We’re narrowing the gene pool to just a few varieties, and they’re pretty shitty varieties. They’re designed not for nutrition but yield.”

One of Jason’s dreams is for every city, town, and country village to have its own seed bank to store locally grown seeds and collect records on them. Another idea he has helped promote is Seedy Saturdays and Sundays—monthly organic- seed fairs for local farmers and small seed vendors. Over 50 Seedy Saturdays are now being held regularly held in places like Salt Spring Island, Kelowna, Halifax, even Toronto. “The only way we’re going to have good food is [by] taking it into our own hands,” Jason says.

Some seed activists are less enthused, however, about the opening in February of a UN–affiliated global seed bank in Svalbard, Norway, that has been likened to a Noah’s ark for plants. Concern has grown that the seed bank could give agribusiness access it has sought for years to seed varieties of the developing world, while farmers will have few rights to their own seeds stored in the vault.

Kuyek notes that the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the international agency that spearheaded the seed bank, accepts private donations from biotech seed giants Syngenta and DuPont. “There is a really aggressive effort by seed companies to patent the seed supply and lock it up,” he says. “If we’re in this monoculture model and we throw in patents, it increases our vulnerability even further.”

If Kuyek is right, it means the very effort of trying to protect our food supply at the seed bank could threaten it like never before.

Straight

Global seed vault opens

A vast underground vault storing millions of seeds from around the world has opened in a mountain on a remote island near the Arctic Ocean.

Dubbed the "Doomsday Vault," the seed bank is considered the ultimate safety net for the world's seed collections, protecting them from a wide range of threats including war, natural disasters, lack of funding or simply poor agricultural management.

The Norwegian government paid to build the vault in a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the remote Svalbard islands between Norway and the North Pole. Building began last year, and the vault opened officially Tuesday.

"With climate change and other forces threatening the diversity of life that sustains our planet, Norway is proud to be playing a central role in creating a facility capable of protecting what are not just seeds, but the fundamental building blocks of human civilization," Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told scores of guests attending the opening ceremony.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, as it is officially known, can hold as many as 4.5 million seed samples and will eventually house almost every variety of the most important food crops in the world, according to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which is paying to collect and maintain the seeds.

The United Nations founded the trust in 2004 to support the long-term conservation of crop diversity, and countries and foundations provide the funding.

"The seed vault is the perfect place for keeping seeds safe for centuries," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the trust. "At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 10,000 years."

The vault's location deep inside a mountain in the frozen north ensures the seeds can be stored safely no matter what happens outside.

"We believe the design of the facility will ensure that the seeds will stay well-preserved even if such forces as global warming raise temperatures outside the facility," said Magnus Bredeli Tveiten, project manager for the Norwegian government.

The vault sits at the end of a 120-meter (131-yard) tunnel blasted inside the mountain. Workers used a refrigeration system to bring the vault to -18 degrees Celsius (just below 0 degrees Fahrenheit), and a smaller refrigeration system plus the area's natural permafrost and the mountain's thick rock will keep the vault at at least -4 C (25 F).

The vault at Svalbard is similar to an existing seed bank in Sussex, England, about an hour outside London. The British vault, called the Millennium Seed Bank, is part of an scientific project that works with wild plants, as opposed to the seeds of crops.

Paul Smith, the leader of the Millennium Seed Bank project, said preserving the seeds of wild plants is just as important as preserving the seeds of vital crops. "We must give ourselves every option in the future to use the whole array of plant diversity that is available to us," he said.

The idea for the Arctic seed bank dates to the 1980s but only became a possibility after the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources came into force in 2004, the Norwegian government said. The treaty provided an international framework for conserving and accessing crop diversity.

Svalbard is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the world.

The Norwegian government says it has paid 50 million Norwegian Kroner ($9.4 million) to build the seed vault.

CNN

African seed samples deposited at Global Seed Vault

Twenty-one boxes filled with 7,000 unique seed samples from more than 36 African nations were shipped to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a facility being built on a remote island in the Arctic Circle as a repository of last resort for humanity's agricultural heritage.

The vault is being built by the Norwegian government as a service to the global community, and a Rome-based international NGO, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, will fund its operation. The vault will open on 26 February 2008.

The shipment, which was sent by the Ibadan, Nigeria-based International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), consists of thousands of duplicates of unique varieties of domesticated and wild cowpea, maize, soybean, and Bambara groundnut. The seeds from the IITA genebank in Ibadan, Nigeria, were packed in 21 boxes weighing a total of 330 kg. The processing by IITA staff took several months, and the boxes were packaged over a three-day period.

The vault has been constructed in a mountain deep inside the Arctic permafrost.

"IITA's genebank houses the world's largest collection of cowpea, with over 15,000 unique varieties from 88 countries around the world," said Dr Dominique Dumet, genebank manager at IITA. "Our collection holds in-trust about 70 percent of cowpea landraces from Africa. Cowpea (also known as black-eyed pea in the USA) is a key staple in Africa, offering an inexpensive source of protein."

Other centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have began packing and shipping duplicate collections from Benin, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, and Syria. Collectively, the CGIAR centers maintain 600,000 plant varieties in crop gene banks, which are widely viewed as the foundation of global efforts to conserve agricultural biodiversity.

Crop biodiversity is the raw material needed to equip crops with critical resistance to pests and diseases, and enable them to grow in harsher conditions of drought, salinity, and flooding, which will likely increase with global climate change, particularly in poor nations.

Cowpea and dozens of other crops, like cassava, yams, and millets, are known as "orphan" crops, because they receive less attention than they deserve relative to their value and importance.

According to researchers at the World Vegetable Center in Taiwan, collectively, 27 orphan crops with a value of $100 billion are grown on 250 million hectares (618 million acres) in developing countries.

"So called 'orphan' crops like cowpea and groundnut are not minor or insignificant crops," said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "They are of great importance to regional food security. In addition, they are often adapted to harsh environments and are diverse in terms of their genetic, agro-climatic and economic niches."

These crops may also vary in less obvious characteristics, such as their response to cold, heat or drought, or their ability to tolerate specific pests and diseases. Farmers and scientists continually draw on the genetic diversity held in crop collections like IITA's to ensure productive harvests.

Storage of these and all the other seeds at Svalbard is intended to ensure that they will be available for bolstering food security should a man-made or natural disaster threaten agricultural systems, or even the gene banks themselves, at any point in the future.

CGIAR

Monoculture-based agriculture is threatening seed genetic pool

by Jonathon Porritt*

The number of people out there today seriously worried about the health of all the plants and seeds on which modern agriculture depends must be very limited, and the number of people actively campaigning to protect them vanishingly few. Making two radio programmes called "Save Our Seeds" forcefully reminded me just how crazy that situation is.

Of the Earth's 250,000 plant species, only 200 are cultivated for food on any serious scale. Even more extraordinary, the vast majority of the world's food comes from just 20 crops, in just eight plant families. Most of these monocultures are dangerously vulnerable to diseases (both old and new), pest infestations, and a rapidly changing climate.

Yet the "genetic pool" on which plant breeders might need to draw to build resistance and adaptability is being constantly eroded as older, non-commercial varieties disappear.

There are two ways of protecting the diversity of plants and seeds. The first is through seed banks, of which there are 1,400 across the world. Some of them survive in almost impossibly tough conditions, others well-funded with strong government support.

But seed banks can only do so much in this massive salvage operation. The seeds they store need to regularly germinated, otherwise they too die. The best way of maintaining an active and vibrant seed bank is to ensure that farmers and gardeners are planting out those "land races"
and rare varieties of plants which are now so endangered.

More often than not, that sets small-scale, subsistence farmers (on whom this kind of "active conservation" depends) in conflict with the juggernaut of industrialised, intensive agriculture.

This battle is far from over, with new efforts now under way to convert much of Africa's land into vast monocultures to produce either food or biofuels for export. And because it's just "seeds" we're talking about here, or nondescript plants for agriculture, the world just stands aside as if this continuing "war on nature" was of little importance.

One suspects that there are some harsh lessons soon to be learned.

*Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission

Listen to Save our Seeds on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 14 November at 2100 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7082933.stm

Africa must guard against risks to its biodiversity posed by biotechnology

Africa must scale up efforts to protect its plant genetic resources particularly now when rapid changes in modern biotechnology are posing serious risks to the continent's agro-biodiversity, says Dr. Melaku Worede, an internationally acclaimed plant genetics researcher.

"We need to be more aggressive because the world is changing fast and risks for the erosion of the continent's biological resources are increasing," Dr. Worede said. "We are not against modern technology, but we are concerned with the context in which it is developed and used. The way it is being done now encourages monopoly and control of the continent's plant resources by large agro-processing companies at the expense of indigenous crops and community needs," he said.

"I get very worried when new technologies are developed and oriented towards exploiting the African farmers. It’s wrong for big agro-multinationals to force African farmers to use new seed varieties which will disempower them and lead to dependency when local varieties suitable to local conditions can be enhanced.

"I get very concerned when European plant genetic researchers use African farmers as guinea pigs. What they cannot do in Europe they do it here in Africa," said Worede, renowned for his pioneering work in plant genetic research and his role in restoring Ethiopia's food security and plant resources.

In 1989, Dr. Worede, now retired, was honored with the Right Livelihood Award, commonly referred as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for "preserving Ethiopia's genetic wealth for the benefit of all humanity," by building one of the finest seed conservation centers in the world.

"The threat of losing biological resources is growing and getting worse because of the expansion of commercial agriculture, which promotes mono-cropping and western agricultural values," said Dr. Worede.

Despite the numerous challenges facing Africa today, he said it was pleasing to note that there were some initiatives that were keeping the unfettered expansion of commercial agriculture in check and working to address the community needs of farmers in Africa.

"In the early 1980s, I was among the crop of scientists who fought for the promotion of indigenous African varieties as a food security strategy at a time when scientists from the North were strongly advocating for mono-cropping,” Dr. Worede said. "When we talked about this, they said: 'This is crazy, how can you maintain diversity with farmers?"

"We kept arguing for the growing of African landraces. I joined forces with Jeff Hadden from Canada and everywhere we went we opposed mono-cropping and agriculture which did not take into account the needs and aspiration of African communal farmers. We met strong resistance at the time but we continued with the fight. I'm happy today that scientists from the North and us here in the South are now talking the same language –biodiversity," Dr. Worede said.

"It was a David and Goliath fight. We were lucky that we got support ... to generate data about the importance of growing African landraces," Worede said. "Of course, there are gaps in the knowledge available; we need to touch base with communities and the first hand information they have on plant breeding. We need to involve African farmers in the seed supply, storage and distribution systems to help them conserve local crop varieties," he said.

"There are so many issues now, the biofuel and climate change debate, biopiracy, biotechnology. What are the implications of these new developments? We need new blood, a new generation of Africans that will promote and enhance farmers' varieties and work to fight the genetic erosion of the continent's plant genetic resources," said the veteran Ethiopian plant breeder and researcher.

"There is a real challenge, to continuously add value to what we started. There are co-existent and complementary factors. African farmers conserve through utilization. We should not lose sight of this. It's important. Through our field works we were able to prove that you can raise the yield potential for farmers’ varieties while maintaining diversity," Dr. Worede said.

Dr. Melaku won plaudits for establishing the Plant Genetic Resources Centre (PGRC), a 'Strategic Seed Reserve' of traditional varieties that could be released to farmers for planting in times of drought, when no other seeds were likely to thrive. Over a few years he and his staff collected and stored a considerable amount of Ethiopia's genetic wealth. "In the process," noted one publication 'he established not only Africa's finest facility of its kind, but one of the world's premier genetic conservation systems."

Dr. Worede built this institution exclusively with Ethiopian staff, training a whole new generation of plant breeders and geneticists in his home country. He retired from government service to continue and develop his pioneer work on a farming-based native seed (landrace) conservation, enhancement and utilization system.

Grown without commercial fertilizers or other chemicals, the locally adapted native seeds developed in this way-such as durum wheat—have been shown to exceed their high-input counterparts on the average by 10-15 percent and the original farmers' cultivars by 20-25 percent in yield, Worede noted.

Though he has retired, Dr. Worede still promotes this concept in other developing regions in Africa and Asia.

Black Star News

Forest farming proposal raises a storm in Kenya

The recent announcement that the Kenyan government was considering lifting a ban on cultivation in its forests has proven to be controversial.

Environment and Natural Resources minister David Mwiraria said the re-introduction of non-residential cultivation was a cheap way of replanting depleted forests, adding that this would benefit both government and local communities. He explained that his ministry’s small workforce could not plant and effectively look after the trees with its small budget.

But the suggestion has elicited stiff opposition from conservationists, who have warned that the shamba system posed a threat to natural biodiversity.

Environmentalist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai dismissed the minister’s assertion that farmers would only be allowed to cultivate on the periphery of forests, where lantana, a wild flowery weed akin to the water hyacinth, grows. She insisted that the system was vulnerable to abuse.

“Natural biodiversity cannot be protected if human activity like growing of farm produce is going on,” she said. She dismissed the Government’s strategy to use free labour as colonial mentality that should be done away with. “The Government does not provide money for the management of forests. Instead, it relies on free labour from farmers. This is an ancient way of doing things and is retrogressive to efforts to conserve the environment.”

But squatters applauded the minister’s announcement. Mr. Samuel Muhoro Gachoka, the chairman of Ragati Squatters Association, said forest cultivation would improve food security. He said he had farmed in the Ragati area of Mt Kenya Forest for more than 15 years and had inherited the forest plots from his fore fathers. “Since the Government threw us out in 1989, we have been living by the road side,” said the 39-year-old father of two. “The rest live on road reserves and rely on relief supplies. Children have dropped out of school and families live in squalor,” the squatter lamented.

Mr Fred Ogombe, the Central Province forest officer said the re-introduction of the shamba system would benefit the squatters. He lauded the system as a noble idea that could help the landless earn a livelihood but had been misused by politicians to woo voters.

The officer explained that politicians pressured the provincial administration to carve out larger chunks of land than agreed, resulting in destruction of indigenous trees.

“The families were allowed to plant annual crops such as maize, beans and potatoes but not perennial ones. But as the families expanded, the system became untenable due to the increasing demand for land,” he explained.

Prof Maathai has promised a long and hard battle against the re-introduction of the shamba system. Her Greenbelt Movement plans protests and tours to educate the public on the dangers of the system. “No amount of legislation will prevent politicians from abusing the system. People need to understand the importance of protecting our biodiversity and stay out of the forests,” she said.

Daily Nation

Gene banks suggested to preserve threatened livestock genetic biodiversity

The world’s first global inventory of farm animals has shown many breeds of African, Asian, and Latin American livestock at risk of extinction. In response, scientists from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have called for the rapid establishment of gene banks to conserve the sperm and ovaries of key animals critical for the global population’s future survival.

An over-reliance on just a few breeds of a handful of farm animal species, such as high-milk yielding Holstein-Friesian cows, egg-laying White Leghorn chickens, and fast-growing Large White pigs, is causing the loss of an average of one livestock breed every month, according to a recently released report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The black-and white Holstein-Friesian dairy cow, for example, is now found in 128 countries and in all regions of the world. An astonishing 90 percent of cattle in industrialized countries come from only six very tightly defined breeds.

The report, “The State of the World’s Animal Genetic Resources,” compiled by FAO, with contributions by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other research groups, surveyed farm animals in 169 countries. Nearly 70 percent of the entire world’s remaining unique livestock breeds are found in developing countries, according to the report, which was presented to over 300 policy makers, scientists, breeders, and livestock keepers at the First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources, held in Interlaken, Switzerland, from 3-7 September 2007.

“Valuable breeds are disappearing at an alarming rate,” said Carlos Seré, Director General of ILRI. “In many cases we will not even know the true value of an existing breed until it’s already gone.” Seré called for the rapid establishment of gene banks in Africa as one of four practical steps to better characterize, use, and conserve the genetic basis of farm animals for the livestock production systems around the world. “For the foreseeable future,” he says, “farm animals will continue to create means for hundreds of millions of people to escape absolute poverty.”

In recent years, many of the world’s smallholder farmers abandoned their traditional animals in favor of higher yielding stock imported from Europe and the US. For example, in northern Vietnam, local breeds comprised 72 percent of the sow population in 1994, and within eight years, this had dropped to just 26 percent. Of the country’s fourteen local pig breeds, five are now vulnerable, two are in critical state, and three are facing extinction.

Scientists predict that Uganda’s indigenous Ankole cattle—famous for their graceful and gigantic horns—could face extinction within 20 years because they are being rapidly supplanted by Holstein-Friesians, which produce much more milk. During a recent drought, some farmers that had kept their hardy Ankole were able to walk them long distances to water sources while those who had traded the Ankole for imported breeds lost their entire herds.

Seré notes that exotic animal breeds offer short-term benefits to their owners because they promise high volumes of meat, milk, or eggs, but he warned that they also pose a high risk because many of these breeds cannot cope with unpredictable fluctuations in the environment or disease outbreaks when introduced into more demanding environments in the developing world.

Scientists and conservationists alike agree that we can’t save all livestock populations. But ILRI has helped lay the groundwork for prioritizing livestock conservation efforts in developing regions. Over the past six years, it has built a detailed database, called the Domestic Animal Genetic Resources Information System (DAGRIS), containing research-based information on the distribution, characteristics, and status of 669 breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens indigenous to Africa and Asia.

Seré proposes acceleration of four practical steps to better manage farm animal genetic resources. A first strategy is to encourage farmers to keep genetic diversity “on the hoof,” which means maintaining a variety of indigenous breeds on farms. Another way to encourage “keeping it on the hoof,” Seré said, is by allowing greater mobility of livestock breeds across national borders. When it comes to livestock, farmers have to “move it or lose it,” he said. Wider distribution of breeds and access to them makes it less likely that particular breeds and populations will be wiped out by fluctuations in the market, civil strife, natural disasters, or disease outbreaks. The third approach is a combination of advanced genomic and geographical mapping techniques to predict which breeds are best suited to which environments and circumstances around the world. The fourth approach Seré is advocating is long-term insurance by establishing gene banks to store semen, eggs, and embryos of farm animals.

“In the US, Europe, China, India, and South America, there are well-established gene banks actively preserving regional livestock diversity,” said Seré. “Sadly, Africa has been left wanting and that absence is sorely felt right now because this is one of the regions with the richest remaining diversity and is likely to be a hot spot of breed losses in this century.”

Seré noted that genebanks by themselves are not the only answer to conservation, particularly if they are never used.

CGIAR

Can Africa afford biodiversity, environmental, health costs of a green revolution?

by Carol B. Thompson*

Kofi Annan has just agreed to head the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The goals of these foundations are ambitious."Our initial estimate is that over ten years, the program for Africa' seed systems (PASS) should produce 400 improved crop varieties resulting in a 50 percent increase in the land area planted with improved varieties across 20 African countries," reads the initiative's press release.

But can Africa afford this proposed "green revolution" in terms of human health and environmental sustainability? The foundation goals require resources that the continent does not have while derogating the incredible wealth it does possess. Although scientists, agriculturalists and African governments all agree that the continent has not remotely reached its agricultural potential, their advocated policies for food sovereignty drastically diverge from the high-tech, high-cost approach promoted by Gates and Rockefeller.

In 2002, while UN secretary general, Annan asked, "How can a green revolution be achieved in Africa?" After more than a year of study, the appointed multi-nation panel of scientists replied that a green revolution would not provide food security because of the diverse types of farming systems across the continent. There is "no single magic technological bullet for radically improving African agriculture," they reported. "African agriculture is more likely to experience numerous 'rainbow evolutions' that differ in nature and extent among the many systems, rather than one Green Revolution as in Asia."

Now Annan has agreed to head the kind of project his advisors told him would not work.

The green revolution of the 1970s promoted increased yields, based on a model of industrial agriculture involving monocultures of one or two crops, which requires massive amounts of fertilizer, pesticide and purchases seed. Although this approach to food production might feed more people in the short term, it also quickly destroys the earth through extensive soil degradation and water pollution from the agrochemicals used. It ruined small-scale farmers in Asia and Latin America, who could not afford to purchase the fertilizers, pesticides, and water necessary for the hybrid seed or apply these inputs in the exact proportions and at the exact times. To pay their debts, the farmers had to sell their land.

Increased yields of one or two strains of one or two crops ("monoculture within monoculture," as stated by a Tanzanian botanist) will not solve Africa's food problems. Africa's diverse ecological and farming systems require multiple initiatives, from intercropping on to permaculture, from respecting and using traditional ecological knowledge to training and equipping more African geneticists. The FAO, for example, now promotes farmers' breeding seeds (in situ) as a better conservation measure than collecting seed for refrigeration in a few large seed banks (ex situ). The very best food seed breeders in Africa are women who often farm less than one hectare of land.

The key to ending hunger is sustaining Africa's food biodiversity, not reducing it to industrial monoculture. Currently, food for African consumption comes from about 2,000 different plants, while the U.S. food base derives mainly from 12 plants. Any further narrowing of the food base makes us all vulnerable because it increases crop susceptibility to pathogens, reduces the variety of nutrients needed for human health, and minimizes the parent genetic material available for future breeding.

Seeds are a key element in the equation. One figure not often quoted among the depressing statistics from the continent is that African farmers still retain control over this major farming input : of the seed used for food crops, 80% is saved seed. Farmers do not have to buy seed every season, with cash they do not have. They possess a greater wealth - their indigenous seeds, freely shared and developed over centuries.

The proposed green revolution would shift the food base away from this treasure of seed. Instead, African farmers would have to purchase seed each season, thus putting cash into the hands of the corporations providing the seed. Is there a way of developing new varieties without further enriching Monsanto or DuPont by removing genetic wealth from African farmers?

Corporate development of new seed varieties, as promoted by the foundations, raises other questions. Will the new varieties be patented or protected by farmers' rights? Who will own and control the seed? One major reason for the decline of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the global South's resistance to patenting life forms. In 1999, the African Union, representing all African governments, asked that its unanimous resolution rejecting any patenting on life be put on the agenda at the Seattle WTO meeting. The US refused the request.

Another source of African wealth derives from indigenous ecological knowledge, reflecting centuries of adaptation to the different ecological zones, which values interspersing different plants to enrich the soil and deter pests from food crops. Shade trees, often cut down to open the land for monoculture farming, are not necessarily in the way of a plowing tractor. African farmers have the knowledge to use these trees as wind breaks, medicine, habitats for biodiverse insect communities, and food for all.

This wealth of knowledge raises another question : whether the African continent needs newly manufactured varieties of food crops, or is the problem the lack of scientific recognition and market valuing of what African farmers have cultivated for centuries?

Sorghum is one example of a crop lost to markets in the global North but not to Africa. On the continent, it is planted in more hectares than all other food crops combined. As nutritious as maize for carbohydrates, vitamin B6, and food energy, sorghum is more nutritious in protein, ash, pantothenic acid, calcium, copper, iron, phosphorus, isoleucine, and leucine. One of the most versatile foods in the world, sorghum can be boiled like rice, cracked like oats for porridge, baked like wheat into flat breads, popped like popcorn for snacks, or brewed for nutritious beer.

Although indigenous knowledge designed these diverse and rich uses of sorghum, most contemporary scientists have ignored its genetic wealth. "Sorghum is a relatively undeveloped crop with a truly remarkable array of grain types, plant types, and adaptability," concludes the US National Research Council. "Most of its genetic wealth is so far untapped and even unsorted. Indeed, sorghum probably has more undeveloped genetic potential than any other major food crop in the world."

Engaging African scientists to discover the potential genetic wealth of sorghum would assist African food security. In a first glimpse of foundation expenditures, however, we see funds directed to the Wambugu Consortium (founded by Pioneer Hi-Breed, part of DuPont) for experiments in genetically modified sorghum. By adding a gene, rather than mining the genetic wealth already there, the consortium can patent and sell the "new" variety at a premium price for DuPont.

Given the well-documented destruction of the previous green revolution, what if we decided that Africa's lack of use of fertilizer is a sign of sustainable development, not of backwardness? Africa's use of chemical fertilizers is extremely low; nine kilograms per hectare in Sub-Sahara Africa, compared to 135 kilograms per hectare in East and Southeast Asia, 100 kilograms in South Asia, and an average of 206 kilograms in industrialized countries. Originating from excess nitrogen production left over after World War II, the massive use of chemical fertilizers defined industrial agriculture in the 20th century. Surely for the 21st century, yields can be increased without such a high cost of African environmental degradation.

In most of Africa, with South Africa a notable exception, the majority of the population still lives in rural areas and still derives their incomes from farming. Dislocation of farmers to consolidate land for high-tech, green revolution farming is as serious a threat as chemical pollution of the environment.

Should the green wealth of ecological and farming knowledge among local small-scale farmers be destroyed for the cash wealth of much fewer large-scale farmers buying all their inputs from foreign corporations?

Each African government will answer the above questions about a green revolution differently. The diversity of policies matches the diversity of the continent. Yet they all reject patenting of life forms and strive to attain food sovereignty. High-tech answers to Africa's food crises are no answers at all if they pollute the environment with fertilizers and pesticides, destroy small-scale farming, and transform the genetic wealth of the continent into cash profits for a few corporations.

*Carol B. Thompson is a professor of political economy at Northern Arizona University.

Foreign Policy in Focus

Monty Jones and the development of NERICA

With his gentle smile and calm demeanour, Dr. Monty Jones does not look like the proverbial wild-haired scientist. Going boldly where other respected scientists had given up, Jones succeeded for the first time in producing fertile offspring - Nerica - by crossing the prolific Asian rice with the hardy African species, a feat that had been almost written off as a breeding impossibility.

Because African and Asian rice species do not naturally interbreed, Jones and his team used a technique called embryo-rescue to ensure that crosses between the two varieties survive and mature. The fruit of this effort, Nerica, has several advantages over traditional varieties.

Nerica represents more than 3,000 varieties of improved rice for various African agro-ecological zones, opening up a new world of rice biodiversity. Jones remembers the excitement he felt when he first saw seven of 48 crosses produce a few fertile plants. "Some even had 98 to 100 per cent fertility!" he said.

From then on, he had several 'eureka' moments, as he noticed the desirable characteristics of the two parents that had been transferred to the offspring. Internationally acclaimed rice scientists had doubted that Nerica varieties had more than 300 grains per panicle compared with Asian varieties that have average of 100.

And this did not deter Jones and his team. They continued to break new ground, learning to use another culture - a technique that allows breeders to obtain pure breeding lines without the numerous cycles of inbreeding or 'backcrossing' usually needed - to produce highly fertile lines in about two years, one-third the time required for conventional selection. "There was often an element of luck in our research," Jones says modestly.

Since its large-scale release in the late 1990s, Nerica, its developers and partners continue to receive global accolades, forcing a rethink on Africa's will and capacity to solve its problems.

This year, Time magazine named Jones one of the most influential people in the world. Economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote, "When Africa breaks free from the grip of poverty and famine - as it now looks poised to do - Jones, 56, will have played a pivotal role. His efforts in creating Nerica are legendary. His work has helped inspire other groups to support an African Green Revolution. The payoff will be a healthy, well-nourished continent on the path of economic growth."

Jones was among the first people to appreciate the value of indigenous rice species as a reservoir of genes for resistance to local stresses and to develop and apply new tools to increase the efficiency of the breeding programme in Africa. To develop Nerica, he started by collecting and classifying 1,500 varieties of native African rice in danger of extinction.

Currently the executive secretary of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Jones developed Nerica during his tenure as a senior scientist at the Africa Rice Centre between 1991 and 2002.

The new rices thrive in the continent's poor soils, defy drought and weeds and increase yields by up to 250 per cent. They mature in only half the time (90 days) of traditional varieties Nerica's protein content is about 25 per cent higher than that of imported rice.

allafrica.com

Madagascar orchid growers strike deal with perfume industry

A slender delicately-perfumed white orchid unique to Madagascar is the pick of the French cosmetics industry to symbolise its new commitment to biodiversity and sustainable development.

Angraecum eburneum longicalcar had all but disappeared from its natural habitat when much of its forest home was destroyed, but for this project will be grown commercially in partnership with Madagascar farmers, and then exported to France. "These orchids can be grown for use as either cut flowers or for their cosmetic value," said Alban Muller, president of both Alban Muller, a producer of fragrances and flavours, and the Cosmetic Valley grouping of France's top perfumers and fragrance specialists. "Orchids have hydrating and softening properties. They also have a very powerful image, which is important for our industry," Muller said. Companies like Guerlain, Yves Rocher and Clarins have been using orchid extracts for a long time, he said.

The island of Madagascar was separated from the African and Indian landmasses 160 million years ago, becoming a sanctuary for rare plant species. It is now home to the world's greatest number of orchids species, with 1,200 different types. Starting in the 1930s, celebrated collector Marcel Lecoufle roamed the island in search of orchids, building up a collection that today includes 105 species native to Madagascar.

Françoise Lenoble-Predine, vice-president of the conservatory of specialised plant collections, says she has found three laboratories in Madagascar that are sufficiently well equipped to handle the delicate operation of reproducing the orchid. "This will enable us to begin reproducing other plants with high added value," she said, kicking off a process of sustainable development in a country ranked as one of the poorest in the world.

Madagascar is already a major producer of plants for the perfume industry, including ylang ylang, vetiver and vanilla, another member of the orchid family. "It is a country rich in natural resources, but very much under the control of middlemen who buy the crops while they are still growing," said Lenoble-Predine. Crops are bartered against rice, with merchants pushing up prices of the food staple, leaving farmers with debts of up to one and a half harvests and families short of food.

The French cosmetics industry is therefore considering ways and means to form partnerships with Madagascar farmers, although it is too early to talk of quantities or prices, said Muller. "What is impossible nowadays is to ignore environmental issues," Muller said. "To secure access to resources in projects like these, we need to work fairly and intelligently with local farmers."

Angraecum eburneum could be cultivated in the very heart of the Madagascar capital, Antananarivo, where there are 3 200 hectares of polluted and deteriorating rice paddies.

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