Agricultural Biodiversity
Soon after peasant farmers first led plant explorers to wild stands of Zea diploperennis (perennial maize) in Mexico's Sierra de Manantlan in the late 1970s, plant breeders hailed the discovery as one of the botanical finds of the century. The rare perennial maize proved to be resistant to seven viral diseases that plague domesticated maize, and scientists predicted that Zea diploperennis could be worth as much as $4.4 billion to the commercial maize (corn) industry. Conservationists called for the establishment of a nature preserve to protect the rare maize in its natural habitat because they feared that poor farmers living nearby, in constant need of grazing land for their cattle, would soon wipe out the few remaining patches of wild maize by grazing cattle in the area. A nature preserve was eventually established, and peasant farmers no longer threatened the rare diploperennis. But within a few years, the forest began to invade the fields of wild maize. The plants were crowded out and began to disappear. Scientists soon realized that the local farmers had been intentionally conserving the wild maize by using a traditional practice of grazing their animals on dry fodder during the dormant season. Local farmers controlled the growth of the surrounding forest without harming the rare perennial maize plants. ...
... This story illustrates not only the tremendous value of rapidly disappearing crop genetic diversity, but also the fact that it is impossible to talk about the conservation of species and ecosystems separate from farm communities and indigenous peoples. The world's main food and livestock species have their centers of genetic diversity in the South. Generations of farmers in the tropics and sub-tropics have consciously selected and improved plants and animals that are uniquely adapted to thousands of micro-environments. Today, farming communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America are the primary custodians of most of the earth's remaining agricultural biodiversity. They are also carriers of unique knowledge about genetic resources and entire ecosystems.[1]
See Also
Biodiversity & Food Sovereignty
Indigenous Food Sovereignty
Whether in farmers' fields, forests, or fisheries, the genetic variation needed to meet human food needs is slipping into oblivion. Equally alarming, genetic resources are being privatized and their natural habitats plundered. We are losing the biological options we need to strengthen food security and to survive global climate change. The consequences, warns the United Nations, are "serious, irreversible and global."
Erosion of crop and animal diversity threatens the existence and stability of our global food supply because genetic diversity (found primarily in the South) is vital for the maintenance and improvement of agriculture. To maintain pest and disease resistance in our major food crops, for instance, or to develop other needed traits like drought tolerance or improved flavor, plant breeders constantly require fresh infusions of genes from the farms, fields and forests of the South. But agricultural biodiversity is not just a raw material for industrial agriculture; it is also the key to food security and sustainable agriculture because it enables poor farmers to adapt crops and animals to their own ecological needs and cultural traditions. Without this diversity, options for long-term sustainability and agricultural self reliance are lost.[2]
Indigenous Species
Colonialism
Bio-Piracy
Although the terms are used synonymously in some instances, biocolonialism is closely related to but distinct from biopiracy, a term which is used by Vandana Shiva to describe the legally-sanctioned (through national and international intellectual property rights laws and protections) theft of biological knowledge and genetic material for corporate profit (2-3). To elucidate, Shiva offers several examples of the patenting of indigenous peoples’ cell lines by western scientists and pharmaceutical companies. Clare Barker effectively elucidates the difference between biopiracy and biocolonialism: “[Shiva’s] preferred term for this harvesting of genetic riches, ‘biopiracy,’ underscores questions of ownership, theft, and potential criminality, while biocolonialism places more emphasis on continuities between contemporary science and western colonialism, and on politicized resistance movements” (143). If biocolonialism describes the wider systemic structures characteristic of the embeddedness of biomedicine and capitalism, then biopiracy is a key symptom of the system.[3]
Slavery
The historical record on the question of African plant introductions to the Americas is not so silent as we might suppose. A salient footnote of the plantation period is the number of European accounts that actually credit slaves with the introduction of specific foods to the Americas, all previously grown in Africa. These accounts were mostly written by planters and naturalists of different nationalities, working in colonies throughout the Caribbean and North and Latin America.
...Through such accounts, we can identify at least a dozen plants whose introductions to the New World are directly attributed to African slaves. For example, Willem Piso, a naturalist who worked in Dutch Brazil in the 1640s, made drawings of belingela, the African eggplant known at that time in English as guinea squash; he asserted that it was introduced by Angolan slaves, along with okra and sesame.1 Of the bonavist or lablab bean, Piso’s scientific collaborator Georg Marcgraf wrote, “This plant was brought from Africa to Brasil.” Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum who was in Jamaica from 1687 to 1689, wrote of a bean “brought from Africa” that he described as “almost round white Pease something resembling a kidney with a black Eye not so big as the smallest Field pea.” This “calavance” pea, so clearly strange and new to him, is the first certain description of the African cowpea in English America, which became known in the colonies as the black-eyed pea, after its distinctive appearance. In the Carolina colony, English naturalist Mark Catesby attributed to slaves the introduction of sorghum and millet.5 French botanist François Richard de Tussac (1751–1837), who worked in the colonies of Saint Domingue and Martinique, credited slaves with bringing the cytisus (pigeon) pea to the French Antilles. British historian John Oldmixon (1673–1742), echoing Oviedo’s account of yam introductions to Hispaniola two hundred years earlier, contended that yams “were brought thither [to Barbados] by the Negroes.” Luigi Castiglioni, an Italian botanist, wrote during his travels in the United States (1785–87) of a plant that “was brought by the negroes from the coasts of Africa and is called okra by them.” Naturalists Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius encountered okra in early nineteenth-century Brazil and wrote, “It seems to have been introduced by the negroes from Africa.” Thomas Jefferson claimed that sesame “was brought to S. Carolina from Africa by the negroes.”[4]
Industrial Agriculture
The greatest factor contributing to the loss of crop and livestock genetic diversity is the spread of industrial agriculture and the displacement of more diverse, traditional agricultural systems. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Revolution introduced high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat to the developing world, replacing thousands of farmers' traditional crop varieties and their wild relatives on a massive scale. The same process continues today. New, uniform plant varieties are replacing farmer's traditional varieties - and the traditional ones are becoming extinct.
In the United States, more than 7000 apple varieties were grown in the last century. Today, over 85 percent of those varieties - more than 6000 - are extinct. Just two apple varieties account for more than 50% of the entire US crop. In the Philippines, where small farmers once cultivated thousands of traditional rice varieties, just two Green Revolution varieties occupied 98% of the entire rice growing area in the mid-1980s.
Industrial agriculture requires genetic uniformity. Vast areas are typically planted to a single, high-yielding variety or a handful of genetically similar cultivars using capital intensive inputs like irrigation, fertilizer and pesticides to maximize production. A uniform crop is a breeding ground for disaster because it is more vulnerable to epidemics of pests and diseases.[5]
Livestock
The same is true with livestock genetic resources. The introduction of "modern" breeds that are selected solely for maximizing industrial production has displaced or diluted indigenous livestock breeds worldwide.
The commercial white turkey that is mass-produced on factory farms in Europe and North America has been bred for such a meaty breast that it is no longer able to breed on its own! This broad-breasted breed - which accounts for 99% of all turkeys in the United States today - would become extinct in one generation without human assistance in the form of artificial insemination.
The spread of industrial agriculture in the South places thousands of native breeds at risk. In India, just 3 decades after the introduction of so-called "modern" livestock breeds, an estimated 50% of indigenous goat breeds, 20% of indigenous cattle breeds, and 30% of indigenous sheep breeds are in danger of disappearing.[6]
Small-Farmer Led Food-Security
Ultimately, farming communities hold the key to conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity, and to food security for millions of the world's poor. They are the innovators best suited to develop new technologies and management to their diverse ecosystems. If international aid and development institutions dismiss peasant farmers, exclude structural reforms, and ignore the indigenous crops and livestock breeds that poor farmers depend upon for survival, then they fail to address actual hunger. At the Science ' Academies Summit held in India in July 1996, several African scientists expressed their frustration with foreign ideas for introducing high-tech agriculture in the South, noting that traditional African crops are ignored or undervalued in international agricultural research. "I don't want a Green Revolution," said Iba Kone of the African Academy of Sciences, "I want a Black Revolution. I want to return to our indigenous crops."
Similarly, the common approach of importing industrial animal breeds to boost productivity of livestock in the South is now being rethought, in recognition of the fact that native breeds are far more likely to be productive under low-input conditions. "In 80% of the world's rural areas the locally adapted genetic resources are superior to common modern breeds," concludes Keith Hammond, the U.N. Food and Agriculture's expert on animal genetics. For poor farmers, an animal's most essential quality is not its rate of growth or yield of milk, but its basic ability to survive and reproduce, which in turn ensures the family's self-reliance and survival.
In the long run, the conservation of plant and animal genetic diversity depends not so much on the small number of institutional breeders in the formal sector (governments, university and industry), but on the vast number of traditional farmers who select, improve and use plant and livestock diversity, especially in marginal farming environments. The challenge for the world community is to link conservation and development by enabling farm communities to assume a major role in managing and benefiting from the genetic resources on which their livelihoods depend.
Ultimately, we cannot save the world's biological diversity unless we also nurture the human diversity that protects and develops it. If we undervalue or ignore the traditional knowledge of farmers and rural people who use and manage biodiversity as the basis for their livelihoods, we lose our last, best hope for salvaging and developing the living resources upon which we all depend.[7]
Additional sources to expand upon
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-25637-5_10
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1246752
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1187512
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diets-around-the-world-are-becoming-more-similar/
Sources
- ↑ https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/921
- ↑ https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/921
- ↑ https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/09/09/biocolonialism/
- ↑ Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009; Page,122-124
- ↑ https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/921
- ↑ https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/921
- ↑ https://www.reimaginerpe.org/node/921