The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) may not sound snappy, but its long-term aim is easily expressed: to act as a vegetable ark.  Part of the treaty requires the developed world to fund the preservation of diverse species of food crop around the world.

The funding is provided by richer nations, which have often become variety poor, and given to other nations, which are often poorer but have a wide range of plants which could act as an ‘agricultural insurance’ by maintaining biodiversity in essential crops.

The crops being preserved in this way include potatoes in Peru, corn and beans in Cuba and oranges in Egypt. The varieties need to be preserved to ensure that the planet has a range of foods that are more likely to be able to adapt to challenges ranging from climate change to pollution, from salination to the loss of pollinators like insects to the ability to resist diseases and predators.

Up to 90% of vegetable variety has been lost

Four basic food staples: rice, wheat, corn and potatoes make up more than half the total foodstuffs eaten on the planet, and in this group of staple foods, less than 150 varieties are grown commercially. Wheat has just five major varieties now grown globally on a commercial scale, of the more than 700 recorded varieties, many of which have been lost and others of which are only grown by hobby farmers or in remote districts where the ‘big five’ will not thrive. China alone has lost nearly 90% of the wheat varieties that were grown across the country sixty years ago and India grows only 10% of the rice varieties that appeared in its fields a hundred years ago.

This is not just a loss of diversity – a limited range of varieties means that those grown are more liable to damage by pests or disease. It also leaves many countries open to price hikes in the recently globalised commodity markets, meaning that many people simply cannot afford to buy the staple foods that used to grow in the fields around their houses.

ITPGRFA set up the Svalbard seed-bank last year, and now that a repository for 1.1 million plant varieties exists, it is focusing on the very many crops that can’t have their variety maintained in a seed bank, such as tuberous crops like potatoes.

International treaties depend on funding and have no national accountability

For a long time this part of the ITPGRFA programme looked as if it would never get off the ground because for five years the parties who were funding the seed conservation initiative couldn’t agree how to finance the on-site part of the project nor on contracts that guarantee any commercial use of the diverse species will bring financial benefit to the nations that have been conserving them. And perhaps the best news of all, for those already involved in ITPGRFA, is that the USA may be willing to join the scheme after expressing no interest in it under the previous administration.

Corn varieties courtesy of alecim at flickr under a creative commons licence

Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

The platforms, called camellones, can be up to eight feet above the level of the fields they support, have two purposes: they protect seeds and crops from being washed away by floods and the water stored in the canals can be used when the river system is low, to irrigate the crops.

The camellone construction system is pre-Columbian dating back to around 1000BC to AD1400, which shows that communities, then, as now, faced the problem of flooding succeeded by drought. And this may have been one of the causes of collapse for those ancient cultures, because when workers were diverted from building and maintaining agricultural systems to joining armies, there may have been famines. In modern day Bolivia, serious floods in the past three years have caused more than £119 million of damage to agricultural systems. It’s hoped that with climate change driving more river flooding and more drought, reverting to old technology could help communities cope with water levels rising even as rains reduce.

Around 400 families have been supported by local and international charities to create camellones in five areas to grow corn, cassava and rice.  The first results look good, as the Amazonian floods have now receded, and where the nutrients in the soil would normally be washed back into the river, the platforms have remained above the floods and conserved the rich vegetative topsoil that can grow better crops than the sandy subsoil.

The downside of ancient systems

If you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, you could very well be right. This kind of preliminary report on an agricultural or technological ‘throw-back’ is often followed by a bleak silence. The reasons for this are often more political than environmental and include:

1) The cost of investment in building and maintaining such systems, which is subsided by charities for three or five years and then the charity funding moves on and nobody is motivated to carry on the work
2) The transfer of local power from hierarchical systems (which are often based on government or international aid and support) to individuals who may be low ranking, illiterate and unable to drive forward change outside their own behaviour
3) The failure to recognise that while subsistence farmers claim to want to be self-sufficient, such projects tend to recruit the young, healthy and confident: all it takes is illness in the family, a child to win a scholarship or a vehicle or house to need substantial repairs and that family is likely to move away from growing crops to eat back into growing cash crops that generate income to meet their needs.
4) Calls on local labour – if a road or resort is built nearby, all the available labour may be pulled from agriculture to work on the cash-generating project.

What such projects need is a longer term investment, along with social support to ensure that the community recognises that the new systems can deliver everything that cash crops or illegal forestry did.

Bolivan market courtesy of PJFurlong06 at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’.  Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.

Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve

Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers.  The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years.

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There are any number of reasons that we should worry about bees: not least that without them, some agronomists predict that the planet could only survive for four years, before the catastrophic failure of crop pollination led to a similarly catastrophic collapse of human civilisation. Forget tsunamis, changes in the Earth’s magnetic core, the arrival of aliens or the mutation of some native species to giant size—our biggest risk is that we lose those small, aerodynamically impossible, stripy creatures so famous for their eccentric flight, useful wax and delicious honey. It’s estimated that 35% of our crops, globally, require bees for pollination.

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Scientists studying the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a period about 55 million years ago when global carbon dioxide levels spiked rapidly, found that plant fossils from that time show noticeably more insect damage than plants from before or after the PETM. They found no evidence that the plants themselves had become more appetizing to insects, or that insect species themselves changed. Rather, it appears that the PETM simply was a time when insects became more voracious and destructive.

Part of the reason might be that plants grown in high-carbon dioxide conditions are less nutritious than they otherwise would be. Some scientists have speculated that might have been the reason dinosaurs grew so large: to be able to take in large enough volumes of plant material to sustain them.

The high-temperature PETM lasted about 100,000 years.

“Our study convincingly shows that there is a link between temperature and insect feeding on leaves,” said Ellen Currano, the study’s lead author and a researcher with Pennsylvania State University and the Smithsonian Institution. “When temperature increases, the diversity of insect feeding damage on plant species also increases.”

Today’s tropics already illustrate that phenomenon, as insects there eat more plants than do their temperate-zone counterparts. Insects are also among the warm-weather species now expanding their ranges as average temperatures around the globe rise.

The researchers’ findings suggest that insects could wreak greater damage to crops and forests around the planet as the climate continues to change.