Indian fruit genebank threatened

Jeremy at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog reports that the government of Jharkand State in India plans to bulldoze the field genebanks of the Horticulture and Agro Forestry Research Programme in order to build housing for Members of Parliament and Members of the Legislative Assembly.  At risk are

5253 plants of different varieties of mango and litchi, 6,500 trees more than 30 years old, eight greenhouse nurseries, each with 4000-5000 plants of guava and jackfruit and a gene bank developed over 20 years to have a germplasm base of 239 varieties of mango and litchi.

[See my full post]

Serendipity and the origin of crops

In Puerto Rican dry forest, one of the most striking dichotomies is between forests dominated by native species and forests dominated by exotic Leucaena leucocephala. Most forests that have regrown on abandoned agricultural land are dominated by Leucaena. The colonisation of these areas by native tree species is slow – either the native species are poor colonisers, or Leucaena resists invasion. Its importance on the landscape and apparent stability made me fascinated with the species.

One of the things which struck me early on was the fact that many published sources listed Leucaena as a native species in Puerto Rico. To me, its behaviour shouted “exotic”, but when I spoke to Alain Liogier at the University of Puerto Rico herbarium (author of the Flora of Puerto Rico) he said that it was probably introduced, but there were no records to say anything conclusive, one way or the other. So I was very happy when I came across Colin Hughes‘ Monograph of Leucaena. Based on the diversity of hyperparasitoids Hughes concluded that Leucaena leucocephala was native to Central Mexico. He concluded that the abundant populations in the Yucatan (which often formed pure stands in disturbed areas) were, in fact, introduced. And that was the last I had heard on the subject for almost a decade.

When a post entitled “How domestication happens” popped up on my RSS reader, I was curious. The post was minimal, and I almost didn’t click through to the link. When I did so I was rewarded with a post entitled “Biodiversity, trash heaps and the evolutionary origin of crops” and a picture I recognised instantly as Leucaena leucocephala. The post described a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences entitled: “Serendipitous backyard hybridization and the origin of crops“.

According to Hughes and coauthors, Leucaena leucocephala is one of several domestic species in central Mexico which are believed to have originated through the hybridisation of related species that were brought together in backyard dumps.

Seeds of 13 species of Leucaena are used for food across S-C Mexico…. Food use is widespread and intensive in Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero, and Morelos and more sporadic further north, but unknown further south despite the availability of native species of Leucaena. Present-day food use varies from gathering of pods from local free-living populations for home consumption to intensive harvesting of commercial quantities from cultivated trees and transportation of seeds to regional markets…. This spectrum of increasing human intervention involves transitions from wild to managed to cultivated, from home consumption to local to wider regional marketing, and from very local to regional to much wider translocation of species.

[This whole thing forced me to reevaluate Leucaena. While I have always thought of it as "useful" for revegetation and perhaps for animal fodder or green manure, the idea of growing it as a food crop for its pods is alien to me. Even the green pods don't strike me as "food".]

In Mexico, there is a continuum of use, from Leucaena cuspidata, which is collected from wild populations and used locally, through L. confertiflora and L. collinsii, which are more widely cultivated and tranlocated, to L. eculenta, L. pallida and L. leucocephala which are intensively cultivated. The pods of these latter species are commercial crops which are distributed to markets several hundred kilometres away.

Five of the 13 species are polyploids, and the authors concluded that they are likely to be allopolyploids (polyploids which originated through the bybridisation of two species) whose origins can be traced to backyard gardens and dumps. The underlying idea is that human activity can bring together species which would not normally encounter one-another in the wild. In the case of Leucaena leucocephala and L. pallida the hybrid origin theory is strengthened by the lack of wild populations of the species.

They go on to point out that this hypothesis is not only plausible for Leucaena, but also for the other two major perennial crops in south-central Mexico, Agave and Opuntia, which show similar trends, but are less thoroughly studied than Leucaena species.

1. Hughes, Colin E. (1998). Monograph of Leucaena (Leguminosae-Mimosoideae), Systematic Botany Monographs 55:1-244
2. Hughes, C.E., Govindarajulu, R., Robertson, A., Filer, D.L., Harris, S., Bailey, C.D. (2007). Serendipitous backyard hybridization and the origin of crops. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA , 104(36), 14389-14394 .

Can organic agriculture feed the world?

I have always loved the idea of organic agriculture but I have struggled with one big question: can we afford the decline in production? Of course, as long as we are feeding huge amounts of grain to cattle, the option to divert that grain to feeding people always exists. Reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma I began to wonder if it wasn’t possible to sustain production on organic or “post-organic” production systems. So I was thrilled to come across this report suggesting that organic agriculture could feed the world.

Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming on the same amount of land—according to new findings which refute the long-standing assumption that organic farming methods cannot produce enough food to feed the global population.

Now I have to go and track down the original article.

H/T Meteor Blades at dKos.

Update: The original article was published in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems. There’s a more detailed review at New Scientist and a two-part story(part 1, part 2) at OrganicAuthority.com.

Biofuels

A recent post by Joe Brewer at Celsas is called The Coming Biofuels Disaster.  In it, he points out that a recent push towards biofuels is likely to make matters worse.

There are two reasons to push for biofuels (or three, if you’re a cynic).  One is carbon – since biofuels are made from recent photosynthesis, the carbon released is equal to the carbon fixed.  Thus, they can be seen as a carbon neutral fuel.  The other side is energy independence – since the main feedstock, corn, is produced in the US, any fuel produced by corn is fuel the US doesn’t have to import.  (The third reason could be profit, in the form of subsidies for Cargill and ADM).

Brewer argues that the “carbon neutral” issue is false.  The “costs” associated with corn production (in terms of fossil fuel for fertiliser, cultivation, transport, etc.) are so high that it takes more energy to make corn than we can get out of it.   In addition there are unaccounted-for subsidies in the form of damage to land and soil as a result of industrial agriculture.

Large-scale agricultural practices deplete soils, contaminate water supplies, and are vulnerable to pests and disease when single crops (monocultures) are grown in large fields. The widespread use of pesticides – manufactured using fossil fuels – is also contributing to the cancer epidemic wreaking havoc on our communities. Current agricultural practices also require non-renewable resources and utilize vast distribution networks that are very high in resource demand – including the need for lots of energy.

The demands for fertiliser isn’t going to change – that’s the key behind the yields of corn fields.  The cultivation systems depletes and pollutes both ground and surface water.  The cropping system degrades the soil.  Yep, we know that.  So how does diverting corn to biofuels change anything?  The system is already geared to keep increasing corn production, while farmers go bankrupt growing corn.  What difference does it really make whether it is being fed to cattle or cars?

The tone of the article doesn’t engender confidence – it seems terribly alarmist.  But tone is meaningless – what are the facts?  Dismissing something as “hysterical” is far too often a tool of the anti-science bunch.  I have no intention of judging content based on tone.  That said, it takes some effort not to do so.  It gets worse when it becomes an anti-GMO rant:

We shouldn’t call genetically engineered plants biofuels. They are frankenfuels. By tampering with plant DNA, we run the risk of getting further out of balance, possibly introducing new and unexpected harms like invasive species that take over croplands and natural ecosystems.

Sadly, the article goes downhill from there.  Brewer writes:

Addressing the climate crisis requires us to do a lot more than change from fossil fuels to plant-based fuels. Global warming is a problem because the way we live is out of sync with nature. The solution is to rethink how we relate to our natural environment. This is where livability is paramount. We need to be thinking about family farms, not factory farms. In the family farm frame, people are interacting with the earth to produce food. The factory farm frame has people interacting with the earth to produce money.

Sure, but who is going to challenge the powers that be?  Who is going to change the system?  And if your main challenge is to change the system stop feeding corn to cattle.  CAFOs are far bigger problems than debating biofuels.  CAFOs turn a resource (manure) into toxic waste.  Stop feeding corn to cattle and we suddenly have a surplus of corn.  In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan says that sixty percent of corn is fed to livestock.  Get rid of the CAFO and the price of meat goes up.  The price of meat goes up and people eat less of it.  So you would probably make a dint in the obesity epidemic.  I’m not saying that Enforced vegetarianism is a viable solution, just that it’s probably easier to achieve than a return to the family farm.

There’s a subtext in the article that says that global warming isn’t the problem, it’s living out of balance with nature.  Sure, but so is everything since the Neolithic Revolution.  Climate change is the problem.  And reverting to the family farm seems almost impossible.

There’s one more point in the article that bothers me.  Brewer makes the point that we should not be taking food out of the mouths of the poor to fuel our cars.  But a return to sustainable farming takes the food out of production, and thus, deprives the poor of the food just as effectively.

Dispersal, vicariance and press releases

Ceiba pentandra (the silkcotton, kapok or ceiba tree) has a broad distribution including across the Neotropics and Africa. A cultivated form is grown across a wider range for kapok fibres. The trans-Atlantic distribution of C. pentandra has attracted attention for a long time – based on the fact that there are nine species in the Neotropics and only one in Africa, it has generally been assumed that it is a Neotropical species that dispersed to Africa. How it got there has long been a question.

EurekaAlert! published a press release attributed to the National Science Foundation about a paper published in Molecular Ecology concerning the trans-Altantic distribution of Ceiba pentandra, the silk cotton or kapok tree. The paper* considers three mechanisms by which the species could have come to be present on both sides of the Atlantic: Gondwana vicariance, Boreotropical dispersal (and subsequent vicariance) and long-distance dispersal.

In the case on Gondwana vicariance, the distribution would reflect the fact that South America and Africa were connected (as parts of Gondwana) until 96 million years ago.  In the case of Boreotropical dispersal, the species would have colonised Africa about 35 million years ago through a then warmer North America and Europe, only to be lost from those areas as the climate warmed.  Both of these would be expected to produce deep divergence between African and South American C. pentandra populations.  On the other hand, if long-distance dispersal across the Atlantic took place more recently, the divergence would be smaller.

The paper found evidence for recent dispersal.  The authors noted that:

Ceiba pentandra has the weakest phylogeographical structure yet reported for a widespread rainforest tree species. Apart from the cluster of sites in Western Ecuador having a variant psbB-psbF haplotype, there was no cpDNA variation across Mesoamerica, the Amazon basin, and West Africa. In fact, this study found less cpDNA variation across three continents than some rainforest tree species exhibit within putative breeding populations in French Guiana and Brazil (Hamilton 1999b; Dutech et al. 2000; Latouche-Halle et al. 2003) or among sample sites at regional scales in French Guiana and across Mesoamerica (Caron et al. 2000; Cavers et al. 2003).

In this regard, C. pentandra is by no means unique – several other species have been found that have recently crossed the Atlantic, including Symphonia globulifera, which apparently colonised the Americas from Africa.

One thing that bothers me is the press release.  It opens with

Celebrated in Buddhist temples and cultivated for its wood and cottony fibers, the kapok tree now is upsetting an idea that biologists have clung to for decades: the notion that African and South American rainforests are similar because the continents were connected 96 million years ago.

It’s obvious that whoever wrote the press release didn’t spend much time looking at the paper.  While the issue of Gondwanan roots is considered, it’s by no means a new idea.  At the same time, it’s a fairly limited suite of trees that are shared between the two areas, and evidence of recent trans-Atlantic dispersal by a few species does not “[upset] an idea that biologists have clung to for decades”.  That’s nonsense.

* Christopher W. Dick, Eldredge Bermingham, Maristerra R. Lemes and Rogerio Gribel. Extreme long-distance dispersal of the lowland tropical rainforest tree Ceiba pentandra L. (Malvaceae) in Africa and the Neotropics. Molecular Ecology (OnlineEarly Articles). doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2007.03341.x

H/T Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog.

Fuel and economics

Trust me, I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Biofuels are a really hot topic these days, especially since the Bush administration has set a goal of 35 billion gallons of “renewable an alternative fuel” by 2017. On the surface of it, renewable fuels seem like a perfect solution to the joint problems of fuel security, declining petroleum production and global warming. Since these fuels are not coming from the politically unstable Middle East, the risk of a disruption of supply is reduced. Since the production of biofuels comes from this year’s photosynthesis, it should be carbon-neutral. Sounds like a true win-win situation.

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. One of the major sources of alternative fuels is corn ethanol. It takes huge amounts of fossil fuels to grow corn in the American Corn Belt in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and machinery. It also takes energy to transport, process and ferment the corn. The net energy gain is low.

Corn is also heavily subsidised. According to Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, to the tune of about $15 billion a year. And the subsidies end up in the bottom line of the big corporations (ADM, Cargill) rather than the farmers (who are going broke growing corn). Of course, demand for corn ethanol pushes up the price of corn, which should (according to the pricing model outlined by Pollan) reduce subsidy payments (again, the farmer doesn’t benefit, but hopefully the taxpayer will).

But corn isn’t only an agricultural commodity, it’s also food. Higher corn prices translate into higher food prices. In some cases (in the food industry) they may be able to switch from one highly processed corn derivative to another. In other cases though (like the cattle-chickens-pigs feedlot industry) the entire model is built around cheap (subsidised) corn.

But this is where I get confused. Craig Mackintosh at Celsias blog reports on Lester Brown‘s senate testimony (transcript here). Brown points out that the US accounts for a 40% of the world’s grain harvest and 70% of corn imports:

The U.S. corn crop, accounting for 40 percent of the global harvest and supplying nearly 70 percent of the world’s corn imports, looms large in the world food economy. Annual U.S. corn exports of some 55 million tons account for nearly one fourth of world grain exports. The corn harvest of Iowa alone exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada. Substantially reducing this export flow would send shock waves throughout the world economy.

In addition, world grain stocks are at an all-time low, and this is likely to push up food prices worldwide:

In six of the last seven years, total world grain production has fallen short of use. As a result, world carryover stocks of grain have been drawn down to 57 days of consumption, the lowest level in 34 years. (See data.) The last time they were this low wheat and rice prices doubled.

Brown reports that demand for corn by ethanol distilleries is driving up the price of food worldwide.

The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide. Investment in fuel ethanol distilleries has soared since gasoline prices jumped at the end of 2005. Once completed, distilleries now under construction could double U.S. ethanol output, turning nearly 30 percent of next year’s U.S. grain harvest into fuel for automobiles. This unprecedented diversion of the world’s leading grain crop to the production of fuel will affect food prices everywhere, risking political instability.

This all sounds terribly disturbing. Brown has a graph that show corn demand for ethanol production spiking up over corn exports. So here’s the problem. The same data show that between 1980 and 2007 corn exports have oscillated around the same mean (30-60 million tonnes per year) while production has gone from 169 million tonnes in 1980 to 316 million tonnes in 2007. Granted, world grain supplies are at their lowest in that entire time sequence, and there have been production shortfalls in seven of the last eight years. What doesn’t quite add up though is the fact that 60% of corn (according to Pollan, I really should check his numbers) is fed to animals. When it comes down to it, meat is a luxury item, albeit one that American consumers have come to regard as a staple.

All of this is pretty up in the air without real numbers. A story in the Christian Science Monitor reports that corn prices hit $4 a bushel earlier in the year – so that would be more than double the $1.45 that Pollan reports in his 2006 book. Unfortunately, for the “blame the price on ethanol” argument, in most things corn only accounts for a few cents of the price.

Facing higher costs at the farm and shareholder pressure to maintain profits, companies such as Tyson Chicken and Coca-Cola are raising prices. The fact that fuel prices remain relatively high hasn’t helped either, allowing no break in the cost of transporting perishable goods.

Using the WalMart model, everyone has kept prices low (and profits high) by squeezing the supplier. Will higher prices cause people to cut down on their consumption of grain-fed beef? That would be nice, but unlikely.

Of course, there’s another wrinkle to all of this. Brown points out, quite rightly, that rising grain prices are affecting food prices in poor countries.

The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world’s 2 billion poorest people. The risk is that millions of those on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder will start falling off as rising food prices drop their consumption below the survival level.

Unfortunately, low grain prices (subsidised by US and EU taxpayers) aren’t a universally good thing. Cheap imported corn makes it impossible for local farmers to compete. This drives them off the land into the cities (or, in the case of Mexico, into the US), where they switch from being food producers to hungry people dependent on corn imports. While this may take pressure of tropical forests, it probably isn’t an effective conservation strategy. There is no easy solution, but at some point the imbalances of almost 40 years of bad policy are going to shake themselves out. Granted, it’s upsetting when the winners remain the same no matter what (ADM, Cargill). But saying that fuel ethanol hurts poor people misses a major point. The problem is subsidised corn and grain-fed beef.

Omnivore’s Dilemma

The fast food industry wants to make you fat. Um, yeah, like that’s news to anyone. And after Morgan Spurlock‘s Super Size Me, we know that they want to kill us as well. But why? Sure, it’s good for any individual company to get us to eat more, and the way to suck us in is through overly large portions rich in salt, fat and sugar. But why?

I’m reading Michael Pollan‘s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I think I am beginning to grasp an idea of why. The current production system rewards farmers who produce more corn, which depresses prices, which forces other farmers to grow more corn to maintain their current incomes, which reduces prices, which forces farmers to grow more corn… End result is an overproduction of corn – increasing from 4 billion bushels* in the 1970s to 10 billion* when Pollan wrote the book. For normal consumer good, higher prices drive down demand, lower prices drive it up. That isn’t generally true for food. When food prices are high, you still need food. When food prices are low, there’s a limit to how much food you can eat. Population growth in the US is around 1%*, which really isn’t an acceptable rate of growth for the food industry. There are two ways to raise income – increase food production, or convince people to pay more for their food.

It’s easy enough to see how companies convince people to pay more for food. People pay more for convenience, they pay more for organic, they pay more for all sorts of “premium” products. Sure, it’s a bit of a scam, but no more than most consumer goods. The other option, to get people to eat more, is far more disturbing. It has obviously worked – people are getting heavier and eating more. But the question of responsibility is more important. Can we really say that the food industry set out to get people to eat more as a tool for their economic growth? That I don’t know, that I can’t say. But the idea has its appeal.

*The numbers are from Pollan’s book – I haven’t verified them, but I don’t have any compelling reason to doubt him.