The article shows a number of examples: Lake Erie in the United States, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers of India, the Whanganui River in New Zealand, all rivers in Bangladesh, the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, and nature in general in Ecuador and Bolivia.
To my mind, it makes sense to protect nature in this way - though I do agree with the article that legislation that protects nature is sometimes too vague or too flexible to be unambiguously useful, as I know from my own research into Bolivia's Madre Tierra ('Mother Earth') law.
What role does agrobiodiversity have to play in these laws? Do crop wild relatives count as 'nature'? What about traditional varieties, only grown in certain places - often surrounded by a wider biodiversity? What about genetically modified crops: have they crossed the Rubicon into un-naturalness? And what about highly integrated farming systems, such as the 'dehesa' that grow Iberian pigs? In short, what does 'nature' mean? And what role does agriculture have to play within it?
You can make the argument that anything a human modifies isn't nature anymore - though by this definition the only natural places we have left are at the very bottom of the sea in places that plastic waste does not gather.
I find it more useful to go back to the examples the article gives us. Many of the specific places that are protected under these pieces of legislation have been cradles of civilization for thousands of years: the Iroquois on Lake Erie, the Hindu on the Ganges, and the Maori of the Whanganui. No one can make the argument that humans have not changed them over time, and no one disputes their status as 'nature.'
Further, the bodies of water that have been protected have been protected for their use to humanity, either culturally or for the safety of drinking water. Agrobiodiversity serves similar cultural goods, either in preserving polycultural practices or niche crop varieties, and it serves food security in a changing climate.
Are these laws a way to protect agrobiodiversity? At the moment, I would hazard a guess that they are not, but it serves as a compelling precedent.
For more information, Vox made a good video that goes into detail on the Lake Erie legislation:
Some things in life are sacred. The silence of a church, the smile of a child, and tomatoes. However, sacred things are often treated with less respect than we might like: a tour group comes into the church and makes loud comments about the iconography, the ice cream truck leaves just as a girl gets money for a popsicle, and people contentedly buy dry, pasty, mass-produced tomatoes.
There's nothing quite like the disappointment of buying a tomato, cutting it in half, and finding the insides to be white, mealy, and dry, massive air pockets squatting inside the fruit. Ten months out of the year I am aghast to find tomatoes like this for sale - Garrison Keillor said these sorts of tomatoes are "strip-mined in Texas," and I can't help but think of this as I dump them into sauces and slide slices into grilled cheese sandwiches. I try to overwhelm their flavor with red pepper flakes, strong cheese, and emotional numbness.
This is a lot of fuss for tomatoes, and I get it if you don't get it.
The problem is that most people think they dislike tomatoes, and this is because they haven't had a real tomato.
Notice the telling gray tinge.
A real tomato is never white; a real tomato is a delicate thing because it is so juicy and its skin so thin. Real tomatoes come in pink, red, orange, yellow, purple, brown, and green. Real tomatoes glow, and you know when to pick them off the plant by the weight in your hand.
If a groundhog eats your tomatoes - and not only that, but eats your Paul Robesons - you decide it's about time to learn how to shoot a gun.
Heirloom tomatoes have served as the seed for my interest in agrobiodiversity; certainly, they're probably more nutritious than normal tomatoes, and they're keeping genetic material alive, but really, all I want is a tomato. A real tomato, one that wasn't strip-mined anywhere. One that tastes like late afternoon sun in August, one that tastes like standing in Jane's garden - the place where I fell in love with gardening - listening to Jane tell us about the Patriarchy; I want a tomato that tastes like eating in warm evenings under soft light, listening to crickets. I want tomatoes with flavor that is sweet and round and full, citrusy or with cherry notes.
Last Saturday I went to the Galway market, straight to the stall I'd found last September. They sell Real Tomatoes. And it is bliss.
If you don't believe me, I challenge you to a tomato tasting: cut up a variety of tomatoes, sprinkle on a tiny amount of salt, and eat them fresh. No oil. No cooking. You'll never look at a supermarket tomato the same way again.
This, naturally, is a bad movie. But also a good one. If you still hate tomatoes, watch this.
Measuring the diversity of a food supply gets tricky fast.
Do we measure the diversity of the farms products come from? How is that done? There are ways of measuring land cover with satellites, but that doesn't say a huge amount about the species or varieties on a farm. So that means doing surveys of farms. Then you have to wonder if the farmers call the same varieties by the same names, and if what's in the field is what they grow year-round - some fields have crop rotations within the same year, and cover crops in the off season. Is the farming style of the region changing? Are there notable extension efforts in the area that are promoting polyculture or monoculture?
If you want to know about the diversity in a diet, that can get thornier still. A lot of measures of dietary diversity rely on 24-hour recalls, in which a person lists everything they ate the day before. There are a few problems with this: they may forget something they ate (having done this myself, it is very easy to 'blank' on a food), there's no easy way to show the amounts of what they ate, and the day that they describe may not be a typical day. These foods are often clumped into different 'functional groups,' which can change depending on who the survey is of and who it's for; but there are often groups of vitamin A-rich food, protein, carbohydrates, leafy vegetables, et cetera. If you want to talk about varieties in a diet, you have to rely on the consumer knowing what the varieties are called, which will often restrict you to farming families or to hunting down labels on packets.
On top of all of this, are they telling you what you want to hear, or what actually happens? Are they fudging the truth to maintain their dignity? (Imagine that a foreigner comes to your home and asks if you eat insects: if you live in a culture where eating bugs is a low-caste thing to do, you may not want to tell an outsider the truth.)
There is an astonishing amount of variation of measurements that are taken; one of the main gripes of meta-analyses is that studies are incredibly difficult to compare, making it really hard to make overall statements about agrobiodiversity and diet diversity.
Considering that this is what the next phase of my thesis is about, I'm in deep water. However, there are a number of examples that have been done successfully which look at agrobiodiversity, diet diversity, and system sustainability. For example, there's the Agrobiodiversity Index, which measures 'commitment,' 'action,' and 'status:' the political will, what is being done, and the current level of agrobiodiversity. These three categories are examined through the lenses of policy, species and varietal diversity, pollinator and soil biodiversity, landscape matrices, seed access, and others. Nutrition is included in the Index through functional diversity, both when it is mentioned in policy documents and in terms of "functional group richness of consumed foods," the number of functional groups the study participants are eating. It's not clear from the Methodology Report exactly how many functional groups there are, or if this varies between countries.
The Agrobiodiversity Index has been a massive undertaking which has spanned years of work; if you would like to see the results of the Index, it has analyzed ten countries worldwide for their levels of agrobiodiversity: Australia, China, Ethiopia, India, Italy, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa, and the USA. Feel free to pick a couple of countries or to skim the whole thing; it's a fascinating read.
Of course, if you also want to measure other kinds of sustainability (water, greenhouse gas emissions,...), that can involve a whole other set of measures, picking and choosing what you need to know in order to be able to draw the type of conclusions you need. It's easy to see how different measures of similar things can become so different so fast, and it's easy to see why people would complain about how difficult it is to compare these approaches. I'm starting to see this kind of diversity as a necessary evil in order to adequately measure agrobiodiversity in each context.
The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) held a conference in Lima this past week. The title was: 'In Defense of the Commons: Challenges, Innovation, And Action.' They had a program with sessions Monday-Wednesday, field trips on Thursday, and a final day of sessions on Friday. The conference was held in the Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, which has one of the nicest campuses I've seen:
The main sessions I attended were on Friday and were organized by Bioversity International, and focused on PACS, Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services.
Some of the audience at the conference; the men in the foreground of the picture are from Cusco, Peru. Every region of Peru - and particularly the Andes - has a different mode of dress; on top of this, in many places locals can tell which town people are from by their hats. (So don't assume everyone's traditional dress looks the same - there is as much cultural diversity as biodiversity in Peru. Also, these aren't their normal street clothes.)
PACS work with local communities to conserve threatened varieties, first by determining what the local varieties are, how much land is planted with these varieties (and by whom), and which varieties should be conserved. Locals have a say in each step of the process and there is competition to find out which communities will participate, building excitement and emotional investment in the scheme. Next, seed is collected; from what I have heard, this can be one of the hardest steps in the process, because there may only be a tiny amount of seed available in any one place. When enough seed is collected, farmers grow the crops; at harvest, a portion of the seed goes to a genebank and the rest the farmers can keep for themselves. In addition, the farmers receive payment of goods; the payment can be shared by the whole community or be parsed out to individual families, and it can be anything from mattresses to processing equipment to building materials: the participants of the program choose what they would like to receive.
In the morning on Friday we heard presentations from a number of speakers, showing how PACS had worked for them. There were examples from a number of places: quinoa in Puno in southern Peru, amaranth in Cusco, Peru, corn in Ecuador, corn in Guatemala, and potatoes in Apurimac in the southern Andes of Peru. In all these cases but one, representatives of the farming communities involved spoke about their experiences, either about the new passion they felt for conservation or the affirmation of their prior convictions. The farmer from Puno came with four samples of quinoa and spoke about how radically her life had changed for the better by conserving these varieties.
I have less blurry pictures, but this guy reminded me of Indiana Jones (it's not just the hat). He's a potato farmer and keen conservationist, key to the program in Apurimac.
After lunch, we broke into working groups of different categories, looking to build upon the experiences of PACS and to make them better. These groups focused on an array of topics: monitoring, conservation (including with traditional knowledge), development of value chains, access to seeds and seed banks, financing and regulation, and finally, public procurement programs.
I ended up leading that last group, considering that I was the one with the most current knowledge base of the four of us who were participating. However, one of the members was part of the administration of Qali Warma in Cusco, so no one in the group was green to the issue.
Public procurement may not at first blush seem like a logical transition from biodiversity conservation, but considering that bringing native varieties securely out of danger requires having enough land devoted to its cultivation and a market for its sale, public procurement makes sense. If a government prioritizes biodiversity, it provides a ready-made market for these varieties and products made with these varieties.
Our group spoke a lot about the twin routes for change in the system: producers need to be empowered and organized, linked with financing but also with small businesses that can make products of high quality that could be sold to the government for its programs. In return, the government must make sure that the door is open to these producers and these businesses.
Nasturtiums.
Of course, this is much easier said than done. Given the sheer number of receipts that the program has to manage, sourcing from places that would provide smaller quantities would bog down the bureaucracy, and sanitation requirements would incur costs of money and time for farmers. However, it was the consensus of the group that these changes are valuable and worth the trouble.
Bettering school nutrition has obvious benefits that no one can deny; however, if someone were to play devil's advocate, they might just ask whether diversifying the food and local sourcing for school meals really does that much good.
I can answer that in a couple of ways: one, feeding children a diverse diet teaches them in a way that whiteboards and lectures never could, and two, that enhancing local markets does a better job of improving dietary diversity than having a lot of species grown on any one farm.
Shibhatu & Qaim (2018) and Jones (2017) both came to similar conclusions. Jones conducted a review of 21 studies and found that in 19 of them there was only a slight positive association between on-farm diversity and dietary diversity. Shibhatu & Qaim examined dietary diversity and on-farm species diversity of 1,482 households in Indonesia, Kenya, and Uganda and found that market access was a better determinant of dietary diversity than diversity on the farm.
This is because what is grown on the farm isn't necessarily what is eaten, which makes sense, even though it's not the first conclusion we might jump to. But when you think about it, you can think up any number of plausible scenarios where this happens: think of cocoa farmers in west Africa who have never had chocolate. They grow chocolate not for their own consumption but to make money for their families, and the amount of money they make depends on their access to markets.
The challenge for agrobiodiverse ecosystems is that having an incredibly diverse farm can be economically disadvantageous, as it can foster subsistence livelihoods, lower income, and lower diet quality, running against one of the main goals of agrobiodiversity: food security (Shibhatu & Qaim 2018). The key, then, is to support diverse farms by giving them a market for their production that enables them to buy food that helps them eat well.
If someone's still playing devil's advocate they could say - the point of school meals is to feed children nutritious meals, not to save whole communities of vulnerable farmers, so why not just fortify food?
I'll return to my first point. If you feed children fortified foods (like the biscuits that are given to Afghan children), you're not teaching them what they will need to know later in life when they no longer are participating in a school meal program. If you show a child that the school approves white rice, cookies, and sugary drinks, they aren't learning habits that will benefit them for their rest of their lives, and you can't guarantee that they will buy fortified foods in the future. (For that matter, one of the things I learned when I was in Capilla was that the children don't like the texture of fortified rice.)
On top of this, if you buy local food for school meals - if it has the full and proud support of the school and the planners of the program - you are also sending a powerful message to the children that the food produced by the community has real value, and that there could be possibilities for them if they stay in that community.
