Tag Archive for: Biodiversity

Agroforestry Offers Climate and Sustainability Benefits

/by

Published: November 28, 2016

Agroforestry has a key role to play in helping the world adopt sustainable agriculture and contrast climate change, according to a high-level conference hosted by FAO today.

“An efficient land-use approach where trees can be managed together with crops and animal production systems” is an essential component of the “new paradigm shift for sustainable agriculture,” said Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in a conference-opening statement delivered by Deputy Director-General Helena Semedo.

Agroforestry, an approach between forest and open-field farming, simultaneously provides an array of social, economic and environmental benefits ranging from nutritious food and renewable energy to clean water and enhanced biodiversity.
“We need better coordination of farm and non-farm natural resource management,” Graziano da Silva said.

Agroforestry’s mixed land-use approach makes it a tailor-made example of how the agricultural sector can contribute to the global effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

KEEP READING ON FAO

OCA’s Regeneration International and Mexico Teams Headed to COP13

/by

On December 5,  Regeneration International (RI) and La Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos (ACO), both projects of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), will join governments, other NGOs, indigenous communities, academia and citizens from around the world in Cancun, Mexico, for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), including the 13th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 13).

Two other important meetings— the Nagoya Protocol and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety— will be held in conjunction with the COP13. The resolutions made at these three meetings will affect global food and farming for generations to come.

To coincide with the COP13 meetings, the RI and ACO teams, along with eight local and international groups, have formed a coalition to defend biological and cultural diversity. The coalition, called the #CaravanaCBD, is bringing together social, cultural and indigenous groups to create a community-driven vision for biodiversity that reflects the richness of biocultural knowledge and traditional growing  practices that stem from the eight centers of origin of plants and agriculture, as defined by the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity.

As part of its mission, #CaravanaCBD is participating in the Biocultural Diversity Fair (Feria de la Diversidad BioCultural), which is currently under way until December 11, in Mexico City (events will be in Spanish). Communities from across Mexico and other centers of origin around the world are gathering to discuss what cultural biodiversity means to them and how to defend and preserve it. The outcomes of the discussions will be presented during a press conference on December 1, 2016, and the results will be presented at the COP13 in Cancun.

If you’re in Mexico City, join RI, ACO and #CaravanaCBD for music, dancing, movie screenings and dynamic conversations with indigenous communities from across Latin America.

Three reasons we’re participating in the COP13 Biodiversity Conference

La Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos (ACO), Regeneration International (RI) and Vía Orgánica (VO), all projects of the The Organic Consumers Association (OCA),  will attend COP13 to:

  1. Counter the global push towards privatization of biological resources and the push for industrial food systems, which are responsible for widespread biodiversity loss through the use of chemicals, pesticides, GMOs and monocultures;
  2. Promote and defend the rights of indigenous and farmer communities, who have defended biological and cultural diversity on their land for centuries;
  3. Promote regenerative agriculture and land use as essential strategies to restore agrobiodiversity and cultural biodiversity, as well as to cool the planet, feed the world, and provide long-term productivity and resilience for communities around the world.

Here are the events we’ve organized:

Regenerative Agriculture to Combat Climate Change and Restore Biodiversity: Experiences of Latin American Women
Organizers: Regeneration International, Vía Orgánica
Date/time: 5-Dec-2016, 18.15
Location: Contact Group 7, Universal Building, main floor
Language: Spanish (English translation available)

Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Agriculture: Pesticides and Its Impacts on Bees as a Key Discussion
Organizers: Greenpeace, La Asociación de Consumidores Orgánicos
Date/time: 14-Dec-2016, 13:15
Location: IGOs Group Meeting Room, Sunrise Building, Second Floor
Language: English (Spanish translation available)

Adventure Tourism and Ecotourism in Mexico: Encouraging Conversation or Exacerbating Resource Exploitation?
Organizers: Vía Orgánica
Date/time: 15-Dec-2016, 13:15
Location: Contact Group 6 Meeting Room, Universal Building, main floor
Language: Spanish (English translation available)

***

Alexandra Groome is campaign and events coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

Ercilia Sahores is Latin America political director for the Organic Consumers Association. 

Milpa: Linking Health, Nutrition and Agrobiodiversity

/by

Author: Meritxell Solé | Published: October 14, 2016

Through the years, different cultures have observed the diversity and dispersal patterns found in natural ecosystems. This learning process has allowed the development of several agrobiodiverse farming systems around the world that imitate nature’s rich biodiversity.

One of them is the Milpa, an ancient intercropping system used throughout Mesoamerica. In this complex agroecosystem corn, beans and squash are grown in polyculture with chiles, quelites (different plants commonly eaten in Mexico for their leaves), amaranth, medicinal plants, insects, flowers and a huge variety of flora and fauna, creating a perfect balance for both the soil and for human’s diet.

From an agrobiological perspective, milpa facilitates interaction between plants, insects, soil microorganisms and animals. As opposed to a monoculture system, the rich biodiversity fostered in the milpa produces a highly resilient system, maintains land cover, reduces soil erosion and enhances soil fertility, protecting farmers from complete crop failure in years of drought and disease. From a nutritional point of view, milpa crops – including fruits, vegetables, grains and legumes in all shapes and colors – provide us with a variety of nutrients that our body needs to maintain optimum health.

However, this ancient biodiverse farming system of producing food in a respectful, colorful and intelligent manner in México is being lost. Industrialization of agriculture and economic interests of big corporations are forcing campesinos to abandon the countryside and move to cities, as they no longer can work the land as their grandparents used to do. This causes rapid growth of cities, overexploitation of soil and water resources and environmental degradation.

Modern agriculture has followed a path of simplification, ‘artificialization’ and intensification, and has replaced nature’s diversity with a small number of cultivated plants, reducing the diversity of our diets. Here’s the paradox: despite being overfed, population is malnourished. Processed food might be inexpensive and convenient, but is nutrient-poor. When food is taken from its natural state and is processed, refined and packaged, it loses enzymes, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and antioxidants; all of them essential for our overall health. So the more processed food you eat and the more you limit yourself to a very narrow range of foods, the more nutrient-deficient you become.

Reverting to diets of our ancestors would enable us to regain lost nutrients, improve our relationship with the Earth and restore not only human but environmental health.  This is why it is so important that you inform yourself: know what you eat, where it comes from and who is producing it. Eat clean and local and reconnect with nature, traditional diets and cultural practices. We depend on it for survival.

Kenya to Restore Denmark-Sized Area of Degraded Land

/by

Author: Hayden Higgins and Aaron Minnick | Published: September 13, 2016

Kenya announced on September 8th that it will restore 5.1 million hectares (12.6 million acres) of degraded land, an area roughly the size of Denmark, to more productive use. The move is poised to improve livelihoods, curb climate change, safeguard biodiversity and more.

Sizing the Problem—and the Opportunity

As a result of poor land use, including overcultivation and overgrazing, Kenya has been quickly losing land to desertification. The drylands that make up much of the country are particularly susceptible.

Kenya’s restoration plan is not only notable because it will reverse some of this degradation, but because of how the country set its international target.

WRI participated in a technical working group that used a novel research approach to map Kenya’s different land areas. That group found 38.8 million hectares (96 million acres)—more than 65 percent of Kenya’s total land area—suitable for restoration. The goal announced last Thursday represents more than 13 percent of the total restorable land area.

KEEP READING ON WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE

5 Food Systems Lessons the U.S. Can Learn from Africa

/by

Author: Jennifer Lentfer| Published on: September 7, 2016

A recipient of the 2016 Food Sovereignty Prize from Ethiopia shares his insights on food and farming in the U.S., threats to smallholder farmers in Africa, and communicating across ideological differences.

As food activists work to localize food systems in the United States, small farmers who sell their food locally still produce around 80 percent of the food in sub-Saharan Africa. But that does not mean that farmers and food activists on the African continent can be complacent. Quite the opposite. Corporate industrialization of African agriculture is resulting in massive land grabs, destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems, displacement of indigenous peoples, and destruction of livelihoods and cultures.

Yonas Yimer works to create a united voice for food justice across more than 50 countries in Africa. He leads communications for the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a policy advocacy group that fights to protect small family farming and community-based food production, and is a recent recipient of the 2016 Food Sovereignty Prize.

Despite the recurring argument that a “green revolution” is needed to feed Africa’s growing population, Yimer says, “we’re here to say that agroecology already feeds Africa.” He describes agroecology as a set of practices that integrates scientific understanding about how particular places work—their ecology—with farmers’ knowledge of how to make their local landscapes useful to humans.

Agroecology also encourages people to think about their own relationship to land, to the ecosystem, and with other people. We sat down with Yimer during his recent visit to San Francisco to talk about what we in the U.S. can learn from the wealth of knowledge that exists within African communities about how to defend and build upon sustainable and indigenous approaches to growing food. Here are the five key lessons that emerged.

KEEP READING ON CIVIL EATS

The Future of Food: Seeds of Resilience

/by

Robust seed systems are central to sustainable food systems that are renewable, resilient, equitable, diverse, healthy, and interconnected. We also believe that there is an urgency to supporting community based and farmer managed seed systems in order to protect and enhance seed diversity.

Recognizing this, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food commissioned experts from around the world to weigh in on a future that protects and improves resilient seed systems. This Compendium, which includes an Opportunities Report by agricultural biodiversity researchers Emile Frison and Toby Hodgkin, as well as twelve commentaries from a diverse range of experts, including farmers, community activists, business representatives, researchers, and scientists to better understand where we could collectively focus our efforts to address this issue.

KEEP READING ON FUTURE OF FOOD

The enormous threat to America’s last grasslands

/by

Author: Ryan Schuessler

STUTSMAN COUNTY, N.D. — Over the past few years, Neil Shook has watched his world burn acre by acre.

“I could tell something was happening,” Shook recalled, when he first noticed the plumes of smoke in 2011. By 2013, fires were raging every day, sending smoke billowing into the air — imagery that reminded Shook of Kuwait’s burning oil wells during the Persian Gulf War.

Hundreds of acres of rolling green grasslands in North Dakota were being intentionally burned, plowed and planted in a matter of days. Shook, who manages the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge and surrounding conservation area, watched as landowners backed out of federally funded conservation programs, opting instead to cash in on the state’s economic boom.

“This was all grass,” Shook shouted as he wildly gestured toward a vast expanse of plowed, brown farmland near the wildlife refuge in June. “Now, what do you see?”

In the mid-2000s, a perfect storm of conditions led to a decade of grassland destruction in North Dakota’s share of the prairie pothole region, a vast expanse of grassland and wetlands that stretches from eastern Alberta to northern Iowa. Corn and soybean prices were high, climate change had extended the growing season and genetically modified crops could now survive in the northern plains. And then the oil boom hit.

Between 2005 and 2015, more than 160,000 acres of Stutsman County mixed grass prairie — an ecosystem that can support more than 100 plant species per square mile — was converted into single-crop farmland. In just six years, North Dakota lost half of its acreage that was protected under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as biodiverse grasslands fell to the plow.

KEEP READING IN THE WASHINGTON POST

Microbes Will Feed the World, or Why Real Farmers Grow Soil, Not Crops

/by

Author: Brian Barth

They are not farmers, but they are working in the name of farmers everywhere. Under their white lab coats their hearts beat with a mission to unlock the secrets of the soil — making the work of farmers a little lighter, increasing the productivity of every field and reducing the costly inputs that stretch farmers’ profits as thin as a wire.

The American Society of Microbiologists (ASM) recently released a treasure trove of their latest research and is eager to get it into the hands of farmers. Acknowledging that farmers will need to produce 70 to 100 percent more food to feed the projected 9 billion humans that will inhabit the earth by 2050, they remain refreshingly optimistic in their work. The introduction to their latest report states:

“Producing more food with fewer resources may seem too good to be true, but the world’s farmers have trillions of potential partners that can help achieve that ambitious goal. Those partners are microbes.”

Mingling with Microbes

Linda Kinkel of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Plant Pathology was one of the delegates at ASM’s colloquium in December 2012, where innovators from science, agribusiness and the USDA spent two days sharing their research and discussing solutions to the most pressing problems in agriculture.

KEEP READING ON MODERN FARMER

How Soil Microbes Fight Climate Change

/by

Author: Esther Ngumbi

Around the globe, 2016 has been a dusty year. Just this month, massive dust storms enveloped Guazhou County in China, engulfing five-story buildings. Dust storms in Kuwait suspended oil exports, while another  storm engulfed the Texas Panhandle. In January, red clouds of dust swept across Free State, South Africa, while scientists warned that the erosion of nutrient-rich topsoil threatened food security.

But the loss of soil also presents a less obvious challenge: it robs us of a key ally in fighting climate change. That ally is soil microbes.

Global soils already hold three times as much carbon as exists in the atmosphere, and there’s room for much more. According to a recent study in Nature, enhanced carbon storage in the world’s farmland soils could reduce greenhouse gas concentrations by between 50 and 80 percent.

To realize this stunning potential, farmers would need to adopt certain game-changing farming practices that restore depleted soils, largely through spurring the activity of the soil microbiome, a web of microscopic life that includes fungi, nitrogen-fixing bacteria and trillions of other bacteria that promote plant growth. Like the microbes that live in and on our bodies, helping us with everything from nutrition to immune responses, soil microbes are allies. They can help us deal with many of the climate challenges facing agriculture.

Indeed, we are just beginning to understand how to harness the potential of soil microbes. Research has shown they can help restore degraded soils, including land in Mexico’s southern Sonoran desert. This capacity gives soil microbes the potential of revolutionize agriculture. Healthier soils produce higher crop yields, hold water more effectively, sequester more carbon and allow for increased agricultural productivity on existing land.

KEEP READING ON SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Using Agroforestry to Save the Planet

/by

Agroforestry—the use of trees in farming—benefits both farmers and the environment.

According to a recent report by Biodiversity International, the Center for International Forestry Research, the World Agroforestry Centre, and Charles Sturt University, forests contribute to the livelihoods of more than 1.6 billion people. Yet, 30 percent of the world’s forests are used primarily for the production of wood products.

Agroforestry is defined as the integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems. These practices can help landowners diversify products and create social, economic, and environmental benefits.

Trees and forests provide more than just food—they can enhance soils, protect biodiversity, preserve precious water supplies, and even help reduce the impacts of climate change.

According to the World Agroforestry Centre, agroforestry is uniquely suited to address the need to grow more food and biomass for fuel while sustainably managing agricultural landscapes for the critical ecosystem services they provide.

Agroforestry efforts in Niger, for example, have resulted in 200 million trees being planted on over 5 million hectares of farmland. This has impacted an estimated 2.5 million people by improving soil, increasing yields, and creating resilience against climate change.

This week, Food Tank is highlighting 16 organizations and projects that are using agroforestry principles to bring benefits to farmers, communities, and the environment.

The Bangor Forest Garden project, located in North West Wales, was created in 1998 to showcase forest gardening as an agroforestry solution to sustainable living. The volunteer-run project has become a popular demonstration site and an effective educational and research resource for Bangor University and the surrounding community.

KEEP READING ON FOOD TANK