Extinction.

As compared with wider biodiversity “the special nature of agricultural biodiversity, its distinctive features, and problems needing distinctive solutions” was recognized by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in its early years (CBD, 1994), confirming the need for globally agreed management and governance measures that are distinct from those governing the preservation of wider biodiversity through, for example, Protected Areas governance measures. These measures recognize that, for example: people have a key role in sustaining and dynamically managing agricultural biodiversity; many components of agricultural biodiversity, such as the diversity of the seeds of food crops, would not exist without this dynamic management and associated indigenous and local knowledge and culture; intraspecific diversity and intravarietal diversity within productive ecosystems are at least as important as diversity between species; access to, and control over, components of agricultural biodiversity can be restricted by legal and technological means thereby potentially limiting its availability; and that many food production systems are based on species introduced from other communities, countries, and continents, creating great interdependence on agricultural biodiversity across the world.

Small-scale food providers’ perspectives on the importance of agricultural biodiversity

Biodiversity has as a fundamental base the recognition of human diversity, the acceptance that we are different and that every people and each individual has the freedom to think and to be. Seen in this way, biodiversity is not only flora, fauna, earth, water and ecosystems; it is also cultures, systems of production, human and economic relations, forms of government; in essence it is freedom (Via Campesina, 2000).

● Agricultural biodiversity is enhanced by and supports agroecological production: it is an essential pillar of peasant strategies for survival and autonomy through reducing costs and risks. Peasant agroecological production systems have cultivated, sustained, and developed millions of heterogeneous varieties of crops and trees, breeds of livestock, and diverse aquatic organisms over millennia, and throughout the world. These nurture healthy populations of pollinators, pest predators, soil, and aquatic organisms above and below ground and in waters.

● Agricultural biodiversity is intertwined with our knowledge: it is more than the diversity of genetic resources, species, and ecosystems. It essentially includes the knowledge that led to its development and for its use. This knowledge is embedded in a dynamic web of relations between human beings and nature, continuously responding to new problems and finding new solutions.

● It makes the environment more resilient: environments rich in agricultural biodiversity are ecologically resilient to climate change and other threats, and also deliver other benefits to the environment and people, such as improved soil water retention, less soil erosion, increased soil biodiversity, improved pollination, as well as clean air and water.

● It improves the health of people and the planet: agricultural biodiversity is essential to human survival and health; when this biodiversity is diminished, disequilibrium results, which threatens health, both of humans and of nature.

● It is the product of their knowledge and collective rights: the successful enhancement of agricultural biodiversity—through exchanges within and between small-scale producers, countries, and continents—depends on peasants’ knowledge and collective rights of access to and control over territories, waters, seeds, and biodiversity.

● Its enhancement requires the freedom for peasants to choose the social system, the agrarian system, and culture that value it in a holistic sense, in the face of economic “values” imposed by a “free” market that destroys peasants’ seeds, biodiversity, and associated cultural freedoms.

Adapted from IPC (2016).

14.3 Threats to agricultural biodiversity

The negative impact on agricultural biodiversity from industrial agriculture, intensive livestock production, and large-scale mechanized fisheries is summarized in many international assessments that have been completed this century, from the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) to FAO’s report on the State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture (FAO, 2019; IAASTD, 2009). Through land use change, destructive and unsustainable management of ecosystems and “downstream” pollution of more biodiverse production systems, industrial monocultures are the main cause of the loss of biodiversity. Industrial production and the value chains it supplies with their associated transport, processing, storage, and retailing systems are also principal drivers of climate change, through associated greenhouse gas emissions, causing further stresses for biodiversity (GRAIN & La Via Campesina, 2014).

The loss of biodiversity in agroecosystems brings devastating consequences … simplified, human constructed agroecosystems may be unable to maintain their structure … [with] the accelerated loss of resilience and diversity and the erosion, salinization or decline in the fertility of soils.

Egziabher (2002)

The impact of these industrial production systems on agricultural biodiversity is even more marked. Over the past 70years, in the wake of 20th century global conflicts and subsequent instability in food supplies, international efforts to increase production of staple grains and commodities have been further intensified. These efforts include the consolidation, intensification, and simplification of peasant systems (Green Revolution technologies) with the expansion of genetically uniform monocultures displacing production using biodiverse peasant varieties. In addition, with the global spread of the industrialization of agriculture and livestock production, including largescale land use changes from forests to plantations and cropping, and the expansion of industrial livestock production and large-scale fisheries, agricultural biodiversity has been further eroded.

Causes of loss of agricultural biodiversity

The social movements of smaller-scale food providers have summarized their views on the principal causes of the loss of agricultural biodiversity:

● The industrial model of production and consumption is rapidly eroding rural societies that manage agricultural biodiversity.

● The industrial model of production also displaces peasant varieties and breeds through using genetically uniform, and, increasingly, genetically modified, monocultures of crops, livestock, and fish, while locking up diversity in gene banks.

● Land grabs and ocean/water grabs extend the area under this model of production.

● Intensive use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers further reduces agricultural biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

● Climate change, exacerbated by this model, is putting new pressures on the local diversity of crops and livestock as weather patterns change, and new pests and diseases proliferate. Consequent disaster relief efforts distributing inappropriate, often industrial, seeds and livestock breeds undermine local agricultural biodiversity.

● Industrial research systems for this model devalue and erode peasant and indigenous knowledge, local research capacities, and the multitude of local innovation systems that foster agricultural biodiversity.

● Monopolies, favored by this model, control industrial seed, agrochemical, and industrial commodity markets and value chains, and this jeopardizes freedom for peasants to control, access, and use agricultural biodiversity.

● Intellectual property rights (IPRs) (sometimes dubbed “industrial” property rights by peasant organizations because they defend the interests of industry) and other laws that protect seed monopolies stimulate the widespread use of industrial varieties and can also criminalize peasant producers who develop, use, share, exchange, and sell their heterogeneous seeds.

Adapted from IPC (2016).

The industrial model of production favors the use of crop varieties, livestock, and aquatic breeds that respond to high applications of agrochemicals and intensive feeds, and the simplification of ecosystems. Its impacts in rural territories across the world include not only the rapid spread of monocultures but also massive increases in the use of associated pesticides and herbicides, resource consolidation, and the exodus of producers. The industrial model of production also produces excessive waste; it is built on an economy of surplus production of commodities rather than on the basis of ecological sustainability and realizing food sovereignty and the Right to Food. This model underlies the dysfunctionality of our food system (Mulvany & Ensor, 2011; van der Ploeg, 2009). An alternative view, as Eric Holt-Giménez has often pointed out, is that the system is not dysfunctional, but rather functioning as intended; it was never meant to provide good food for all, or preserve the environment, but to serve vested interests (Holt-Giménez, 2017).

14.4 Few crops “Feed the World”?

While industrial production systems per se undermine agricultural biodiversity for all the reasons cited previously, and more, a further determining factor is that, for complex reasons, probably related to power and control, human civilizations have selected relatively few crops for most of their food. By focusing on these few species, it can skew the discourse on sustaining agricultural biodiversity to the exclusion of concern about the diversity of the very many other species that are important for a sustainable food system.

Estimates of the numbers of “how many crops feed the world” often build on the work of the Prescott-Allens (Prescott‐Allen & Prescott‐Allen, 1990). Their conclusion was that most food in the global food system comes from 82 species commodities as they describe them (i.e., species as well as genera, such as the cabbage family Brassicaceae) consisting in total of 103 species. These, they calculate, contribute 90% of national per capita supplies of food plants. Subsequently, Colin Khoury and colleagues concluded, based on the analysis of FAO data in 2014, that the number is slightly fewer, i.e., 94 species (Khoury et al., 2014). In answer to his own question, “So how many crops feed the world anyway?,” Guarino (2014), in the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, summarizes the state of knowledge and more or less concurs with the estimate of Khoury but adds Quinoa—increasing the number to 95 species— and reflects that precision about the exact numbers is not particularly important. The number is indicative of the limited number of species that dominate the global (especially industrial) food system.

[FIGURE 14.1 OMITTED]

Fig. 14.1 shows the number of crops used directly for food, in part or wholly, which dominate the industrial food system. It is based on an interpretation of the data recorded by FAO for 2018.

There seems to be general consensus that only three species—maize/corn, rice, and wheat— provide about half the world’s plant-derived calories (Tutwiler, Bailey, Attwood, Remans, & Ramirez, 2017), and, with potatoes, the proportion increases to about 60% of the formally recorded food system. The choice of the next eight species that, with maize/corn, rice, wheat, and potatoes, make up 75% of the industrial food supply, varies, depending on the author. They may include plantains and bananas, sweet potatoes, yams, cassava, and other roots, cereals such as barley, oats, rye/ triticale, sorghum/millets, chickpeas, and other pulses.

The species in the additional 83 crops that provide 90% of food include some that might be suitable substitutes in the foregoing list of eight species, e.g., several vegetables and fruits that have many varieties that are important locally, and a few of these varieties are also globally dominant in the industrial food system such as tomatoes, mangoes, and apples. Also, the list includes many vegetable species, such as those in the Brassica (cabbage family) and Allium (onion/garlic family) genera, common fruits, and many legumes and pulses. In addition to these 95 species there are some 7000 species known to be used by people for their food. The prevalence and importance of these is probably underreported.

What’s deliberately missing in this figure are industrial commodity crops, such as oil palm and other oil crops, soya, sugar cane, and sugar beet, which are traded as comestible commodities mainly for food processing and livestock feed, although on a smaller scale they may be used directly in local food webs.

Historically, human civilizations have selected relatively few species for their main foods. It is interesting to note that the four crops (maize/corn, rice, wheat, and potatoes), which make up 60% of the industrial food system, originated in regions that gave rise to significant empires; the Olmec, Aztecs, and Mayans developed their empires in MesoAmerica (today’s Mexico and Central America), the region where maize/corn was selectively developed from the grass Teosinte; rice developed in SE Asia where dynasties ruled for thousands of years; the Babylonian empires of the “fertile crescent” in West Asia arose in the region that developed wheat and other cereals; and in the Andean region, home to the Inca empire, potatoes were selected as an important food crop from the many roots and tubers that developed in the heterogeneous ecosystems on the slopes of the Andes.

The most important aspect of the quantification of the number of food crops that “feed the world” to this discussion about agricultural biodiversity is the recognition that, in reality, humans regularly grow and harvest food from more than 7000 species, and that there are up to another 70,000 species known to have edible parts (Tutwiler et al., 2017).

It is therefore plausible to suggest that there is underreporting of the wider number of species known to be used for food by people across the world. The few dominant species in the industrial food system, whose seed is increasingly controlled by a few corporations and whose production, trade, processing, and retail are captured in official records, bias attention in official statistics to these crops and, hence, in a selfreinforcing process also create a bias in food system presentation and planning.

Though a limited number of species are used in the industrial food system, the security of the world’s food supplies was attained through the use of a multiplicity of crop varieties and livestock breeds. Large areas of single species can be relatively resilient and maintain productivity if there were significant varietal diversity within the production system. Millions of diverse varieties of the commonest crops have been developed by farmers over millennia as they selected seeds for various traits over many generations and when they adapted crops to new environments. For example, more than 100,000 varieties of rice are known to have been developed in India. In the in vitro collections of the Peru-headquartered International Potato Centre there are more than 4000 varieties of potatoes and in the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, a million accessions of diverse seed varieties are stored (Asdal & Guarino, 2018). While having the backup of diversity ex situ in gene banks provides some insurance, it is the in situ intraspecific and intravarietal diversity on-farm within a field that allows crops to evolve (Mulvany, 2017). This can compensate somewhat for limited species diversity in production systems. Tolerance of the different varieties of a single crop species within a field to varying weather patterns, rain/drought, heat/frost, changing soil conditions, diseases, insect attacks, and so on, can produce compensatory growth by one variety in the event that another variety suffers. Such has been the experience of peasant farmers in their biodiverse plots of, for example, potatoes. In Peru, peasant farmers in the Andes grow potato mixtures of up to 50 varieties in a “Challo” that, overall, can resist variable weather conditions and always provide consistent production from season to season.

Now, it is this biodiversity—the number of varieties of each species in current production systems—that is fast disappearing. Assessments conclude that for some crops, more than 90% of varieties are no longer being grown regularly on-farm and the number of livestock breeds is also diminishing (FAO, 1997a, 2007). The single greatest cause of the loss of varietal diversity is the result of their substitution, on a very large scale, by relatively few industrial varieties (FAO, 1997a).

This rapid erosion of the intraspecific variety within each species, i.e., the small number of varieties that dominate production, is of equal if not greater concern than the limited number of species grown. Genetically uniform monocultures of single varieties are easily susceptible to the effects of climate stresses and pests and diseases. Were this erosion of agricultural biodiversity to continue and production of the few industrial crops that dominate the industrial food system to become dependent on a limited number of genetically uniform varieties, the results could mirror, on a global scale, the impacts of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. This was caused, in part, because of failure of the staple potato crop; only two varieties of potato were being planted in the whole country at that time. They turned out to be susceptible to late blight and widespread crop failure resulted.