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Bioversity International is shaking up the food system says Food Tank
Bioversity International was mentioned by the Food Tank: The Food Think Tank as one of the 40 organizations that are shaking up the food system. "Our hope is that the more people know about the work that these groups are doing, the more people can be inspired to make their own change in the food system," said the co-founders of the blog.
Semantics for Biodiversity – International Workshop
The 1st international workshop on Web Semantics for Biodiversity, held on 27 May in Montpellier, France, will define key challenges identified by the bioinformatics community, discuss solutions and identify opportunities emerging from interactions across plant science and informatics disciplines.
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Translator
Payments for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services
The global benefits of conserving agricultural biodiversity
Agricultural biodiversity is the basis of human survival and well-being yet it is being lost at an alarming rate.
Maintaining agrobiodiversity helps ensure the continuation of existing evolutionary processes, providing future food growing options for us all, in the face of climate change and outbreaks of new pests and diseases.
The value of agricultural biodiversity
The benefits of agricultural biodiversity are not fully reflected by the market. This creates a bias in favour of commercially-driven, often highly specialized monocultural, agricultural systems designed to maximize output.
The resulting displacement leads to many other important plant and animal (livestock) genetic diversity becoming increasingly threatened as conserving biodiversity is not considered commercially attractive.
Payment for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services (PACS)
The application of Payment for Ecosystem Services(PES) specifically for agricultural biodiversity conservation (PACS) is a new idea and Bioversity is at its forefront.
Bioversity is currently working in India, Bolivia and Peru, to test the potential of competitive tenders in creating cost-efficient strategies to conserve priority endangered species and also improve indigenous farmer livelihoods.
The smallholder farmer as a guardian of diversity
Agricultural biodiversity’s unrecognized values in the commercial market-place mean that conservation is often carried out on farm by poor smallholder farmers, who maintain certain crop species/varieties at their own cost for reasons other than just high output.
Smaller farmers, especially those on marginal lands, are often much more interested in minimizing risk than in maximizing productivity. They need to feed themselves and their families. A surplus for sale is good, but not the key to a sustainable livelihood.
For example, maintaining a variety of different crops can reduce the risk of complete loss in the event of harvest failure. A particular species/variety may also be socially and culturally valuable, used as part of a traditional cuisine or ceremony such as a wedding.
Yet maintaining crop diversity at the 'on farm' level generates benefits at the local, national or even global level.
Paying farmers to conserve biodiversity
Photo: Bioversity/A. Drucker
The costs of maintaining diversity for local, national and global benefit is currently borne by the smallholder farmer. This cannot continue if we want to secure socially desirable levels of conservation for the greater public good and protect the priority crops that are at the most risk of extinction.
Recognition of the value of farmers’ work in maintaining such agrobiodiversity, and the provision of positive incentives that adequately compensate them for doing so (as called for by the Convention on Biological Diversity) is urgently needed - a form of Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES).
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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