Escaping the treadmill
Green evolution
A place for plantations
Mistaken miracles
Africa's wave of the future, or a backwash from the past?
It starts with 'F', and that stands for food!
Rain-forest harvest
The soil's shield: Trees
Heirs of the revolution
The remarkable series of research advances and technology transfers which so sharply boosted crop yields in many parts of the world throughout the 1960s and '70s seems to have completed a kind of cycle: the mission of the Green Revolution has been passed to a new generation, one which faces grave threats to world food security.
As with most new generations, however, the present one is fractious. Some are respectful, but others are in a hurry to push the Old Guard out the door and take over. They question their elders' wisdom, and grow impatient at the nostalgic glow of satisfaction that surrounds their predecessors' tales of scientific derring-do. While spokesmen for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) like Mike Collinson equate the Green Revolution approach with science itself, and the Sasakawa Foundation promotes a continuation of early Green Revolution methods, others disagree.
Vandana Shiva openly attacks the Green Revolution as an unscientific blunder, while Miguel Altieri advocates a new, "agro-ecological" approach to agricultural research. Foresters, like FAO's J.B. Ball, S. Braatz and C. Chandrasekharan, are anxious that the crucial importance of forests not be overlooked in planning for food security.
In short, the heirs are squabbling. Whether the result will be a new revolution, a counter-revolution, or some combination of the two, remains to be seen. Ceres readers are invited to join the debate, and influence the outcome.
Agro-ecology puts synergy to work to create self-sustaining "agro-ecosystems"
By Miguel Altieri
Most scientists today would agree that the agricultural model promoted by the original Green Revolution faces an environmental crisis. In the Third World, this model hasn't led to small farmer betterment, or slowed the increasingly vicious cycle of rural poverty and environmental degradation. Nor is the problem one merely of production or technology, although productivity is part of it: it is rather the social, cultural and economic issues responsible for under- development that require attention.
The causes of the environmental crisis are in fact rooted in the prevalent socio-economic system, which promotes high-input technologies and practices that lead to soil erosion, salinization, pesticide pollution, desertification and loss of biodiversity.
Loss of yields due to pests, despite increased pesticide use, is another symptom of the crisis. It is well-known that plants grown in genetically homogeneous monocultures often haven't the ecological defence mechanisms to tolerate pest outbreaks. The Green Revolution selected crops for high yield and palatability, making them more susceptible to pests by sacrificing natural resistance for productivity. Modem farming practices also have negative effects on pests' natural enemies, which don't do well enough in monocultures to be effective as biological control agents. As long as monoculture is maintained as the structural base of agricultural systems, pest problems will continue on a negative treadmill that reinforces itself, as increasingly vulnerable crops call for increasingly destructive or expensively high-tech protective measures (Figure 1).
A useful concept
The concept of sustainable agriculture is a relatively recent response to the decline in quality of the resource base associated with modem farming.
Though controversial and diffuse, it is useful be- cause it captures a set of concerns about agriculture which is conceived as the result of the co-evolution of socio-economic and natural systems. Agricultural development results from the complex interaction of a multitude of factors, and a wider understanding of the agricultural context requires study of the relations between fanning, the environment and social systems. It is through this deeper understanding of the ecology of farming that doors will open to new management options more in tune with the aims of a truly sustainable agriculture.
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Research emphasis today is still too highly technological |
The goal is to develop agro-ecosystems with minimal dependence on high agrochemical and energy inputs, in which ecological interactions and synergy between biological components provide the mechanisms for the systems to sponsor their own soil fertility, productivity and crop protection.
While hundreds of environmentally aware research projects and technological development experiments have taken place, and many lessons have been learned, research emphasis today is still too highly technological, emphasizing on one hand laboratory development of transgenic varieties resistant to stress factors, and on the other, organic agriculture-input substitution approaches aimed at replacing agro-chemical and high-input technologies with more environmentally sound, low-external- input technologies. These approaches fail to address the ecological causes of the environmental problems in modem agriculture, which are deeply rooted in the monoculture structure prevalent in large-scale production systems. The narrow view still prevails that only isolated, specific causes affect productivity, and that overcoming individual limiting factors via alternative technologies should continue to be the main goal. This view has diverted agriculturalists from realizing that limiting factors only represent symptoms of a more systemic disease inherent in unbalanced agro-ecosystems. It fails to appreciate the context and complexity of agro-ecological processes, thus underestimating the root causes of rural agricultural limitations.
Today, the need to increase food security while conserving the resource base requires not only profound changes in strategic research agendas, but also in the fundamental approaches to rural development that involve true farmer participation. Although the challenge for sustainable production is common to all regions in the world, their intensity or perceived importance differs in each area depending on whether systems are large- or small- scale, subsistence- or market- oriented, high- or low-input, etc.
In the commercial sectors of agriculture, the problem is beginning to be seen as manifestations of a technology-induced environmental degradation resulting from a sort of "development oversaturation." In the small-farm sector, mean- while, "development" has not reached the vast population of resource-poor farmers. There is a great need to match an appropriate agricultural development approach with the needs of this part of society.
In both cases, the development of an "appropriate technology" capable of translating productive potentials into sustainable livelihood for all has been a central idea. A number of research and development schemes (farming systems research and extension, agro-ecosystem analysis and development, etc.) have been proposed to reach this goal. Most emphasize a systems framework of analysis, focus on both biophysical and socio-economic production constraints, and utilize the agro-ecosystem or region as a unit of analysis.
These approaches have improved diagnostic methodologies, and also introduced new criteria (e.g. sustainability, equitability, stability) to evaluate the performance of farming systems. They've allowed us to better understand, in a more fully integrated way, the varied factors that govern agricultural productivity and have allowed development of new, more environmentally sound, technological avenues to overcome these factors. However, by perceiving the problem of sustainability solely as a technological one of production, most approaches are restricted in their ability to understand why systems become non-sustainable.
Irrigation of a monocrop cotton field in Israel's Hula Valley (FAO photo by U. Keren/Contrasto)
A socio-economic agenda
Clearly, new sustainable agro-ecosystems can- not be implemented without modifying the socio-economic determinants that govern what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom it is produced. Approaches should deal with technological issues in such a way that they assume their corresponding role within an agenda that incorporates social and economic issues in its development strategy. Only policies and actions derived from such a strategy can confront the agricultural-environmental crisis and rural poverty throughout the developing world.
Agro-ecology has emerged as the discipline that provides the basic ecological principles for studying, designing and managing agro-ecosystems which are productive and re-source-conserving, as well as culturally sensitive, socially just and economically viable.
Agro-ecology goes beyond a one-dimensional view of agro-ecosystems - their genetics, agronomy, edaphology, etc. - to embrace an understanding of ecological and social levels of co-evolution, structure and function. Agro-ecology encourages re- searchers to tap into farmers' knowledge and skills, as well as to realize the unlimited potential of "assembling biodiversity" to create beneficial synergisms that provide agro-ecosystems with the ability to remain or return to an innate state of natural stability. Sustainable yield in the agro-ecosystem derives from a proper balance of crops, soils, nutrients, sunlight, moisture and coexisting organisms. The agro-ecosystem is productive and healthy when this balance and rich-growing conditions prevail, and when crop plants remain resilient enough to tolerate stress and adversity. Occasional disturbances can be overcome by vigorous agro- ecosystems which are adaptable and diverse enough to recover once the stress has passed. Occasionally, strong measures (i.e. botanical insecticides, alternative fertilizers) may need to be applied to control specific pests or soil problems. Agro-ecology provides the guidelines to carefully do so without unnecessary or irreparable damage.
Simultaneous with the struggle to fight pest, disease or soil deficiency, the agro-ecologist strives to restore the resiliency and strength of the overall agro-ecosystem. If the cause of disease, pests, soil degradation, etc. is understood as imbalance, then the goal of the agro-ecological treatment is to recover balance. In agro-ecology, biodiversification is the primary technique to evoke self-regulation and sustainability.
However, ecological health is not the only goal of agro-ecology. In fact, sustainability is not possible without preserving the cultural diversity that nurtures local agricultures. A closer look at ethno-science (the knowledge system of an ethnic group that has originated locally and naturally) has revealed that local people's knowledge about the environment, vegetation, animals and soils can be very detailed. Peasant knowledge about ecosystems usually results in multi-dimensional land use production strategies, which generate, within certain ecological and technical limits, the food self-sufficiency of communities in particular regions.
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Agro-ecology provides the methodological tools for community participation |
Traditional knowledge is relevant
For agro-ecologists several aspects of traditional knowledge systems are relevant, such as knowledge of farming practices and the physical environment, biological folk taxonomic systems, or use of low- input technologies. By understanding ecological features of traditional agriculture, such as the ability to bear risk, production efficiencies of symbiotic crop mixtures, recycling of materials, reliance on local resources and germplasm, exploitation of full range of micro-environments, etc., it is possible to obtain important information that may be used for developing appropriate agricultural strategies tailored to the needs, preferences and resource bases of specific peasant groups and regional agro-ecosystems.
Tea-covered slopes in Sri Lanka are interspersed with trees (Photo by Gustaaf Blaak)
Stable production can only take place within the context of a social organization that protects the integrity of natural resources and nurtures the harmonious interaction of humans, the agro-ecosystem and the environment. Agro-ecology provides the methodological tools for community participation to become the driving force defining the objectives and activities of development projects. The goal is for peasants to become the architects and actors of their own development.
From a management perspective, the agro-ecological objective is to provide a balanced environment, sustained yields, biologically mediated soil fertility and natural pest regulation through the design of diversified agro-ecosystems and use of low-input technologies. The strategy is based on ecological principles, so that management leads to optimal recycling of nutrients and organic matter turnover, closed energy flows, water and soil conservation and balanced pest/natural enemy populations. The idea is to exploit the complementarities and synergisms that result from various combinations of crops, trees and animals.
The optimal behavior of agro-ecosystems depends on the level of interaction between their biotic and abiotic components. By assembling a functional biodiversity, it is possible to provoke synergisms. These in effect subsidize agro-ecosystem processes, by providing ecological services such as the activation of soil biology, the recycling of nutrients, or the enhancement of beneficial arthro-pods.
Today there is a whole battery of practices and technologies available, which vary in effectiveness as well as strategic value (Figure 2). Some, which include practices already part of conventional farming (genetic improvement, minimum tillage, rotation) are of prophylactic value, while others which are key, are of a preventative nature and act by reinforcing the "immunity" of the agro-ecosystem. The effects of many of these practices have been scientifically documented and tend to have wide geographic implications. These technologies do not emphasize boosting yields under optimal conditions, as Green Revolution technologies do; rather, they assure constancy of production under a whole range of soil and climatic conditions - especially marginal conditions which usually prevail in small-farm agriculture. What is important, however, is not to focus on particular technologies, but rather on an agro-ecosystem management approach which emphasizes crop diversity, use of legumes in rotations, animal integration, recycling and use of biomass and residue management, and incorporates an assemblage of alternative technologies.
Agro-ecology proposes that the basic tenets of a sustainable agro-ecosystem are the conservation of renewable resources, adaptation of the crop to the environment, and maintenance of a moderate but sustainable level of productivity. The production system must:
1) reduce energy and resource use and regulate the overall energy input, so that the output: input ratio is high;2) reduce nutrient losses by effectively containing leaching, runoff and erosion, and improve nutrient recycling through the promotion of legumes, organic manure and compost and other effective recycling mechanisms;
3) encourage local production of feed items adapted to the natural and socio-economic setting;
4) sustain desired net output by preserving the natural resources (by minimizing soil degradation);
5) reduce costs and increase the efficiency and economic viability of small- and medium-sized farms, thereby promoting a diverse, potentially resilient agricultural system.
From a management viewpoint, the basic components of a sustainable agro-ecosystem include:
1) vegetative cover as an effective soil- and water-conserving measure, met through the use of no- till practices, mulch farming, use of cover crops, etc.;2) a regular supply of organic matter through the regular addition of manure, compost and promotion of soil biotic activity;
3) nutrient recycling mechanisms through the use of crop rotations, crop/livestock systems, use of legumes, etc.;
4) pest regulation assured through enhanced activity of biological control agents, achieved by introducing and/or conserving natural enemies.
Mimicking nature
The ultimate goal of agro-ecological design is to integrate farm components so that overall biological efficiency is improved, biodiversity is preserved, and agro-ecosystem productivity and its self-regulating capacity are maintained. The idea is to design an agro-ecosystem that mimics the structure and function of local natural ecosystems, that is, a system with high species diversity and biologically active and conserved soil, one which promotes recycling and prevents resource losses. To use the barn as an analogy: agro-ecologically designed systems are characterized by a solid foundation of biologically active soils, which ensure efficient nutrient recycling (vertical supports of the barn). The rich biodiversity (roof) provides stability and protection against environmental stress. Soil cover and animal and/or tree integration (walls) minimize leakages from the system.
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The Green Revolution of the past concentrated on farmers at the top of the gradient |
Cover crop management in vineyards in central Chile (Photo by Miguel Altieri)
Due to its novel approach to peasant agricultural development, agro-ecology has heavily influenced the research and extension work of many institutions and farmer organizations. The various examples of grassroots rural development programs currently functioning in developing countries suggest that the process of agricultural betterment must: a) utilize and promote autochthonous knowledge and resource-efficient technologies; b) emphasize the use of local agricultural diversity, including indigenous crop germplasm as well as essentials like firewood resources and medicinal plants; and c) be a self-contained, village- based effort with the active participation of peasants. Evaluation of projects in Latin America suggest these methods represent important alternatives for better water-use efficiency, environmentally sound pest control, effective soil conservation and fertility management that subsistence farmers can afford (Ceres No. 134, pp. 33-39, 1992).
In every developing country it is common to find small farming systems that range widely in their access to capital, markets and technologies. The problem with the Green Revolution of the past few decades is that it concentrated on farmers at the top of the gradient, hoping that "progressive or advanced farmers" would serve as examples to others in a sort of "trickle-down" technology diffusion process. Conversely, agro-ecologists emphasize that in order for development to be truly bottom-up, it must start with those resource-poor farmers in the lower part of the gradient. By doing this, the agro-ecological approach has proven to be culturally compatible, since it builds on traditional farming knowledge, combining it with elements of modem agricultural science. The resulting techniques are also ecologically sound because they do not radically modify or transform the peasant ecosystem, but rather identify traditional and/or new management elements which, once incorporated, lead to optimization of the production unit. By emphasizing the use of locally available resources, agro-ecological technologies also become more economically viable.
The Centro de Educación de Tecnología (CET), a Chilean NGO, has applied the agro-ecological approach to help hundreds of peasants improve food security, resource conservation and income. CET's approach consists in the establishment of several small-farm models that efficiently meet most of the food requirements of a family with scarce resources. Thus crops, animals and other farm resources are assembled in mixed and rotational designs to optimize production efficiency, nutrient cycling and crop protection. Farmers with limited land are trained to diversify their farms with animals, crops and trees, and to optimize bio-resource flows, interactions and complementarities among farm components. By helping farmers design and adopt a crop/pasture rotation, which is the key to breaking pest life cycles and enhancing soil fertility, the pasture "charges" the system with organic matter and nutrients. Crops constitute the "extractive" phase, although they bring the benefits of crop and residue production, soil cover, trap cropping, etc. Animal integration is crucial, although cattle races are carefully selected for size and nutritional needs in order not to place too high a demand on pasture resources. Rotational grazing proves an effective way to constantly avail cattle with food, to allow rapid pasture regrowth and to evenly distribute manure in the field.
This design has proven effective on Chiloe Island, south Chile, where phosphorous levels and crop production increased dramatically after a six-year crop-pasture rotation in phosphorous-deficient marginal lands. After the sixth year, potato yields increased double-fold and only half of the chemical fertilizer and cow manure are needed to sustain such yields. After a third complete rotation cycle, it is expected that no external inputs will be needed to maintain acceptable production levels. Biological structuring will sponsor the system's performance.
Converting conventional systems
Modem conventional agro-ecosystems, which characterize much of the commercial agriculture sector in developing countries, are based on monoculture. Due to this artificial structure, such systems lack functional biodiversity and require constant external inputs to perform. A major concern in sustainable agriculture is the maintenance and/or enhancement of biodiversity and the role it can play in restoring the ecological balance of agro-ecosystems and in achieving stable production. Bio-diversity performs a variety of renewal process and ecological services in agro-ecosystems (Figure 3). When they are lost, the costs can be significant.
A major strategy in sustainable agriculture is to restore agricultural diversity in time and space through alternative cropping systems, such as crop rotations, cover crops, inter-cropping, or crop/livestock mixtures, which exhibit several ecological features. For example:
Crop rotation - Temporal diversity incorporated into cropping systems provides crop nutrients and breaks the life cycles of several insect pests, diseases and weeds.Polycultures - Complex crop- ping systems in which two or more crop species are planted within sufficient spatial proximity result in biological complementation, thus enhancing yields.
Agroforestry systems - An agricultural system where trees are grown together with annual crops and/or animals, results in enhanced complementary relations between components, increasing multiple use of the agro-ecosystem.
Cover crops - The use of pure or mixed stands of legumes or other annual plant species under fruit trees for the purpose of improving soil fertility, enhances biological control of pests, and modifies the orchard microclimate.
Crop/livestock mixtures - Animal integration in agro-ecosystems aids in achieving high biomass output and optimal recycling.
The process of converting a conventional crop production system that relies heavily on synthetic, petroleum-based inputs to a system managed with low inputs is not merely a process of withdrawing external inputs, without compensatory replacement or alternative management. Considerable ecological knowledge is required to direct the array of natural flows necessary to sustain yields in a low-input system.
Figure 3 - The integration of resources, components and functions for multiple-use farming systems
The process of conversion from high-input conventional management to low-external-input management is a transitional process with four marked phases:
1) progressive chemical withdrawal;2) rationalization and efficiency of agrochemical use through integrated pest management (IPM) and integrated nutrient management;
3) input substitution, using alternative, low-energy-input technologies;
4) redesign of diversified farming systems with an optimal crop/animal integration which encourages synergisms, so that the system can sponsor its own soil fertility, natural pest regulation and crop productivity.
Basic technical elements of agro-ecological strategy
1. Conservation and Regeneration of Natural Resources
A. Soil (erosion, fertility and plant health)
B. Water (harvesting, in situ conservation, management, irrigation)
C. Germplasm (plant and animal native species, landraces, adapted germplasm)
D. Beneficial fauna and flora (natural enemies, pollinators, multiple-use vegetation)
2. Management of Productive Resources
A. Diversification- temporal (rotations, sequences, etc.)
- spatial (polycultures, agroforestry, crop/livestock mixed systems)
- genetic (multilines, etc.)
- regional (zonification, watershed, etc.)B. Recycling of nutrients and organic matter
- "plant biomass (green manure, crop - residues, N fixation)
- animal biomass (manure, urine, etc.)
- re-utilization of nutrients and resources, internal and external to the farmC. Biotic regulation (crop protection and animal health)
- natural biological control (enhancement of natural control agents)- artificial biological control (importation and augmentation of natural enemies, botanical insecticides, alternative veterinary products, etc.)
3. Implementation of Technical Elements
A. Definition of resource regeneration, conservation and management techniques tailored to local needs and agro-ecological-socio-economic circumstancesB. The level of implementation can be at the microregion watershed level, farm level and cropping system level
C. The implementation is guided by a wholistic (integrated) conception and therefore does not emphasize isolated elements
D. The strategy must be in agreement with the peasant rationale and must incorporate elements of technical resource management
During these four phases, management is guided in order to ensure:
1) increasing bio-diversity both in the soil and above ground;2) increasing biomass production and soil organic matter content;
3) decreasing levels of pesticide residues and losses of nutrients and water components;
4) establishment of functional relationships between the various farm components;
5) optimal planning of crop sequences and combinations and efficient use of locally available resources.
The FAO-initiated IPM program for rice in Asia is an example of a conversion process, in which on- farm training of farmers in pest monitoring and appropriate rice cultivation practices allows farmers to significantly reduce pesticide use, thus setting a framework to initiate input substitution (i.e. biological control, organic fertilization) to finally enter into the design of integrated rice production systems that may include fish production, crop rotations and livestock integration.
The conversion process can take anywhere from one to five years, depending on the level of artificialization and/or degradation of the original high-input system. In addition, not all input substitution approaches are ecologically sound, as it is well established that some practices widely encouraged by organic farming enthusiasts, such as flame-weeding and applications of broad-spectrum botanical insecticides, can have serious side-effects and environmental impacts.
A key challenge in the transition process is to maintain an economic equilibrium, in order to assist farmers in absorbing the possible income loss due to slightly lower yields in the initial conversion phase. Incentives and/or subsidies may be needed for some farmers as they wait for their productive systems to generate the gains that the conversion process assures.
Field experiments in the Aconcagua Valley in central Chile are showing that yield drops at the beginning of the transition are not inevitable. Vineyards subjected to conversion with an undersown cover crop (Vicia atropurpurea) exhibited a 10 to 20 per cent yield increase during the first two years of conversion, and size and quality (sugar content) of table grapes in the organic plots were of higher quality than in conventional plots. Pests such as the grape mealybug are usually controlled by natural enemies harbored by the cover crops, but at times mass releases of Pseudaphycus flavidulus parasitoids may be needed in some sectors of the vineyard. Botrytis, the main disease, is buffered with canopy management which permits ventilation, thus favorably modifying the microclimate, and/or with applications of compost-based preparations containing antagonists (Trichoderma, Pseudomonas). However, after two years under cover crop management, input substitution is necessary only in "spot trouble areas" of the vineyard. Eventually, the biological structuring of the vineyard sponsors the performance of the agro-ecosystem.
Research suggests that cover crops transform vineyards into agro-ecosystems of increasing ecological diversity and stability. In fact, cover crops function as a major "ecological turntable" which activates and influences key processes and components of the vineyard agro-ecosystem: provision of habitat for beneficial insects, activation of soil biology, addition of organic matter, nitrogen fixation, soil protection, microclimate modification, etc. Clearly then, in vineyards and orchards, cover cropping is a simple but key diversification practice that triggers profound positive ecological changes in the agro-ecosystem.
Breaking monoculture's grip
An agro-ecological strategy to achieve sustained agricultural productivity combines elements of both traditional and modem technologies. Realistically, however, a successful strategy requires more than simply modifying or adapting existing systems or technologies. Novel agro-ecological approaches must aim at breaking the monoculture structure by designing integrated farming systems such as those described herein. Otherwise, the role of alternative agricultural practices will be limited only to input- substitution. This fails to take advantage of the effects of the integration of plant and animal biodiversity, which enhance complex interactions and synergisms optimizing ecosystem functions and processes - such as biotic regulation of harmful organisms, nutrient recycling and biomass production and accumulation - thus allowing agro-ecosystems to sponsor their own functioning. The end result of agro-ecological design is improved economic and ecological sustainability of the agro-ecosystem, especially if management systems are in tune with the local resource base and operate within the framework of existing environmental and socio- economic conditions. Management components in an agro-ecological strategy promote the conservation and enhancement of local agricultural resources (germplasm, soil, beneficial fauna, plant biodiversity), emphasizing a development methodology that encourages farmer participation, use of traditional knowledge and adaptation of farm enterprises to local needs and conditions (Figure 4).
Miguel Altieri is affiliated with the Laboratory of Biological Control, University of California at Berkeley, as well as with the Latin American Consortium on Agro-ecology and Development (CLADES) and Sustainable Agriculture Networking and Extension (SANE-UNDP).
"User-friendly" research, better targeted varieties mark the CGIAR's fine-tuning of the original Green Revolution paradigm
By Mike Collinson
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and its international centres were born into the turmoil of rapidly increasing populations in Asia in the 1950s and '60s. Two original centres, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the International Centre for Maize and Wheat Improvement (CIMMYT), represented an early, publicly funded, international step in applying science to the food problems of the developing world, an application whose abundant results eventually came to be called the Green Revolution.
The ready acceptance of medical innovations by people worldwide had brought rapid growth in population. Deep cultural changes and a rapidly expanding demand for food came in its wake. Governments solved their urgent need for more food by turning to modem science.
(Although the Green Revolution of the 1960s had its initial successes in the irrigated lowlands of Asia, the earlier, popular perception that the Green Revolution was restricted to irrigated areas has been outdated. Modem varieties now also reach less favorable environments.)
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The Green Revolution also represented a revolution in the application of science |
The longer-term perspective on the Green Revolution shows that by 1990 almost 70 per cent of the combined rice, wheat and maize area in the developing world was planted to modern varieties. It remains true, however, that in the more fragile ecologies into which people continue to push seeking the security of their own land, agricultural innovation is more complex and has failed to keep pace with the increasing demand for food and people's aspirations for better living. It creates a contrast. Where the new germplasm from science was rapidly accepted by farmers the very pace of change threatened social cohesion. Where the new materials offered were unacceptable, social cohesion is threatened by the failure to make the pace.
The Green Revolution continues to be painted in other colors by some advocacy groups. The rhetoric, even with thirty years of hindsight, treats it as a one- off event and a bad one, rather than a reaction to a problem created by medical innovation and people's will to live and to see their children live. In reality it was essentially a learning experience for its stake- holders: governments, communities and scientists, in a new dimension of international cooperation.
Not all governments have absorbed its lessons but those involved widely acknowledge the value of the Green Revolution. Global collaboration made rapid action possible. The common language of science allowed understanding and interaction across political boundaries. International agricultural research was efficient for producing plant types of value to many countries. Infrastructure, market access, and the availability of inputs proved essential complements to improved varieties on the farm. National agricultural research was a valuable investment for adapting imported plant types to bring benefits to more and more communities. Farmers found that improved livelihoods and increased incomes helped to manage cultural changes, larger families and longer lives.
Scientists, and particularly the fledgling scientists of the international centres, probably learned most, for the Green Revolution also represented a revolution in the application of science. Moving materials over great distances, organizing networks of trials with national partners for comparison across many countries, recognizing what makes a technology attractive to farmers; these lessons, described below, have been increasingly reflected in the way the international centres organize their research.
Improvement of germplasm
Germplasm is now much more closely targeted; even global centres such as CIMMYT target defined production environments. IRRI has completely reorganized its programs to fit the major rice producing environments.
Germplasm is specifically developed to help manage the more fragile resource bases on to which farmers are being pushed by the pressure of population: for example, pastures and rice (International Centre for Tropical Agriculture-CIAT) and maize (CIMMYT), which are tolerant to acid soils and crops such as sorghum, millet (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics-ICRISAT), wheat, barley (International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas-ICARDA) and maize (CIMMYT) tolerant to drought conditions for the uncertain rainfall in arid and semi-arid environments.
The low cost and transferability of new plant varieties when compared to the levels of cash, and the access to market needed to purchase pesticides each year, have increased efforts to breed in resistance to pests and diseases into new plant varieties, internalizing the package.
There is increased awareness of the need to maintain, and in some cases improve, diversity by the way in which new materials are introduced to farmers. Better understanding of resource-poor farmers has led to the strategy of adding new materials to the portfolio of the varieties they use to manage both climatic and market vagaries, rather than insisting in the traditional fashion, "This is the variety you should be growing!"
The Green Revolution rices were the result of a crash program to get new material out into the areas of food scarcity. Their weak resistance to pests and diseases resulted in high losses when new materials were exposed to heavy attacks. The case of the brown plant hopper in Indonesia is probably the best known. Wheat was not the result of a crash program; CIMMYT has estimated that 50 per cent of its wheat research budget was devoted to keeping ahead of mutating pathogens, and it was less vulnerable than the original Green Revolution rices. These days resistance to six or seven of the major rice pests is built into materials released from IRRI.
Much has been made by critics, of the damage to biodiversity by the introduction of science-based plant materials. In some cases diversity was a feature of traditional agriculture. We have all thrilled to the complexity of Hanunoo swiddens described by Conklin (1957) but these are by no means a universal truth. Uncertainty about the level of production has always been a hazard of managing agriculture and historically, in many areas, there have been high correlations between low production and thus high market prices, and years with weather conducive to disease. The older materials have been shown to be much less stable than the newer ones and with the expansion of breeding diversity have widened: two varieties dominated the original Green Revolution wheat in India, now the National Agricultural Research Services (NARS) in India puts out eight new wheat varieties each year targeted to 20 defined agro-ecosystems. The story is paralleled in aquaculture. Tilapia are very popular with Asian farmers, yet the genetic base of the introductions is very narrow. Research by the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resources Management (ICLARM) shows that yields can be dramatically improved, simply by selection from the diverse tilapia stock available in Africa.
Conserving natural resources
After a decade or so of Green Revolution experience, it became clear that the right kind of technical and economic change in the better lands raises the demand and price for labor and, by attracting people in, conserves the more fragile lands. Both the social and environmental benefits of holding people in the better land areas are perceived to be high (Hazell & Ramasamy, 1991; David & Otsuka (eds), 1994).
However, the documentation of stagnating yields in rice and wheat, not in marginal and fragile lands, but in the irrigated breadbasket of South Asia, has raised the uncertainties of this strategy. It re-emphasizes the need for research for the marginal lands and brings a new urgency to the sustainability issue in high potential areas.
Although breeders have very successfully adapted the original Green Revolution semi-dwarf and dwarf materials to bring benefits to a greater range of growing conditions, IRRI variety IR-8, released in 1966, continues to hold the record yield for rice.
Beans developed at CIAT in Uganda (CIAT photo by M. Fichler)
A change in IRRI breeding strategy in the 1980s to the protection of the yield gains assumed that the high-yield frontier realized with IR-8 would be sustained. The assumption was in error; using 20 years of data for IR-8, Pingali identified a yield decline of 5.17 per cent per year for the wet season crop and 5.89 per cent per year for the dry season crop. A long-term erosion of yield levels seems to be due to the degradation of the growing environment in highly intensive rice cultivation. Similar long-term yield declines have been observed in experiment stations in India, Thailand and Indonesia.
Cultivation of the high-yielding rice IR-8 (FAO photo by Banoun/Caracciolo)
Further, from the Green Revolution experience, we have learned that high levels of pesticides and fertilizers bring damaging externalities to the local ecosystem. Pesticides poison life throughout the food chain based on the environment around the plants. Nitrates, neither used by plants nor retained by the soil, poison groundwater to affect other users. Both highlight the fact that the continual and inefficient use of high inputs degrades the land itself. Pingali identifies increased pest pressure, rapid depletion of soil micronutrients, changes in soil chemistry from both intensive cropping and increased reliance on low-quality irrigation water, as three possible sources for land degradation and declining rice yields. Understanding the cause is an urgent research task. India's population will double over the next 40 years; rice yields also need to double in order to feed them.
The CGIAR remains convinced that modem inputs of fertilizer and pesticides will be needed to feed burgeoning populations, but at the same time, is also convinced that we must learn to manage them more benignly. We must a) recognize that a variety of options for soil and water management, including organic options particularly where market access is weak and cash availability is low, are important; b) recognize that nutrient-efficient plant materials reduce the levels of purchased fertilizers needed, and better agronomy must guide decisions on placement and timing with environmental externalities an explicit criterion of performance; c) maintain a breeding emphasis on developing pest- and disease- tolerant varieties to reduce the levels of pesticide needed; d) beyond simple pest and disease tolerance, develop modem varieties that facilitate the adoption of resource-conserving technologies, for example:
- varieties resistant to diseases carried over by crop residues left as ground cover in conservation tillage;- varieties that tolerate shade, or reduce shade for better growth of intercrops which offer a multiple canopy to break the physical force of rain and wind;
- varieties that reduce externality costs by tolerance to a herbicide that is environmentally benign.
The CGIAR has revised its mandate to embrace the issue more explicitly and, over the last five years, has begun to balance its crop improvement activities with natural resource management research in the context of the sustainable improvement of productivity. It has developed an ecoregional approach to research which examines the interactions of human decisions at the farm, community, institutional and policy levels on the soil, water and biological processes within, and between watersheds.
The CGIAR is in the process of planning and implementing ecoregional programs, with partners from the NARS, advanced research institutions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in regions where population pressures are high and there will be long-term dependency on local agricultural potential. Needless to say a priority for the ecoregional approach is to understand the reason for stagnating rice and wheat yields in the Indo-Gangetic plain. The approach is itself a lesson from the Green Revolution, which taught the importance of the human dimension to success in agricultural research.
A better process
In addressing the CGIAR meeting in New Delhi in May 1994, the Prime Minister of India, Shri P.V. Narasimha Rao, emphasized the tremendous diversity among India's communities and urged the need , for local-specific answers to their agricultural problems. In this message he captured the essence of an ongoing struggle to develop a research process which accepts the importance of human diversity and can reach down to find relevant solutions to local-specific problems.
It is now widely recognized that, in addition to weather, soil and biology, cultural, social and economic criteria also determine what is a "good" technology. It is also recognized that "good" is in the eye of the user. More and more the search process involves the users, both men and women, increasing the probability for generating successful technology.
It is recognized that where market influence is weak, as in communities dominated by subsistence production, traits other than yield will be particularly important to farmers. These traits arise both from consumption needs and preferences, how the material tastes in local dishes, how it processes using local techniques, and how it stores to meet local needs, as well as on the impact the technology makes on the use of family labor in existing farming and other livelihood opportunities.
The widening recognition that traditional communities have strong indigenous generation, dissemination and diffusion processes for technological innovation has come through Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITK), in which the International Potato Centre (CIP) has been particularly active through its anthropologists. Farming Systems Research (FSR), with IRRI, CIMMYT, ICARDA and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) heavily involved, and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) movements with CIAT and ICLARM as the CGIAR's strongest protagonists.
Using the traditional ITK process is the important element. Using indigenous knowledge will not keep up in the race with population. We know that from past experiences. However, interfacing the indigenous knowledge process with modem science and the more formal research sector, offers a "user-friendly" research and development process with communities driving it. The use of participatory methods to mobilize indigenous processes for technology generation and diffusion requires less government involvement and expense, and at the same time, by bringing community ownership to the process increases its effectiveness.
Recent International Agricultural Research Centres (IARC) initiatives have moved this trend further. Early exposure to farmers even on research stations helps to ensure relevance in plant material and avoids locking scarce human and budget resources into the development of plant types which farmers, even in early breeding cycles, can easily identify as unacceptable to them. In a state-of-the-art pilot study in Rwanda, CIAT and national program staff compared results from farmer and breeder selections of bush beans. They found that farmer participants chose breeders' materials which would perform well in their own home ecosystems. The 21 cultivars selected by farmers added greatly to diversity and outperformed their own mixtures, planted in their own fields, on 64-89 per cent of occasions, with average production increases of up to 38 per cent. This performance was compared to earlier country-wide trials of breeder selections which outyielded local mixtures in 41-51 per cent of on-farm trials with a highest average increase of eight per cent in any one season.
The evolution of an effective interface between small, resource-poor farmers and the research process is perhaps the most important outcome of the Green Revolution and of the widening involvement of a range of institutions, from governments to NGOs, at the poverty/environment nexus. Beyond this there are signs, as social pressures increase, that governments are willing to change their policies in order to mobilize new technologies. It is a dimension likely to become of increasing importance as the social costs and benefits of environmental degradation are better factored into technology design.
However, for the more complex issues of soil, water and biological processes the time-lag between research and solving the problem on the ground remains a deterrent to political commitment to research investment. It therefore remains an open question whether either donor or recipient governments expect science to repeat its success in increasing food supply as well as conserving soil, water and biodiversity through the next millennium.
Mike Collinson is science adviser to the CGIAR Secretariat in Washington, D.C.
Plantation forestry has been practised since the early Egyptians and Greeks, with enormous benefits for communities and countries, providing valuable and often vital forest products, helping to restore soil fertility, improving the microclimate, and protecting land, crops, animals and humans.
The environmental impacts of forest plantations vary according to the establishment methodology, species planted, and the rotation length employed. More research is needed on the use of certain species, for instance eucalypts, and the effect of plantations on soils. Caution should be taken in implementing aggressive plantation programs because it is not advisable to establish millions of hectares of tree plantations without due consideration of the overall ecological and economic benefits.
Investment in plantations should be guided by ecological and economic assessment of performance alternatives, taking into consideration impacts on biodiversity and the risks of fungal and insect diseases.
As techniques for successful establishment and management of plantations are well developed, the problem is adapting these techniques to specific environments, in consultation with local farmers and communities prior to investment in farm woodlots or plantations.
Plantation monoculture should be avoided:
- in natural forest areas where biodiversity conservation is a prime concern;
- in arid or semi-arid zones where long-term water availability for farming is of vital importance;
- on steep hillsides where suppression of ground vegetation could accelerate erosion.
More research is needed into multipurpose tree species (MPTs) satisfying the local populations' requirements of fruits, fuelwood, building poles and fodder, in addition to timber.
CGIAR staff
Mixed farming depicted in a tomb wall-painting, Thebes, Egypt (Photo by AKG/Erwin Lessing)
One thing the "monoculture mind" has produced in plenty, is problems
By Vandana Shiva
In her controversial book, The violence of the Green Revolution, Indian scientist Vandana Shiva levelled a devastating attack on the assumptions of high-input agriculture, detailing its real social and environmental costs in developing countries. Having thus thrown a rock into the hornet's nest, she proceeded to throw another, publishing Monocultures of the mind - excerpted below - in 1993. In the latter, she argues against the "monocultural" (single-crop) mind-set which, largely for the sake of short-term economic gain, moves toward simplification and uniformization in agriculture, forestry and eventually all of social life.
In agriculture, too, the monoculture mind creates the monoculture crop. The miracle of the new seeds has most often been communicated through the term "high-yielding varieties (HYVs)." The HYV category is central to the Green Revolution paradigm. However, unlike what the term suggests, there is no neutral or objective measure of "yield" on the basis of which the cropping systems based on miracle seeds can be established to be higher yielding than the cropping systems they replace. It is now commonly accepted that, even in the most rigorous of scientific disciplines, such as physics, there are no neutral observational terms. All terms are theory laden.
The HYV category is similarly not a neutral observational concept. Its meaning and measure are determined by the theory and paradigm of the Green Revolution. And this meaning is not easily and directly translatable for comparison with the agricultural concept of indigenous farming systems, for a number of reasons. The Green Revolution category of HYV is essentially a reductionist category which decontextualizes properties of both the native and the new varieties. Through the process of decontextualization, costs and impacts are externalized and systemic comparison with alternatives is precluded.
Cropping systems, in general, involve an interaction between soil, water and plant genetic resources. In indigenous agriculture, for example, cropping systems include a symbiotic relationship between soil, water, farm animals and plants. Green Revolution agriculture replaces this integration at the level of the farm with the integration of inputs, such as seeds and chemicals. The seed/chemical package sets up its own interactions with soils and water systems - which are, however, not taken into account in the assessment of yields.
Modem plant breeding concepts like HYVs reduce farming systems to individual crops and parts of crops. Crop components of one system are then measured with crop components of another. Since the Green Revolution strategy is aimed at increasing the output of a single component of a farm, at the cost of decreasing other components and increasing external inputs, such a partial comparison is by definition biased to make the new varieties "high- yielding" when, at the systems level, they may not be.
Women in Rajasthan, India, harvesting a so-called "improved" variety of rice (FAO photo by H. Null)
Unrealistic assessments
Traditional farming systems are based on mixed and rotational cropping systems of cereals, pulses, oilseeds with diverse varieties of each crop, while the Green Revolution package is based on genetically uniform monocultures. No realistic assessments are ever made of the yield of the diverse crop outputs in the mixed and rotational systems. Usually the yield of a single crop like wheat or maize is singled out and compared to yields of new varieties. Even if the yields of all the crops were included, it is difficult to convert a measure of pulse into an equivalent measure of wheat, for example, because in the diet and in the ecosystem, they have distinctive functions.
The protein value of pulses and the calorie value of cereals are both essential for a balanced diet, but in different ways. One cannot replace the other. Similarly, the nitrogen-fixing capacity of pulses is an invisible ecological contribution to the yield of associated cereals. The complex and diverse crop- ping systems based on indigenous varieties are therefore not easy to compare to the simplified monocultures of HYV seeds. Such a comparison has to involve entire systems and cannot be reduced to a comparison of a fragment of the farm system. In traditional farming systems, production has also involved maintaining the conditions of productivity. The measurement of yields and productivity in the Green Revolution paradigm is divorced from seeing how the processes of increasing output affect the processes that sustain the condition for agricultural production. While these reductionist categories of yield and productivity allow a higher destruction that affects future yields, they also exclude the perception of how the two systems differ dramatically in terms of inputs.
The indigenous cropping systems are based only on internal organic inputs. Seeds come from the farm, soil fertility comes from the farm and pest control is built into the crop mixtures. In the Green Revolution package, yields are intimately tied to purchased inputs of seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, petroleum and to intensive and accurate irrigation. High yields are not intrinsic to the seeds, but are a function of the availability of required inputs, which in turn have ecologically destructive impacts.
As Dr. Palmer concluded in the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development's 15-nation study of the impact of the seeds, the term high-yielding varieties is a misnomer because it implies that the new seeds are high yielding in and of themselves. The distinguishing feature of the seeds, however, is that they are highly responsive to certain key inputs, such as fertilizers and irrigation. Palmer therefore suggested the term "high-responsive varieties (HRVs)" in place of high-yielding varieties. In the absence of additional inputs of fertilizers and irrigation, the new seeds perform worse than indigenous varieties. With the additional inputs, the gain in output is insignificant compared to the increase in inputs. The measurement of output is also biased by restricting it to the marketable part of crops. However, in a country like India, crops have traditionally been bred and cultivated to produce not just food for man, but fodder for animals, and organic fertilizer for soils. According to A.K. Yegna Narayan Aiyer, a leading authority on agriculture, "as an important fodder for cattle and in fact as the sole fodder in many tracts, the quantity of straw obtainable per acre is important in this country. Some varieties which are good yielders of grains suffer from the drawback of being low in respect to straw." He illustrates the variation in the grain: straw ratio with yields from the Hebbal farm.
In Karnataka, India, oil-palms are cropped with jasmine grown for perfume (Photo by Gustaaf Blaak)
Conscious sacrifice
In the breeding strategy for the Green Revolution, multiple uses of plant biomass seem to have been consciously sacrificed for a single use, with non-sustainable consumption of fertilizer and water. The increase in marketable output of grain has been achieved at the cost of decrease of biomass for animals and soils and the decrease of ecosystem productivity due to overuse of resources.
The increase in production of grain for marketing was achieved in the Green Revolution strategy by reducing the biomass for internal use on the farm. This is explicit in a statement by M.S. Swaminathan:
"High-yielding varieties of wheat and rice are high yielding because they can use efficiently larger quantities of nutrients and water than the earlier strains, which tended to lodge or fall down if grown in soils with good fertility...They thus have a harvest index (i.e. the ratio of the economic yield to the total biological yield) which is more favorable to man. In other words, if a high-yielding strain and an earlier tall variety of wheat both produce, under a given set of conditions, 1 000 kg of dry matter, the high- yielding strain may partition this dry matter into 500 kg for grain and 500 kg for straw. The tall variety, on the other hand, may divert 300 kg for grain and 700 kg for straw."
The reduction of outputs of biomass for straw production was probably not considered a serious cost, since chemical fertilizers were viewed as a total substitute for organic manure, and mechanization was viewed as a substitute for animal power. According to one author:
"It is believed that the Green Revolution type of technological change permits higher grain production by changing the grain foliage ratio... At a time when there is urgency for increasing grain production, an engineering approach to altering the product mix on an individual plant may be advisable, even inevitable. This may be considered another type of survival technological change. It uses more resources, returns to which are perhaps unchanged (if not diminished)."
It was thus recognized that in terms of overall plant biomass, the Green Revolution varieties could even reduce the overall yields of crops and create scarcity in terms of output such as fodder.
Finally, there is now increasing evidence that indigenous varieties could also be high-yielding, given the required inputs. R.H. Richaria has made a significant contribution to the recognition that peasants have been breeding high-yielding varieties over centuries. Richaria reports:
"A recent varietal-cum-agronomic survey has shown that nearly nine per cent of the total varieties grown in Uttar Pradesh fall under the category of high-yielding types (3 705 kg and above per hectare)."A farmer planting a rice variety called Mokdo of Bastar who adopted his own cultivation practices obtained about 3 700 to 4 700 kg of paddy per hectare. Another rice grower of Dhamtari block (Raipur) with just a hectare of rice land, falling not in an uncommon category of farmers, told me that he obtains about 4 400 kg of paddy per hectare from Chinnar variety, a renowned scented type, year after year with little fluctuation. He used FYM supplemented at times with a low dose of nitrogen fertilizer. For low-lying areas in Farasgaon block (Bastar), a non-lodging tall rice variety Surja with bold grains and mildly scented rice may compete with Jaya in yield potential at lower doses of fertilization, according to a local grower who showed me his crop of Surja recently.
"During my recent visit of the Bastar area in the middle of November 1975, when the harvesting of a new rice crop was in full swing in a locality, in one of the holdings of an adivasi cultivator, Baldeo of Bhara tribe in village Dhikonga of Jugalpur block, I observed a field of Assam Chudi ready for harvest with which the adivasi cultivator has stood for crop competition. The cultivator has applied the fertilizer approximately equal to 50 kg/N per hectare and has used no plant protection measures. He expected a yield of about 5 000 kg/ha. These are good cases of applications of an intermediate technology for increasing rice production. The yields obtained by those farmers fall in or above the minimum limits set for high yields and these methods of cultivation deserve full attention."
India is a vavilov centre or centre of genetic diversity of rice. Out of this amazing diversity, Indian peasants and tribals have selected and improved many indigenous high-yielding varieties. In South India, in semi-arid tracts of the Deccan, yields went up to 5 000 kg/ha under tank and well irrigation. Under intensive manuring, they could go even higher. As Yegna Narayan Aiyer reports:
"The possibility of obtaining phenomenal and almost unbelievably high yields of paddy in India has been established as the result of the crop competitions organized by the central government and conducted in all states. Thus even the lowest yield in these competitions has been about 5 300 lb/acre, 6 200 lb/acre in West Bengal, 6 100, 7 950 and 8 258 lb/acre in Thirunelveli, 5 623 and 6 769 lb/acre in South Arcot, 11 000 lb/acre in Coorg and 12 000 lb/acre in Salem."
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The Green Revolution was build on the displacement of genetic diversity. |
The Green Revolution package was built on the displacement of genetic diversity at two levels. Firstly, mixtures and rotation of diverse crops like wheat, maize, millets, pulses and oilseeds were replaced by monocultures of wheat and rice. Secondly, the introduced wheat and rice varieties reproduced over a large scale as monocultures came from a very narrow genetic base, compared to the high genetic variability in the population of traditional wheat or rice plants. When HYV seeds replace native cropping systems, diversity is lost and is irreplaceable.
The destruction of diversity and the creation of uniformity simultaneously involve the destruction of stability and the creation of vulnerability. Local knowledge on the other hand, focuses on multiple use of diversity. Rice is not just grain, it provides straw for thatching and mat-making, fodder for livestock, bran for fish ponds, husk for fuel. Local varieties of crops are selected to satisfy these multiple uses. The so-called HYV varieties increase grain production, by decreasing all other outputs, increasing external inputs, and introducing ecologically destructive impacts.
Local knowledge systems have evolved tall varieties of rice and wheat to satisfy multiple needs. They have evolved sweet cassava varieties whose leaves are palatable as fresh greens. However, all dominant research on cassava has focused on breeding new varieties for tuber yields, with leaves which are unpalatable.
Ironically, breeding for a reduction in usefulness has been viewed as important in agriculture, because uses outside those that serve the market are not perceived or taken into account. The new ecological costs are also left out as "externalities" thus rendering an inefficient wasteful system productive.
There is, moreover, a cultural bias, which favors the modern system, a bias which becomes evident in the naming of plant varieties. The indigenous varieties, or landraces, evolved through both natural and human selection, and produced and used by Third World farmers worldwide are called "primitive cultivars." Those varieties created by modem plant breeders in international agricultural research centres or by transnational seed corporations are called "advanced" or "elite."
Clearing a forest, Guyana (FAO photo by J. Ciganovic)
Yet the only aspect in which the new varieties have really been "advanced" has been in their ecologically appropriate systems not through test and evaluation, but through the unscientific rejection of local knowledge as primitive and the false promise of "miracles" - miracle trees and miracle seeds. Yet as Angus Wright has observed:
"One way in which agricultural research went wrong was precisely in saying and allowing it to be said that some miracle was being produced... Historically, science and technology made their first advances by rejecting the idea of miracles in the natural world. Perhaps it would be best to return to that position."
Monocultures non-sustainable
The crucial characteristic of monocultures is that they do not merely displace alternatives, they destroy their own basis. They are neither tolerant of other systems, nor are they able to reproduce themselves sustainably. The uniformity of the "normal" forest that "scientific" forestry attempts to create becomes a prescription for non-sustainability.
The displacement of local forest knowledge by "scientific" forestry was simultaneously a displacement of the forest diversity and its substitution by uniform monocultures. Since the biological productivity of the forest is ecologically based on its diversity, the destruction of local knowledge, and with it of plant diversity, leads to a degradation of the forest and an undermining of its sustainability. The increase in productivity from the commercial point of view destroys productivity from the perspective of local communities. The uniformity of the managed forest is meant to generate "sustained yields." However, uniformity destroys the conditions of renewability of forest ecosystems, and is ecologically non- sustainable.
In the commercial forestry paradigm sustainability is a matter of supply to the market, not the reproduction of an ecosystem in its biological diversity or hydrological and climatic stability. As Schlich states, "forest working plans regulate, according to time and locality, the management of forests in such a manner, that the objects of the industry are as fully as possible realized." Sustained yield management is aimed at producing "the best financial results, or the greatest volume, or the most suitable class of produce." If this could be ensured while maintaining the forest ecosystem, we would have sustainability for market supplies of industrial and commercial wood. However, "sustained yields" as conceived in forestry management, are based on the assumption that the real forest, or the natural forest is not a "normal" forest, it is an "abnormal" forest. When normalcy is determined by the demands of the market, the non- marketable components of the natural forest ecosystem are seen as abnormal - and are destroyed by prescriptions of forest working plans.
Uniformity in the forest is the demand of centralized markets and centralized industry. How- ever, uniformity acts against nature's processes. The transformation of mixed natural forests into uniform monocultures allows the direct entry of tropical sun and rain, baking the forest soils dry in the heat, washing the soils off in the rain. Less humid conditions are the reason for rapid retrogression of forest regions. The recent fires of Kalimantan, Indonesia, are largely related to the aridization caused by the conversion of rain forests into plantations of eucalyptus and acacias. Floods and drought are created where the tropical forest had earlier cushioned the discharge of water.
In tropical forests, selective felling of commercial species produces only small yields (5-25 m3/ha), whereas clear felling might produce as much as 450 m3/ha. The non- sustainability of selection fellings is also borne out by the experience of PICOP, a joint venture set up in 1952, between the American firm. International Paper Company, the world's largest paper producer, and the Andre Soriano Corporation in the Philippines. The company takes only about 10 per cent of the total volume of wood, roughly 73 cubic yards per acre of virgin forest. But the company's measurements of annual growth show that the second rotation will only yield 37 cubic yards of useful wood per acre, half as much as the first cut, and not enough to keep the company's plywood, veneer and sawmills functioning at a profitable level.
"Sustainable yields" can be managed for PICOP by reducing the diameter for extraction. At present the government allows PICOP to take out all trees larger than 32 inches in diameter, and a certain proportion of those that are 24 inches or more in diameter. If on the second rotation they could take out all trees bigger than 12 or 16 inches around, they could sustain supplies for another rotation. Taking smaller trees on the second cut would not, of course, make the forest grow faster, for a third, fourth and fifth rotation.
PICOP's plantations have also failed. It had to replant 30 000 acres of a variety of eucalyptus from Papua New Guinea that was attacked by pests. Its pine plantations of 25 000 acres have also failed. At $400 per acre, that was a $10 million mistake.
Angel Alcala, professor of biology of Siliman University in the Philippines observes that selective logging is good in theory, but it does not really work. "With selective logging, you are supposed to take only a few trees and leave the rest to grow, so you can return later and take some more, without destroying the forest. This is supposed to be a sustainable system. But here, although they use the phrase selective logging, there is only one harvest, a big one. After that, no more."
One study found that 14 per cent of a logging area is cleared for roads and another 27 per cent for skidder trucks. Thus more than 40 per cent of a concession can be stripped of protective vegetation and highly liable to erosion. It can be as high as 60 per cent.
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They damage or destroy more than three times as many trees as they deliberately harvest |
In dipterocarp forests, with an average of 58 trees per acre, for every 10 that are deliberately felled, 13 more are broken or damaged. Selective loggers damage more trees than they harvest. In one Malaysian dipterocarp forest, only 10 per cent of the trees were harvested and 55 per cent were destroyed or severely damaged. Only 33 per cent were unharmed. In Indonesia, according to the manager of Georgia-Pacific, they damage or destroy more than three times as many as they deliberately harvest.
According to the Unesco report on tropical forest ecosystems, not many forests are rich enough to allow true selective working - the removal of each tree (of desirable species) as soon as it reaches commercial size. Not only does each tree cause considerable damage when it falls, but the heavy logging equipment needed causes further damage. To sum up, true selective felling is impracticable regardless of the structure, composition and dynamism of the original stands.
This paradigm which destroys the diversity of the forest community, either by clear felling or selective felling, simultaneously destroys the very conditions for the renewal of the forest community. While species diversity is what makes the tropical forest biologically rich, and sustainable, this same diversity leads to allow density of individual species. The reductionist paradigm thus converts a biologically rich system into an impoverished resource and hence a non-renewable one. Thus, while the annual biological production of tropical broadleaved forest is 300 tons/ha compared to 150 tons/ha, the annual production of commercial wood is only 0.14 m3/ha on the average in tropical forests compared to 1.08 m3/ha. In tropical Asia, commercial production is 0.39 m3/ha due to the richness in diversity of commercial species of the dipterocarp forests.
Biological suicide
In the dominant system, financial survival strategies determine the concept of "sustained yield," which are in total violation of the principles of sustaining biological productivity. Sustained yields based on continuously reducing exploitable diameter classes leads to biological suicide, and a total destruction of forests.
Lush mixed garden in Sri Lanka (Photo by Gustaaf Blaak)
L. Fahser reports how a forestry project in Brazil, aimed at "self-help" and satisfying basic needs, destroyed both the forests and the communities whose improvement it was aimed at:
"With the building up of the first Faculty of Forestry Science and the imparting of modem forestry knowledge, a milestone was actually reached in the forests of Brazil. A greater knowledge of economics encouraged trained people toward new approaches; the natural forest with its many species was replaced by huge timber plantations of fir and eucalyptus; weak and unreliable human workers were replaced by powerful timber harvesting machinery; the hitherto untouched coastal mountain ranges were conquered, using rope cranes as an elegant means of transport."Since forestry development aid began, afforestation in Parana has dropped from about 40 per cent to its present level of eight per cent. Transformation into steppe, erosion and periodical flooding are on the increase. Our highly qualified Brazilian counter- parts are now shifting their interest to the Amazon regions of the north where there are still plenty of forests and where they are "managing" cellulose timber plantations (e.g. Gmelina arborea) with rotation periods of only six years.
"What happened to the population during the roughly 20-year period of the project, to those people whose basic needs were to be satisfied and who were to be given aid so that they could help themselves? Parana is now largely cleared of forest and full of mechanized agriculture. Most Indios and many immigrants who lived there at subsistence level or as small farmers have silently disappeared, become impoverished and collected in the slums (favelas) in the vicinity of the cities. In forestry the capital-intensive unit based on the mechanization pattern of North America and Scandinavia is now dominant. Only a few experts and a few wage- earners are still needed for peak work periods."
Where the local knowledge is not totally extinct, communities resist the ecological destruction of introduced monocultures. "Greening" with eucalyptus works against nature and its cycles, and is being resisted by communities who depend on the stability of nature's cycles to provide sustenance in the form of food and water. The eucalyptus guzzles nutrients and water and, in the specific conditions of low rainfall zones, gives nothing back but terpenes to the soil. These inhibit the growth of other plants and are toxic to soil organisms which are responsible for building soil fertility and improving soil structure. The eucalyptus certainly increased cash and commodity flows, but it resulted in a disastrous interruption of organic matter and water flows within the local ecosystem. Its proponents failed to calculate the costs in terms of the destruction of life in the soil, the depletion of water resources and the scarcity of food and fodder that eucalyptus cultivation creates. Nor did they, while trying to shorten rotations for harvesting, see that tamarind, jackfruit and honge have very short rotations of one year in which the biomass harvested is far higher than that of eucalyptus, which they nevertheless declared a "miracle" tree. The crux of the matter is that fruit production was never the concern of forestry in the reductionist paradigm - it focused on wood, and wood for the market, alone. Eucalyptus as an exotic, introduced in total disregard of its ecological appropriateness has thus become an exemplar of anti-life afforestation.
People everywhere have resisted the expansion of eucalyptus because of its destruction of water, soil and food systems. On 10 August 1983, the small peasants of Barha and Holahalli villages in Tumkur district (Karnataka) marched en masse to the forestry nursery and pulled out millions of eucalyptus seedlings, planting tamarind and mango seeds in their place. This gesture of protest, for which they were arrested, spoke out against the virtual planned destruction of soil and water systems by eucalyptus cultivation. It also challenged the domination of a forestry science that had reduced all species to one (the eucalyptus), all needs to one (that of the pulp industry), and all knowledge to one (that of the World Bank and forest officials). It challenged the myth of the miracle tree: tamarind and mango are symbols of the energies of nature and of local people, of the links between these seeds and the soil, and of the needs that these trees - and others like them - satisfy in keeping the earth and the people alive. Forestry for food - food for the soil, for farm animals, for people - all women's and peasants' struggles revolve around this theme, whether in Garhwal or Karnataka, in the Santhal Perganas or Chattisgarh, in reserved forests, farmlands or commons. In June 1988, in protest against eucalyptus planting, villagers in northern Thailand burned down eucalyptus nurseries at a forestry station.
Fostering pests
The destruction of diversity in agriculture has also been a source of non-sustainability. The "miracle" varieties displaced the traditionally grown crops and through the erosion of diversity, the new seeds became a mechanism for introducing and fostering pests. Indigenous varieties or landraces are resistant to locally occurring pests and diseases. Even if certain diseases occur, some of the strains may be susceptible, while others will have the resistance to survive. Crop rotations also help in pest control. Since many pests are specific in particular plants, planting crops in different seasons and different years causes large reductions in pest population. On the other hand, planting the same crop over large areas year after year encourages pest build-ups. Cropping systems based on diversity thus have a built-in protection.
Having destroyed nature's mechanisms for controlling pests through the destruction of diversity, the "miracle" seeds of the Green Revolution became mechanisms for breeding new pests and creating new diseases. The treadmill of breeding new varieties runs incessantly as ecologically vulnerable varieties create new pests which create the need for breeding yet newer varieties.
The only miracle that seems to have been achieved with the breeding strategy of the Green Revolution is the creation of new pests and diseases, and with them the ever-increasing demand for pesticides. Yet the new costs of new pests and poisonous pesticides were never counted as part of the "miracle" of the new seeds that modem plant breeders had given the world in the name of increasing "food security."
Monocultures of the mind is available from: Third World Network, 87 Cantonment Road, 10250 Penang, Malaysia.
The Sasakawa Foundation's agenda is ambitious, but some critics think it needs revising
By Polly Stroud
It sounds like a miracle-in-the- making: a noted philanthropist joins forces with a former president of the United States and the "father of the Green Revolution" to fight hunger in Africa. With the blessing of the World Bank and the cooperation of UN agencies and important research institutions, the Sasakawa Foundation, Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug will bring agricultural development to the world's poorest and hungriest continent through the Sasakawa-Global 2000 project, or SG 2000.
SG 2000 is attempting to transfer to Africa the promise that the Green Revolution brought to Asia in the 1960s and later to Latin America with the introduction of new, high-yielding wheat and rice varieties.
Critics, however, fear that the program will also resurrect several of the original Green Revolution's serious problems, which only became apparent after the initial successes of the 1960s and '70s had been widely publicized.
No one denies that those successes included dramatic results. Food-deficit countries not only approached self-sufficiency in staples but were able to embark on ambitious programs of industrial and commercial development that have turned once undeveloped countries like the Republic of Korea into economic powerhouses. Invoking the Asian model at an SG 2000 workshop held in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1991, Donald L. Plucknett, scientific adviser to the Washington-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), said the Green Revolution "showed that national investments in agricultural research and development could pay big dividends. Countries in Asia began to move forward, with gains in agricultural productivity serving as the engine of growth."
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"We believe... Asia's Green Revolution can indeed be applied to Africa" |
But critics, speaking with the benefit of hind- sight, question the basic approach of the African venture. They say it takes a top-down rather than a participatory approach, promotes expensive, difficult-to-transport chemical fertilizers and pesticides - sometimes in doses well above the maxi- mums recommended by FAO guidelines - and makes farmers rely too heavily on commercial hybrid seeds. They point to a varietal loss of disease resistance, and an increased threat to biodiversity.
They also charge that the program is set up in such a way that it mainly benefits "rich" farmers. And they warn of serious effects the chemical fertilizers can have on some African soils.
From Africa's Agricultural Development in the 1990s: Can It Be Sustained? CASIN/SAA/ Global 2000
International Governance and Agricultural Development in Africa
Jimmy Carter
Former President of the USA
I would like to point our several circumstances that give us cause for encouragement as we consider sub-Saharan Africa's future and that help put African situation in perspective.
It is interesting to recall, for example, that major technical innovation in the agriculture of developed countries is a relatively recent phenomenon, as the experience of my own family illustrates.
Ever since my father's family arrived in North America from England 361 years ago, they have been farmers. In fact, I was the first one who had the chance to finish high- school. Conditions on the Georgia farm where I grew up were quite rudimentary. We had no running water, no electricity, and practically no farm machinery. We planted and harvested all of our crops by hand. We pulled every leaf off the cornstalks and stocked and dried them for use as cattle fodder. We pulled peanuts out of the ground by hand. If our peanut yield was a half ton per acre, it was worthy of a front page story in the local newspaper.
So, not that long ago agricultural technology in my own state was little different from what it is in much of sub-Saharan Africa today. Now, of course, Georgia peanut farmers regularly obtain yields of 2 tons per acre. The increase has resulted not so much from mechanization as from the application of basic science and technologies to production, which led to better varieties, improved soil fertility, and new knowledge about crop development.
I am currently chairing committee for the Carnegie Foundation that is analyzing the need to introduce science and technology in the developing nations. In preparing our first preliminary report, we have become increasingly aware of a breakdown in relations between donors and recipient countries or communities that greatly limits the transfer of technology. Often, there is little cooperation among donors, sometimes they even compete with one another. And as a result, very little feedback is generated about what works and what does not. Another problem is that developing nations seldom give clear signals about their needs to donors, who are anxious to be part of a success story. Often, the funds and suitable technology are available, but the relations among the groups involved are inadequate and sometimes even antagonistic.
Where development projects in the Third World have succeeded, I think the single most important factor has been governance within the countries involved. The recipients of donor funds and services must have the capacity to make efficient use of them. This is not always an easy conditions to fulfill, particularly in view of Africa's colonial past. When the colonial powers withdrew from the continent, they left behind little infrastructure and few people with sufficient preparation to deal with the huge challenges that lay ahead. To make matters worse, many of the new governments came into power.
Defending the methodologies
Yohei Sasakawa, son of Japanese shipbuilding magnate and philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa, and president of the foundation he founded in 1962, has ackowledged skepticism about SG 2000 but says it is not deserved. In a message to an SG 2000 work- shop at Cotonou, Benin, in 1993, the younger Sasakawa said:
"Although I realize that our methodologies may appear somewhat out of fashion to some, I want to clearly state that the Sasakawa Foundation fully supports Dr. Borlaug's vision and strategy for modernizing food production. We believe that many of the agricultural development lessons of Asia's Green Revolution can indeed be applied to Africa as well. Moreover, we know - as do the cooperating farmers - what is possible, especially if we seek bold solutions of a type that can radically improve the productivity of peasant farmers."
SG 2000 was born from the African famine of 1983-84, which ravaged the Sudan and some 20 other African countries. Like other charitable organizations worldwide, Ryoichi Sasakawa's Japanese Shipbuilding Industry Foundation delivered emergency food to starving Africans. Then Sasakawa began thinking about long-term solutions. In 1984, he approached Borlaug to ask about the possibilities of bringing the Green Revolution to sub-Saharan Africa. In 1985, some 30 scientists and public figures - former U.S. president Jimmy Carter among them - held a planning session in Geneva.
"One of the most exciting things that has happened to me is becoming involved with Mr. Ryoichi Sasakawa and his son, Yohei, and with my hero in agriculture, economics and peace - Dr. Norman Borlaug," Carter said later.
The Carter Presidential Center, which is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and involved in projects to monitor wars, promote democratic processes and systems, immunize children and eradicate guinea worm worldwide, became a partner, and SG 2000 went into action. It launched its first programs in the Sudan and Ghana in early 1986 and later moved into the United Republic of Tanzania, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Zambia. The work is carried out under the aegis of the non-profit Global 2000 organization, which is part of the Carter Center, the Sasakawa Africa Association, of which Borlaug is president, and the commercial Pioneer Seed company.
While the programs are not identical in each country, they share "common philosophical and programmatic elements," Borlaug told the 1991 workshop. "First," he said, "all of the projects are concerned with improving productivity in staple food crops grown by small-scale men and women farmers. Second, we selected countries where we knew sufficient research products and information had been generated which were appropriate for small-scale producers, but which were not reaching them for various reasons. Third, each of the projects is quite small, both in terms of staff and financial resources. Two to three internationally recruited scientists are assigned to each country project, where they work with national counterpart staff in national extension and research organizations."
Demonstrating technologies
The program focuses on demonstrating available technological packages in high-potential, rain-fed agricultural land in order to prove that rapid and substantial increases in food production are possible if the government makes the right policy choices. Extension workers are trained to carry on the work once the program ends.
It recommends what Borlaug describes as "moderate use of chemical fertilizers to restore soil fertility, in conjunction with improved varieties and more optimum agronomic practices so that farmers obtain greater returns on their investments." In some countries, farmers were given their first-year fertilizer requirement on credit, paying only after the crop was harvested. Farmers in the showcase villages in Ethiopia, however, must pay 50 per cent of the cost of seeds, fertilizers and other inputs on initial delivery.
"The program does not depend on expensive mechanization," Carter told the Benin workshop. "As a matter of fact, most of the farmers in this program still plant corn or sorghum, or wheat or millet by hand and cultivate with a hoe. But their yields average three times as much as their neighbors if they follow Dr. Borlaug's scientific and practical advice."
Last November, the World Bank entered the SG 2000 partnership in an effort to spread the program further. "Our SG 2000 organization has great flexibility to design and test new agricultural development initiatives on a pilot scale while the World Bank can finance the much larger-scale investments needed to strengthen African govern- mental institutions," Borlaug told a news conference in Washington.
After almost a decade of operation, SG 2000 can claim considerable success in demonstrating that farmers given improved seed and taught how and when to sow, weed and fertilize will produce dramatically higher yields. In the Sudan, which is in the grip of civil war, wheat production quadrupled in three years and remained more or less stable through drought and shortages of fertilizer. But there have also been marked failures. The first and most unforgettable of the failures was in Ghana in 1989, where the field program expanded in the field from 16 000 production test plots (PTPs) to nearly 80 000 - then collapsed.
Transport of water by donkey, Cape Verde (FAO photo by M. Marzot)
In a summary of what went wrong, the Tanzania workshop was told that the Ghana experience "shows what can happen when optimism about the possibilities for accelerating food production is carried to the extreme."
"...the PTPs were transformed from an extension demonstration activity into a commercial production program. This placed the extension officers, who were made responsible for managing input distribution and subsequent loan collection in addition to their purely extension education duties, in an untenable position. The result, according to a team that reviewed the project early in 1991, was a high rate of default on loans made to participating farmers. More than 50 000 of the 1989 PTPs were financed by the Ministry of Agriculture and several public sector banks. The high rate of default thus had a sobering effect on ministry officials as well as SG 2000 staff."
In 1990, the program shrank to 17 000 plots and once again became a vehicle for demonstrating technology.
Sustainability questioned
The workshop concluded that despite "the unfortunate consequences of mistakes made in 1989," SG 2000 had "positive effects" in Ghana. "Over a five-year period, national maize production increased by 40 per cent" and the program "opened new vistas to thousands of small-scale producers."
Writing several months later in the Information Centre for Low-External-Input and Sustainable Agriculture (ILEIA) newsletter, Elsie Ayeh of Ghana's Garu Agricultural Station agreed that the program had helped farmers increase their yield in the short term. "But," she asked, "should not its longer-term sustainability be determined?"
One of Ayeh's major concerns was that the program gave the impression that external inputs "are the only and most effective ones" farmers can use. "Pains are not taken to study the area, e.g. the soils and the locally available resources which could be used for the same purpose," she said.
She said farmers were made to believe that they had to use expensive commercial pesticides instead of ones prepared locally at a nominal cost. "Commercial pesticides cost 30 000 cedis (US$30) per gallon," she said. "Only 80 cedis (US$0.08) worth of soap is needed to make new insecticide to spray the same area of land as a gallon of commercial pesticides. But the farmers believe in the latter."
The same is true of fertilizer, Ayeh said. "Ask a farmer in the Bawku East (demonstration) area what his most crucial input is, and he'll say 'fertilizer." Yet, she said, the area produces more than adequate manure, "and farmers elsewhere in the south still produce well enough without depending so much on (inorganic) fertilizer."
Worse yet, she said, "excessive and unwise use of fertilizer has further depleted the soils in the Bawku East area: they are more or less 'dead.' The farmers were not informed of the pros and cons of using that technology."
Similar criticisms of excessive fertilizer use were made in Ethiopia more recently, where the Sasakawa program was calling for fertilizer use rates, more than double the economic rates recommended by FAO for projects in the same country. This seems to contradict Dr. Borlaug's claim that SG 2000 projects make only "moderate use of chemical fertilizers."
In Ghana, Ayeh said what had become crucial to farmers was not the SG 2000 strategy, but credit in the form of fertilizer at the right time. The program assumes that after the first year, the farmer would be able to store and sell the increased harvest to buy fertilizer for him or herself. "But this does not happen," Ayeh said. She said "rich" farmers, who can afford to give the extension workers "incentives," get themselves re-registered for fertilizer on credit and are counted as new entries to the program. In addition, she said, the quantity of fertilizer provided has dropped without warning and the types have been changed "without informing the farmers how to use the new types."
Ayeh had other criticisms: the extension staff collected the repayments too late, waiting until the farmer's money was gone; farmers were expected to repay on time even if the harvest was poor because of unfavorable weather; the large quantities of maize grown under the program flood the markets at harvest-time because the farmers need cash to meet their needs, and this drastically lowers prices.
More recently, a consultant to an international organization who visited Benin reported that SG 2000 has been forced to buy all the hybrid maize grown by demonstration farmers. The maize can't be stored on-farm because it is highly prone to pests, which cause serious post-harvest losses. Rural people refuse to buy the maize, and the only market is in urban areas.
Another consultant returned from a field mission sharply critical of SG 2000 operations in Ethiopia, where demonstrations began with 160 half-acre plots in 1993 and expanded to 1 600 last year.
"Organizers claim that the program is 'participatory' in that farmers pay for the inputs and carry out the demonstration on their own plots following the village extension agent's instructions," the consult- ant reported. "However, the project is an 'artificial laboratory.' SG 2000 selects the crops and technical packages without farmer consultation, procures the inputs and delivers them to the participating farmers via the village extension agent who also handles credit recovery. The packages are high-input/high- output/high-risk and create farmer dependency on imported hybrid seed (Pioneer) and fertilizer."
The consultant also cited as "major constraints" the need to apply fertilizer for maize, a varietal loss of disease resistance for wheat and the loss of sorghum varieties.
The program, concluded the consultant, "is neither participatory nor sustainable."
Of course, the problems to which critics point can be looked at as no more than the normal "growing pains" of any large-scale, urgently implemented effort to bring positive change - the same kinds of growing pains encountered by the first Green Revolution.
"Precisely the point," say critics. "We've already made these mistakes once; why make them twice?"
Planning for food security must take account of the multiple values of woodlands
By J.B. Ball, S. Braatz and C. Chandrasekharan
People have used forests as a source of food for uncountable thousands of years, domesticating wild forest species and intervening to favor the regeneration or growth of preferred plants. Woodlands are an obviously crucial component in assuring food security worldwide, not only because of the food, fuel and medicinal products taken from them, but through the wider environmental role they play in soil and water preservation and as natural "seed banks."
Yet their value is generally grossly underestimated in national accounts and often overlooked by precisely those policy-makers whose decisions most directly affect who will have enough to eat.
Biodiversity is food security
Forests are an in situ reservoir of wild relatives of agricultural crops. "True" forest species, which are today important food crops, include bananas and plantains, cocoa, cola nut, coffee and many fruit trees such as mango, pawpaw, guava and avocado pear, while important food producing species of the savanna zone include the shea-butter tree (Butyrospermum paradoxum). Such major staples as yams and cowpeas probably evolved on the forest mar- gins. Oil-palms were forest species, and today their concentration in the moist forests of southeast Nigeria is due to deliberate encouragement by humans. Wild rice originated in swampy areas within the forest.
After the oil-palm harvest, Ghana (Photo by Gustaaf Blaak)
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Forest products have been an integral part of rural socio-cultural systems |
Food security has been defined as "economic and physical access to food of adequate quantity and quality." Trees and forests contribute to this directly by providing food and fodder. Although some forest foods may not be the most desirable in times of plenty, they are valued as "famine foods" when other sources fail.
The forests' indirect contributions to food production include improved soil conservation, nitrogen fixation, watershed protection, regulation of water flow, rehabilitation of wastelands or highly degraded lands, and provision of natural pesticides. Forest resources can also play a critical role in producing the household income necessary for food purchases, as well as providing wood fuels and medicines.
Historically, forest products have been an integral part of rural socio-cultural systems. Poor households and those in marginally productive and environmentally fragile areas often still depend heavily on forest foods and other products. Kayapo Indians in the Amazon Basin rely heavily on semi-domesticated plants raised along trails or in forest fields for food, medicine, building materials, dyes, scent, insect repellent, etc. and the exchange of plants as gifts is an important social mechanism. The Kayapo also manage "resource islands" filled with the requisite species for human and animal survival (in particular resistant tubers) in times of disasters.
Though rarely staples, forest foods are highly important. In Java, agroforestry systems provide more than 40 per cent of the total calories consumed by some farming communities, while in Nigeria, traditional home gardens contain at least 60 species of trees which provide food products. Many edible forest products, used in prepared foods and beverages, play an important role in local food trade.
In forested areas of Africa and Latin America, game provides most of the meat eaten by rural populations: in savanna areas of Venezuela, some groups obtain almost all their calories from foraging. Even those who live primarily in agricultural settlements in some areas of Paraguay spend a quarter of their time foraging, while in Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, India, 80 per cent of forest dwellers depend on the forest for 25 to 50 per cent of their annual food requirements.
In predominantly subsistence economies in remote areas, forest products contribute to diet diversity and flavor, eaten as snacks or relishes to complement the usual starch staples. Forest foods balance diets by providing carbohydrates such as starches, fructose and other soluble sugars, protein, fats and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).
Most fruits and berries are rich in carbohydrates (fructose and soluble sugars), and in vitamins (in particular vitamin C) and minerals (calcium, magnesium, potassium). Some can also contain protein, fat or starch (such as bananas and plantains, or palm dates). Juicy fruits poor in proteins and oil are rich in vitamins and minerals. Nuts are rich in oils and carbohydrates. Chestnuts (Castanea sativa) have been for centuries a staple food of poor rural house-holds in forested areas of Europe. The shea-butter tree is second only to the oil-palm as the main source of fat in Africa, where many herbaceous plants and young leaves are eaten as vegetables and provide essential vitamins.
Starch reserves in stems, roots and tubers usually constitute a major food source in forest areas. Starch of sago palm (Metroxylon sp.) constitutes the main energy food for at least 300 000 people in Melanesia and one million people eat it regularly as part of their diet. Forest yams are consumed in Africa, Australia and Asia. Nectars an pollens contribute to the production of honey, thus constituting an important indirect element of local foods. Gums and saps provide proteins and minerals. Mushrooms in many societies are highly valued, and are sometimes considered "meat."
Invertebrate forest food sources include leaf-eating insects, caterpillars, snails and crabs. A total of 1 383 species of edible insects have been identified worldwide to date. Insects, very efficient in converting plant protein into insect protein, are an important source of fat in some areas. In many parts of the world, hunting remains an important subsistence activity and bushmeat provides a critical source of protein for both urban and rural populations. In Amazonia, indigenous 'groups living near large rivers acquire up to 85 per cent of their dietary protein through fishing. Snails and rats may be eaten several times a week in some villages.
The consumption of foods is as much a social matter as a biological need. Individual decisions regarding food acquisition and consumption are seldom independently made. They are generally guided by local cultural perceptions, attitudes and beliefs.
Women harvesting fruit of the Shea tree, Burkina Faso (FAO photo by R. Faidutti)
Beyond the forest
In many developing countries 50 to 80 per cent of domestic cattle depend on forest-provided fodder and grazing. Forest humus and green manure are used to fertilize fields, and access to the forest to collect these products is important to many cultivators.
Forests and trees play an important role in protecting the natural resource base on which sustainable agriculture depends. Forestry, by contributing to sound watershed management, can help regulate river flows which irrigate agricultural areas downstream. The planting or management of trees on farmlands in agroforestry systems (in which trees and shrubs are grown in association with field crops, pastures or livestock) contributes to soil fertility maintenance.
Uplands and lowlands are linked hydrologically, and land use changes in uplands may significantly affect the agricultural potential of lowlands. Deforestation coupled with poor land use practices in water catchment areas not only leads to erosion and decreased productivity on-site, but may result in losses of storage capacity in reservoirs, lowered irrigation potential, and flooding downstream. Examples are numerous. Farming practices on the slopes of the Andes and Himalayas have caused tragedy downstream in Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Substantial investment has been made in watershed rehabilitation efforts around Guinea's Fouta-Djalon Massif, known as "the water-tower of West Africa" for its tremendous importance to agricultural production in several West African countries.
Where rehabilitation is necessary, policy-makers should realize vegetative and soil treatment measures are often more appropriate means of stabilizing slopes than engineering structures, particularly in developing countries. Key forestry activities in watershed protection and rehabilitation include forest protection in critical areas, use of low-impact logging practices, afforestation or revegetation for catchment protection, fire control, and adoption of agroforestry systems that minimize erosion risk. It should be remembered that when upland people lose their arable land to erosion and runoff, they will migrate to less damaged areas, where they are unlikely to be welcome.
Agroforestry helps maintain levels of soil fertility by adding organic matter and nutrients, reducing losses through more closed nutrient cycling, and improving the physical, chemical and biological properties of soil. Agroforestry offers reduced dependence on agricultural inputs, often not available locally; wood and non- wood tree products for household or commercial use; as well as improved microclimate from shade and protection from winds.
Some widespread agroforestry systems found in the lowland humid tropics are plantation crop combinations (e.g. shade trees over cacao or intercropping food crops with cacao), plantation crops (e.g. coconuts) with livestock, and home gardens or multi-storey tree gardens such as the famous Kandy gardens in Sri Lanka or Javanese home gardens in Indonesia. Hedgerow intercropping (or alley-cropping) has proven an effective means of increasing soil fertility in subhumid or humid areas.
In the semi-arid and subhumid zones, sand-dune fixation, windbreaks and shelter- belts, multipurpose trees on croplands, silvo-pastoral systems (trees and shrubs on range- land and/or pasture) and woodlots for production of fuelwood or poles are some of the more promising systems. Major sand-dune fixation programs have been carried out in Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, the Niger and China among other places, for effective protection of important agricultural areas. While some tree species planted on croplands in semi-arid areas compete too much with crops for water resources, some species, notably Faidherbia albida (a.k.a. Acacia albida) in West Africa and Prosopis cineraria in India,: have contributed to an overall increase of crop production by increasing soil fertility.
Agroforestry clearly contributes to food security and has potential for further development. The environmental contribution of forestry and agroforestry may be less obvious, but is probably more significant overall than its more direct contribution through production of foodstuffs.
Although agroforestry is an ancient practice in many areas, it is a new science and much is still to be learned about the nature of interactions between tree, crop and animals in various systems. Agroforestry systems are complex by nature, requiring adequate analysis of ecological, economic and social factors and an understanding of the importance of each to system viability. Similarly, food security cannot be treated in isolation from questions of environmental security, household economy and overall integrated land use planning and management.
(The above-mentioned methods are beneficial to more productive areas as well as poor farming regions. For example, intercropping of paulownia trees with agricultural crops is widespread in the productive North China plain; this system is now practised on 59 per cent of arable lands in the provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Henan, Anhui, Shanxi and Jiangsu.)
Traditionally, villagers inhabiting the edge of Sri Lanka's Sinharanja rain forest have used a variety of plant species for food and medicine. Seeds of wild cardamom (Eletteria cardamomum), for example, are harvested by large groups of villagers from August to September. By virtue of their uses as a spice (used to flavor curries and cakes and exported to the Middle East, where they are added as a flavoring of coffee) and medicine (given internally for diseases of the liver and uterus, as a diuretic and to prevent vomiting in children), these seeds contribute to the local village economy. Woody stems of the liana Coscinium fenestratum are one of the commonest indigenous medicinal ingredients found in rural as well as urban households and are usually taken in combination with other medicinal plant products to treat a variety of ailments from fever to tetanus. Foods made with flour ground from fruit of the shorea tree are strongly recommended by local physicians for gastritis and other bowel ailments.
Source: "Underutilized food plant resources of Sinharanja Rain Forest," Gunatilleke & Gunatilleke, 1991, in Tropical forests, people and food, Unesco, 1993.
Eletteria cardamomum
Fuel and food security
Wood, mainly as firewood but also as charcoal, is important in food security in many ways. A 1980 FAO survey of the fuelwood situation in developing countries found that two billion people (or 75 per cent of the global population) depended on fuelwood for domestic energy, while 100 million were living in a situation of acute shortage.
Fuel shortages may mean food is inadequately cooked, or only cooked once a day, or people may rely on street vendors who sell snack or fast foods that may be less nutritious or less hygienically prepared. The time taken to find fuel when it is in short supply leaves less time for women, who mainly gather the fuel and cook the food, to engage in other tasks such as maintaining home gardens or income-generating activities. Fuelwood supplies also affect food processing and storage, for instance where fish is smoked and dried to preserve it. In the United Republic of Tanzania fuelwood scarcity around the fishing villages of Lake Victoria has led to increased costs which have been passed on to consumers as higher retail prices.
Income and employment are generated from forests by gathering or processing. Both usually are small-scale (often employing family labor), flexible, and may be seasonal. Many studies of gathering activities were summarized by FAO in 1989. One of the largest in India is the fuelwood trade. Most gatherers are women. The number of households engaged in the fuelwood industry has been estimated at 3-4 million in India, 830 000 in the Philippines and 600 000 in Pakistan.
Up to 7.5 million Indians, mostly women, collect tendu leaves (Diospyros melanoxylon) as wrappers for the bidi cigarette; a further three million Indians may be involved in the cigarette manufacture, an industry estimated at more than US$100 million yearly. Similarly, rattan is an important industry in the Philippines, Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia; the growing of gum arabic (Acacia Senegal) restores agricultural land and provides income to farmers in the Sudan.
FAO studies of processing activities divide rural industries relying on wood-based or biomass fuels into three categories: the processors of agricultural produce (for example, baking, parboiling, brewing, smoking, or distilling of food and beverages, soap or paper-making, preparation of dyes, medicines and many others); the processors of minerals (lime burning, brick-making, ceramic or pottery manufacture); and metal fabrication (casting, soldering, blacksmithing). The processing of rattan into furniture, which is closely linked to its collection, employs at least half a million people in Southeast Asia. Forest-based processing industries serving important export markets include rattan, brazil nuts, hearts of palm, gums and resins (such as gum arabic or turpentine), honey and beeswax, tanning materials, spices and many others.
Conclusions
The contribution of forests to food security may be felt far downstream of their immediate location. It is thus critical that in revisiting the Green Revolution, the potential contribution of trees and forests to increased agricultural production from fertile land, and their essential role in marginal lands should be evaluated.
Constraints that can limit the contribution of forests to food security must also be dealt with, including: lack of information; limitation of access to communities; insufficient post-harvest technology; poor marketing; lack of institutional support; and inappropriate consumer perceptions.
In drafting rural development plans, an integrated approach should be adopted to promote appropriate management of forest resources for their contribution to food security. This approach should be developed on the basis of local needs: relevant scientific research by anthropologists or botanists should be reviewed and complemented by community-level research, which retrieves relevant indigenous knowledge and understands its contribution.
Women are often more knowledgeable on food plants, as they are the main gatherers. Elderly people are generally better informed regarding traditional practices and trends. Data gathering, and related research carried out in a participatory way, should be undertaken, and from it new agricultural extension packages should be developed, incorporating forestry and nutrition-related information.
J.B. Ball, S. Braatz and C. Chandrasekharan are with the FAO Forestry Department, in Rome.
Further reading: Forests, trees and food (FAO, 1992), Community forestry field manual No. 3 (FAO, 1991a), Community forestry, Note No. 6 (FAO, 1990a), FAO forestry paper No. 90 (FAO, 1989), Tropical forests, people and food (Unesco, 1993, Man and the Biosphere series, Vol. 13).
Rapid agricultural expansion and deforestation in China have contributed to increased soil erosion, runoff, siltation of rivers and flooding. Reservoirs along the Yellow River basin (draining the heavily eroded Loess plateau) and the Yangtze River are showing alarming siltation rates which affect their storage capacity. In response, the government of China has launched massive forestry and agroforestry programs, including the "Three North" project, located in the arid/semi-arid zone of northwest, north central and northeast China. Started in 1978, it is now perhaps the world's largest agroforestry program. Large-scale farm shelterbelt systems have been established, sand-dunes have been fixed, forests have been planted for soil and water conservation, and other watershed rehabilitation works have been carried out, with positive results. An estimated 6.7 million hectares of farmland and 3.4 million ha of pastures have been protected.
Yield increases due to shelterbelt establishment averaging 16.4 per cent for maize, 36 per cent for soybean, 42.6 per cent for sorghum and 43.8 per cent for millet have been reported.
Reforesting China's Loess plateau (Photo by Ministry of Forestry, China)
