The importance of biodiversity in securing food for the future
Biodiversity forms the basis for food availability. This diversity of life is the stuff food is made from. Without it, there is no food. It is as simple as this. Yet economic development policies tend to ignore the pivotal role biodiversity plays in determining food security. As a result, biodiversity is being lost at a rapid pace, ecosystems are disappearing, species are being lost, and the variety of life or genetic diversity within given species is being reduced. Many experts fear that if this trend continues, we will not be able to produce enough food for the 9 billion people that will populate the world in 2050.
It is important to emphasize the word 'diversity' when unbundling the meaning of biodiversity, for it is this diversity that ensures food security through intricate natural processes operating at the ecosystem, species, and genetic strata of biodiversity existence, wielding influence across all geographic and governance scales on our planet. Scientists are becoming more and more aware of the fact that all strata of biodiversity existence are equally important in determining the integrity of a sustainable life on earth. Economic development policies need to recognize that ecosystems, species, and the genetic variety within species are all interdependently connected.
At the ecosystem strata, it is important to appreciate the importance of maintaining variety and extent of ecosystems in short, the importance of protected areas. Take for example the Amazon forests. While we are familiar with the idea that they store carbon, as well as a wealth of species and genetic diversity, we are only beginning to be aware of the value of their function as a rain factory. According to PavanSukhdev, leader of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study on the economics of biodiversity loss, the Amazon forest up to 20 billion tons of water vapor per day into the air. Water vapor is sucked up, gathered and transported by the north-eastern trade winds, until it eventually precipitates in the form of rainfall in the La Plaza Basin. This rain effectively feeds an agriculture economy at the order of US$240 billion for Latin American countries including Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, yet these countries do not pay anything for this rain and for the protection of the Amazon biodiversity.
Saving biodiversity at the ecosystem level often demands action and financing far beyond the geographical boundaries of nations. Thus the TEEB for Policy Makers Responding to the Value of Nature which was published in 2008, suggest the importance of governments joining forces to internationally work towards increasing the geographic coverage and funding for global protected area networks. This would leverage the potential of ecosystems to maintain biodiversity and expand the flow of services for local, national and global benefits.
There is a connection between diversity of species and food security for the poor. At the species strata of biodiversity existence, economic development policies need to pay closer attention to understand the relationship between informal and formal economies in developing countries. According to TEEB, around 13.9 percent of the earth's land surface, 5.9 percent of territorial seas and only 0.5 percent of the high seas were under protection, yet more than 1 billion people depend on these protected areas for a significant percentage of their livelihoods. These people suffer increased poverty when natural ecosystems and biodiversity is lost. They predominantly exist within the informal economy, harvesting naturally available plants, catching fish and hunting animals for their own use and to sell, at which point their dependencies on natural resources connects with the formal market economy.
In highly populated Java, for example, rural women often sustain their family livelihoods by gathering resources in forests, cultivating small plots of agriculture lands, and then selling the surplus of both activities to the urban poor through the informal markets. This way the urban poor gain access to nutritious food at a low cost. However, when natural ecosystems deteriorate and biodiversity erodes, the lowest rung of urban workers within the formal economy who depend on the informal sector for cheap food, also suffer as the nutrition content of street foods are reduced. People notice for example that various vegetables such as kecipir (winged bean), tespong (Oenanthejavanica), genjer (yellow burrhead), and wild proteins such as haremis (clam), ells and various wild fowl which used to be abundant have now disappeared.
According to the Food and Agricultural Organization estimates, roughly a quarter million plant varieties are available for agriculture. The problem is that formal agriculture is based on less than 150 species. The invisibility of the value of species, and the invisibility of informal economic benefits derived by local communities from healthy natural ecosystems, is often overridden by the artificially lucrative returns offered by formal commercial agriculture.
The TEEB report for policymakers presents a study carried out by Barbier (2007) in Southern Thailand on conversion of mangroves into monoculture shrimp farms. This study showed that while annual private economic returns were estimated at US$1,220 per hectare, this return did not account for rehabilitation costs at US$9,318 hectare, which would need to be done when the pond is abandoned after five years. Neither did it account for the benefits provided by mangroves for local communities which included around US$584/hectare (ha) for collected wood and non-wood forest products, US$987/ha for providing nursery for off-shore fisheries and US$10,821/ha for coastal protection against storms, totaling US$12,392/ha.
The study clearly shows that the overall value of intact mangrove is greater than the conversion of it into a shrimp farm. But without the correct policies in place, time and again decisions favor the conversion of mangroves for short-term private profits at the cost of increased vulnerability of ecosystems and of the poor. Sadly in the long term, this focus on short-term financial gain will also compromise food security for the future. For mangroves are essential for fish production in coastal areas, because they provide a rich habitat to about 75 percent of fish caught within adjacent areas as well as to a large number of crustaceans such as crabs and other wild life. When mangroves are lost, local fishermen will directly be impacted through reduced abundance in their fish catch.
Especially from a climate adaptation perspective, it is important to protect the genetic diversity of biological species. There is a definite role played by women in conserving genetic diversity.
Women in rural Indonesia, for instance, can provide important lessons-learned on the ways and means to conserve and use genetic diversity to build resilience towards climate change in food and agriculture systems.
A new book published by the Global Environment Facility Small Grant Program in Indonesia, PengalamanTerbaikMenginspirasi Indonesia (Best Practices Inspiring Indonesia) provides a wealth of inspiring insights on how women throughout the country are promoting food security through biodiversity and genetic conservation. One such case serves as an important example of how by strengthening the relationship between biodiversity and culture, a community's dependence on soybean, which is currently a contentious import commodity in Indonesia, has been avoided.
Women in the Wonogiri district, Central Java, have revitalized and developed an entire industry of tempe, from a variety of legumes besides soybean. The foundations for this security was planted in the early 1990s, by a group of young women activists who believed in the importance of protecting the genetic diversity of varieties of legumes traditionally used in the area, for the sake of achieving sustainable agriculture and poverty alleviation. In doing so, they counter-intuitively swam against the dominant trend of agricultural industrialization, and the tendency to replace diverse agricultural landscapes with monoculture varieties of economic products. They did this, not by reintroducing anything new, but by digging deeper into the then disappearing traditional culinary culture. As a result, in Wonogiri today farmers still produce eight different kinds of legume that are not produced at an economic scale by farmers in other regions. They are also proudly delivering a variety of different kinds of tempe to the market.
More research is needed to better understand the connections between the role women play in agriculture in relation to saving biodiversity and assuring food security for the future. But we cannot wait for everything to be explained before taking action, policymakers need to take a leap of faith to invest more in biodiversity, culture and women, even if they do not directly reflect a visible immediate financial return within national accounting systems. After all, as the wise saying goes when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, we will realize that we cannot eat money.
Chandra Kirana is Director of Green Economy Initiatives at Daemeter Consulting. This article first appeared in Tempo Magazine’s Special Report on 1 October 2013.