Agricultural Biodiversity

The value of biodiversity #3

Since its very beginning, humankind has relied on natural resources to survive. After nomadism, agriculture has provided the most ancient and traditional form of human sustenance. Through the domestication of wild animals and plants, from ancient Egypt to China and from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, cultivation and agriculture developed in several parts of the globe almost 10,000 years before Christ. However, the great differentiation of climate, culture, landscape, and geology led to a wide variety of crops, foods, and production techniques, many of which still constitute immense historical and cultural heritage.

Beyond providing mankind the essential means for survival, agriculture has always directly connected man to nature. Not coincidentally, still today we refer to agriculture as the primary sector.

Starting from these premises, why is the protection and advancement of agricultural biodiversity needed?

Agrodiversity or agrobiodiversity?

Although at first glance they might seem synonymous, agrodiversity and agrobiodiversity refer to two distinct areas. The first one, agrodiversity, is defined by FAO as ‘‘the many ways in which farmers use the natural diversity of the environment for production, including not only their choice of crops but also their management of land, water, and biota as a whole.”

Conversely, agricultural biodiversity or agrobiodiversity refers to the plurality of gifts offered by nature, including crops, land, and marine species that can be directly (harvested) or indirectly support food production or agro-ecosystems. In other words, crop species and varieties, wild and semi-domesticated animals hunted for food (livestock and fish species), micro-biota, pollinators, and other insects that contribute to agricultural, pastoral, forest, and aquatic ecosystems, and diversity of agro-ecosystems.

Agrodiversity merges with agrobiodiversity, meaning that human activities (agricultural practices, farm management and organization, and uses of natural resources) directly affect the abundance of fruits given by the Earth, both in negative and positive terms.

“Food is an agricultural act. There is a very close connection between where and how our food is grown or raised and our health.” — Wendell Berry

Invisible, ancient, forgotten or novel: embracing the diversity of foods and crops

Are we really aware of the great variety of food and crops available on the planet?

It may be easier, especially for Western consumers, to have a clear image of agricultural biodiversity when thinking about the rich and colorful selection of fruits, vegetables, pulses, and meat available in the supermarkets: diversities that know no geographical distance nor seasonal limitations.

However, this is nothing compared with the abundance offered by Mother Nature, even just referring to local crop varieties.

Globally, there are about 7,500 varieties of apples, 2,500 varieties of pears. In ancient times, Andean farming communities alone cultivated more than 5,000 varieties of multicolored potatoes.

This diversity has long represented the foundation of nutrient-rich diets, created the perfect habitat for terrestrial and marine biodiversity, enriched the landscape, traveled with farmers and their seeds, and improved and evolved to become more resilient, creating new varieties and influencing food traditions.

But why then, when we now think about apples, can we list no more than four to five varieties? Why do the majority of people believe that only one type of banana exists?

Because, despite hundreds of varieties, 90% of the banana market is dominated by one variety: the Cavendish. Just as pears, where only two varieties share 96% of the global pear market. In the United States, almost 95% of crop varieties are irreparably lost.

These statistics refer to ancient, neglected, or forgotten crops, those that have not survived the dynamics of the global markets, the aesthetic standards required by consumers (color/flavor/size), or the optimum performance demanded by producers.

It is a price we are all paying: limiting the range of crop varieties inevitably accelerates “diet monotony,” a trend that, characterized by the relevant exclusion of nutrition sources, drives vitamin and mineral deficiencies, also known as hidden hunger.

But our food systems are also inevitably affected: becoming less resilient because they are less diverse. Intensive farming methods today often rely on the mass use of fertilizers and pesticides, further depleting nutrients and impoverishing the soil, on which all the biodiversity directly or indirectly depends.

Standardization kills diversity in all its forms. Not only the diversity of foods and crops but also the invisible diversity: the diversity within food. The reference is to microbial diversity, the (good) bacteria naturally found in food once it is transformed (as in cheeses or through fermentation, such as for wine, beer, and bread) that massively increase the nutritional value of foods and the well-being of human microbiota. A central value of food that we are losing in the current rush of the agrifood system for “more and faster.”

But there is good news. Propelled by the human tendency to understand the value of things only when they are taken away, the so-called beauty from deprivation, there is a growing trend to rediscover ancient or forgotten varieties, just as raw and unprocessed foods, driven by the desire to recover the richness in genetic, dietary, nutritional diversity. A motivation that also comes from the policy level, as the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has recently opened up the use of insects (specifically the Yellow Mealworm) as a food for human consumption. A big step onward for novel foods, foods that, by definition, were not consumed to any significant extent within the European Union prior to 1997.

Consumers are now eager to include variety and diversity in their lives and recipes. It means including the rainbow in our dishes.

Agrobiodiversity and landscape diversity: two sides of the same coin

Landscapes are often a beautiful mosaic of farmers’ fields, natural and semi-natural habitats, grazing animals, variety and diversity of crops and practices. Panoramas where the territory merges with history, knowledge, wisdom, time, and diversity, remaining visible to the eyes of the beholder. From the most traditional to the most innovative, it is not possible to separate food practices and agriculture biodiversity from the landscape.

The Mediterranean Diet, as a way of living long before a way of eating embodied in a sustainable and highly diverse diet, is one outstanding example of how polycultures are right at the center of the “set of skills, knowledge, rituals, symbols, and traditions concerning crops, harvesting, fishing, animal husbandry, conservation, processing, cooking, and particularly the sharing and consumption of food.”, as UNESCO recognized.

But also transhumance, the seasonal droving of livestock along migratory routes in the Mediterranean and in the Alps, recently included among the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage, is perfectly embedded in the rich geological, geomorphological, and hydrological diversity of the landscape (geodiversity), as seasonal movements of livestock and shepherds require in-depth knowledge of both the territory and needs of the animals.

The increasingly evident relationship between local food and geological heritage has recently brought UNESCO to recognize and value GEOfood as a bridge between geodiversity and food production.

Not surprisingly, regenerative agriculture practices, such as biodynamics, agroecology, agroforestry, permaculture, based on preservation, self-sufficiency, and high levels of diversity (of crops and practices), also take advantage of the symbiotic relationships that are typical of highly diverse environments. In turn, this leads to more nutritious foods and more resilient territories. Territories that are now revealing their power and beauty to consumers, tourists, or simply travelers.

Practices such as foraging, food and wine experiences, and proximity tourism, which are currently on the rise, are only possible by thoroughly safeguarding the richness of diversity we have at our disposal.

The snow on the trees,

the red of certain apples

that no one picks,

the leaves that will come

and then the goats, the sheep, the dogs

the songs and the hugs,

the tender knots of the humans.

The serene democracy of the leaves,

the kindness, the clemency,

the care of going out

and look at the landscape.

This is the new humanism,

something that resembles

a cherry tree

in the sky of May.

Franco Arminio (Resteranno i Canti)

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