Unless something is done soon to protect plants and livestock and their wild relatives from extinction, the world will face hunger in the coming years, according to a London-based think tank.
“The profusion of plants, animals and micro-organisms that make up the planet’s rich biological diversity is disappearing at an alarming rate, threatening future food supplies,” said a briefing paper published by Panos Institute.
Since the beginning of the century, about 75 percent of the world’s plant varieties have become extinct. “Around 50,000 varieties disappear ever year,” deplores the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Twenty-five percent of animals, which contribute about 30 percent of the total global value of food and agriculture, have joined the extinct dodo. “Some 4,000 breeds worldwide are in danger of becoming extinct,” FAO warns.
Biodiversity (condensed from biological diversity) refers to the vast diversity of plants and animals on the planet and implies the importance of all.
Only about 1.75 million species have been formally identified, with scientific names, including everything from bacteria to the relatively tiny group of vertebrates.
The most accurate estimate yet of the total number of species in the world, according to the 1,140page Global Biodiversity Assessment, is from 13 to 14 million.
“Biodiversity represents the very foundation of human existence,” says a summary of the report. “Yet by our heedless actions, we are eroding this biological capital at on alarming rate.”
Biodiversity, FAO claims, is essential to the survival of humanity. The world’s population obtains 90 percent of its calories from 20 crop species. Four of them – rice, corn, wheat and potato – account for 50 percent of total calorie intake.
“Within these few crops, the number of varieties used is also shrinking,” the Panos paper noted. “This is because the technology of large-scale commercial farming, such as mechanical harvesting and heavy use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, demands that large areas are planted with the same variety of the same crop.”
The introduction of high-yielding rice, wheat and corn has replaced thousands of local varieties of these crops by a few genetically uniform varieties.
In Indonesia, for example, 1,500 local varieties of rice have disappeared in the past 15 years, and nearly three-fourths of the rice planted today descends from a single maternal plant.
“Though the modern hybrid varieties have been successfully bred for particular desirable characteristic, they may lack resistance to pests and diseases,” the Panos paper explained.
According to Panos, the high-yielding varieties are “highly vulnerable, precisely because of their lack of genetic variation.”
For instance, the Irish potato famine in the 19th century occurred because the few potato varieties planted in Ireland were vulnerable to the same blight. In Asia, a virus on rice in the 1970s caused dramatic losses because of over-reliance on a few varieties.
The FAO, which was one of the chief supporters of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, now stresses that “intensified food production can be achieved by the sustainable use of a broader range of genetic material.”
Scientists hunt through “libraries” of plant material and cross-breed, or introduce new genes into existing varieties to create new varieties.
“If the wild relatives and old cultivars disappeared,” the Panos paper noted, “all their useful characteristics would disappear with them.”
Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand further explains this phenomenon through these words:
“Some species of a plant may have a high yield but are unappetizing; some are both low yielding and tasteless, but these species are hardy and can grow in saline soil.
Through modern biotechnologies, wild diversity can also be incorporated into crops and contribute to world agricultural development.”
Through such spectacle, FAO believes biodiversity is essential to the world’s ability to maintain its current level of food supplies.
“Crops need to be made more productive – able to yield more, to resist pests and diseases, to tolerate difficult environments such as drought and heat, and to cope with climate change,” the UN food agency says.
“Such characteristics might be found in the range of varieties of plants, both cultivated and wild.”
But crops are not the only species fast disappearing; animals, too. Europe has lost half the domestic horses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry breeds it had in 1900.
In the Philippines, tamaraw – the largest mammal native to the country – is facing extinction. From as many as 10,000 at the turn of the century, only more than a hundred are left.
The loss of animal breeds, FAO points out, is “mostly due to the highly specialized nature of modern livestock production. Much of the genetic base of indigenous breeds is being eroded by ‘grading up’ with exotics.”
A FAO publication, The World Watch List for Domestic Animal Diversity, puts it succinctly: “If only five percent of the breeds are being lost every year, the average loss could be about one breed a week.”
The State of the World 1992 described the earth’s biodiversity as “complex beyond understanding, valuable beyond measure.” And yet, they are fast disappearing from the face of the world.
“Of all the global problems that confront us, species extinction is the one that is moving the most rapidly and the one that will have the most serious consequences,” says Dr. Peter Raven, a noted American biologist.
The UN food agency is doubling its efforts in saving what has remained of the world’s biodiversity. After all, biodiversity provides the raw materials, in this case combinations of genes that are essential building blocks of the plant varieties and animal breeds upon which agriculture depends.
“The thousands of different, genetically unique varieties of crops and animal breed in existence are the result of 3,000 million years of natural biological evolution, as well as careful selection and nurturing by our farming and herding ancestors during 12,000 or so years of agriculture,” FAO said in a statement.
“If we are to build a world without hunger, we have to conserve and sustain biodiversity and use it equitably,” declares Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, a former Ramon Magsaysay Awardee.
