Video about biodiversity

This is a video I got from the Farming First website. I haven't quite decided yet what I think of Farming First. It calls itself a coalition of multi-stakeholder organizations concerned with "improving farming and farmers' livelihoods". This goal is fair enough, and its blog often has interesting news pertaining to farming. Its members include various farmers' organizations, but there is also a heavy presence of agribusiness corporations. Actually none of the Farming First members are private corporations, but rather the international lobbying groups and not-for-profits that they create, with names like International Plant Nutrition Institute, whose website states that they are "funded by member companies that are dedicated to the efficient and responsible use of fertilizers in plant nutrition". I am not inherently opposed to private companies' operating in the agricultural sphere, but I don't like it when these private companies create supposedly neutral, objective campaigns or organizations that are really fronts to advance their industrial ag agenda.

Anyway, the video I'm posting today comes from the International Seed Federation, via the Farming First blog. It is beautiful and slickly-done, and rightly points out that all life depends on biodiversity. What isn't so cool are the silly, vacuous claims explicitly and implicitly linking the crop seed industry to conservation of biodiversity. The seed industry is private business aiming to maximize its profits. It does so by selling farmers and gardeners seeds that are interesting to them (thanks to higher yields, disease resistance, etc.). Private seed companies are indeed reliant on crop biodiversity to make their living, because the new varieties that they breed come from older varieties (landraces) or wild relatives of crops. But these landraces and wild crop relatives do not exist thanks to the seed industry, but rather thanks to nature and generations of farmers.

Much of the present-day genetic diversity of the major crops is stored in an international network of seedbanks. For instance, the US keeps a huge collection of corn varieties in Ames, Iowa, wheat varieties in Aberdeen, Idaho, etc. Most countries of the world have similar seedbanks for their major crops, and there are also international centers in the CGIAR network, each one specializing in certain crops and maintaining a germplasm collection of those crops. Here in Colombia, for instance, is the CIAT center, which holds stocks of cassava, bean, and forage grass varieties for the CGIAR network. Obviously the US seedbanks are government funded, and the international CGIAR centers operate thanks to donations from major world governments and international bodies like the World Bank. None of this important work of conservation of crop genetic diversity is carried out by private seed companies, despite the video's claim that private companies have supported seedbanks for more than a century.

In fact, while seed companies are reliant on the international supply of crop diversity to carry out their business, private companies and industrial agriculture in general tend to promote a narrow focus on relatively few varieties of any given crop. For instance, in the US, most of the corn varieties sold by seed companies descend from about four major parent lines. These are inbred and mixed and matched to create new varieties, but this is not exactly a flowering of diversity. Commercial corn breeders keep using the same set of high-yielding lines year after year, occasionally introducing pollen from exotic varieties so as to imbue disease tolerance to the inbred, high-yielding lines. Again, though I don't like this model of agriculture, I don't blame seed companies for operating the way they do. I just don't want them telling me that they're these enlightened custodians and creators of biodiversity.

My last point of contention with the video is the reference to mankind's scarring the land. To me, this posits humans as some scourge on nature, and seed companies as a means of saving and restoring nature. The fact is that for most of human history, over 100000 years, people have lived sustainably off the land, without "scarring" it. To the extent that much land is scarred today, it's due precisely to the industrial abuse of land promoted by agribusiness. Note, by the way, that all the cultivated fields shown in the video are industrial monocultures, and the video draws an explicit line between agricultural land and "habitat", as if farming automatically eliminates natural habitat. What supporters of the "industrial high-yield agriculture minimizes the land necessary for farming" view don't recognize is that farming doesn't have to totally erase natural ecosystems. There even exist high-yielding farming systems that fit into the surrounding ecosystem as opposed to replacing it, but of course these are not the farming systems that agribusiness is interested in.

So to summarize, the video is pretty and I'm glad they're promoting consciousness of the importance of biodiversity. But private seed companies are by no means stewards of the world's biodiversity.