Re: The Long Ecological Revolution
Posted: Tue Oct 17, 2023 2:49 pm
How not to feed a hungry planet
October 11, 2023
India’s fertilizer-intensive ‘Green Revolution’ is a warning, not a blueprint
by Glenn Davis Stone
Research Professor of Environmental Science, Sweet Briar College
Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.
The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter.
Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.
But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.
As I explain in my book, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.
A triumphal narrative
There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.
India was the global poster child for this looming Malthusian disaster: Its population was booming, drought was ravaging its countryside and its imports of American wheat were climbing to levels that alarmed government officials in India and the U.S.
Then, in 1967, India began distributing new wheat varieties bred by Rockefeller Foundation plant biologist Norman Borlaug, along with high doses of chemical fertilizer. After famine failed to materialize, observers credited the new farming strategy with enabling India to feed itself.
Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987. Tributes to Swaminathan, who died on Sept. 28, 2023, at age 98, have reiterated the claim that his efforts brought India “self-sufficiency in food production” and independence from Western powers.
Debunking the legend
The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions. First, India faced a food crisis, with farms mired in tradition and unable to feed an exploding population; and second, Borlaug’s wheat seeds led to record harvests from 1968 on, replacing import dependence with food self-sufficiency.
Recent research shows that both claims are false.
India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation. After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry. U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.
Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.
Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.
India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.
Once India’s 1965-67 drought ended and the Green Revolution began, wheat production sped up, while production trends in other crops like rice, maize and pulses slowed down. Net food grain production, which was much more crucial than wheat production alone, actually resumed at the same growth rate as before.
But grain production became more erratic, forcing India to resume importing food by the mid-1970s. India also became dramatically more dependent on chemical fertilizer.
India’s Green Revolution wheat boom came at the expense of other crops; the growth rate of overall food grain production did not increase at all. It is doubtful that the ‘revolution’ produced any more food than would have been produced anyway. What increased dramatically was dependence on imported fertilizer. (Glenn Davis Stone; data from India Directorate of Economics and Statistics and Fertiliser Association of India, CC BY-ND)
According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organizations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertilizer to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms). So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, paid for with precious international currency.
Today, India remains the world’s second-highest fertilizer importer, spending US$17.3 billion in 2022. Perversely, Green Revolution boosters call this extreme and expensive dependence “self-sufficiency.”
The toll of ‘green’ pollution
Recent research shows that the environmental costs of the Green Revolution are as severe as its economic impacts. One reason is that fertilizer use is astonishingly wasteful. Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food. Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life. Producing and using fertilizer also generates copious greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
In Punjab, India’s top Green Revolution state, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides has contaminated water, soil and food and endangered human health.
In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky. Ethiopia offers a cautionary case. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has forced farmers to plant increasing amounts of fertilizer-intensive wheat, claiming this will achieve “self-sufficiency” and even allow it to export wheat worth $105 million this year. Some African officials hail this strategy as an example for the continent.
But Ethiopia has no fertilizer factories, so it has to import it – at a cost of $1 billion just in the past year. Even so, many farmers face severe fertilizer shortages.
The Green Revolution still has many boosters today, especially among biotech companies that are eager to draw parallels between genetically engineered crops and Borlaug’s seeds. I agree that it offers important lessons about how to move forward with food production, but actual data tells a distinctly different story from the standard narrative. In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/1 ... ry-planet/
More on the Insect Apocalypse
October 15, 2023
New research shows insect decline poses major threat to important tropical crops
by Ian Angus
My articles on the rapid decline of Earth’s most numerous animals have been widely republished. Read them here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. This news release, issued on October 12 by University College London (UCL), confirms and further emphasizes the dangers posed by the massive destruction of insect life.
Coffee and cocoa plants at risk from pollinator loss
Tropical crops such as coffee, cocoa, watermelon and mango may be at risk due to the loss of insect pollinators, finds a new study led by UCL and Natural History Museum researchers.
Published in Science Advances, the study explores the intricate interplay between climate change, land use change, and their impact on pollinator biodiversity, ultimately revealing significant implications for global crop pollination.
The study, which compiled data from 1,507 crop growing sites around the world and catalogued 3,080 insect pollinator species, exposes a concerning trend – the combined pressures of climate change and agricultural activities have led to substantial declines in both the abundance and richness of insect pollinators.
Crops which depend on pollination by animals to some degree make up around 75% of crops. The model created by the research team looked at which pollination dependent crops were most at threat all the way up to 2050 in the hope of providing a warning to both the agricultural and conservation communities.
Lead author Dr. Joe Millard, who completed the study as part of his PhD at the UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, before moving to the Natural History Museum London, said:
“Our research indicates that the tropics are likely most at risk when it comes to crop production from pollinator losses, primarily due to the interaction of climate change and land use. While localized risks are highest in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and south-east Asia, the implications of this extend globally via the trade in pollination dependent crops.”
The tropics were identified as having a heightened vulnerability to the interaction of climate change and land use, meaning crops such a coffee, cocoa, mango and watermelon which all rely on insect pollination are at the greatest risk. These crops play vital roles in both local economies and global trade and their reduction could cause increased income insecurity for millions of small-scale farmers in these regions.
Dr. Millard continued:
“As insects decline, due to being unable to cope with the interacting effects of climate change and land use, so too will the crops that rely on them as pollinators. In some cases, these crops could be pollinated by hand but this would require more labor and more cost.”
The study also underscores the importance of pollinator abundance and richness in delivering pollination services. It is evident that efforts to mitigate climate change could significantly reduce the risk to future crop production, but challenges remain.
As the world grapples with the intricate web of climate change, land use, and biodiversity loss, this study serves as a stark reminder of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the critical role played by pollinators in sustaining agriculture and food security.
Senior author Dr. Tim Newbold (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said:
“Climate change poses grave threats not only to the natural environment and biodiversity, but also to human well-being, as the loss of pollinators can threaten the livelihoods of people across the globe who depend on crops that depend on animal pollination. Our findings underscore the urgent need to take global action to mitigate climate change, alongside efforts to slow down land use changes and protect natural habitats to avoid harming insect pollinators.”
This is real and scares me more than most of our basket of woes.Thirty Five years ago I could set up a light trap for insects and get deluged with a vast assortment of species. Today, 15 miles from that location and about a miles from a river with a pond alongside the driveway and the porch light attracts a paltry collection. Chuck Wills Widow, a bird that feeds on large insects at night has disappeared from our neighborhood where it had been common in season. Other bird species populations fluctuate but the trend is down. Reptile diversity over 20 years is down, frog and toad calls are waning. Not good, not good at all.
******
Tanzanian farmers are paying for “conservation” with their land and lives
For over 15 years, small farmers and pastoralists in Tanzania’s Mbarali have been facing threats of eviction, criminalization and violent attacks by the state to expand the Ruaha National Park
October 16, 2023 by Tanupriya Singh
Photo: Tanzania National Parks/Facebook
Located in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands, the district of Mbarali in the Mbeya region has long been considered the country’s “rice basket”. However, for the past year, smallholder farmers in the area have been unable to cultivate the grain even to securely feed themselves, let alone produce for the market.
These farmers are among 21,252 people in Mbarali who are facing eviction from their land under the guise of a ‘biodiversity conservation’ project— namely, the expansion of the Ruaha National Park (RUNAPA) — being undertaken by the Tanzanian government, with funding from the World Bank.
There is an extensive history of displacement of local communities along the Great Ruaha River, that runs through parts of Mbarali. But much of what is unfolding now in the district dates back to a government notice (G.N. 28) issued in 2008, when the government initiated plans to expand the area of RUNAPA. Among the areas demarcated for this expansion, which included the Usangu Game Reserve and the Ihefu wetlands, were local villages.
Speaking to Peoples Dispatch, Esther (name changed), who has been among those at the forefront of the struggle in Mbarali, stated that at the time, residents of one ward as well as one village and two hamlets in a separate ward in the district were slated for removal. However, she said, the people were not given any compensation and were essentially left to fend for themselves.
“Over 90% of elders [among the displaced] have died since 2008 because it was difficult for them to move and adjust to a new environment,” Esther said.
Trespassers on their own land?
A report published by Tanzania’s National Audit Office in 2009 also noted that there was no evidence to suggest that a sum of USD 3.3 million which had been authorized as compensation to affected people had indeed been disbursed.
Over the next few years, there were further reports of expansion plans. However, after president John Pombe Joseph Magufuli assumed office in 2015, these plans were halted.
“During this time, the president was provided with differing narratives regarding the situation in Mbarali,” Esther said. “The district and regional commissioners insisted in their reports that the villagers were trespassers, that the area was not residential, that people were claiming land that was not theirs.”
“Meanwhile, independent commissions were saying otherwise,” she added. “They documented that there were schools, hospitals and houses in the area. That these were recognized villages and people had been living there since 1974.”
In January 2019, President Magufuli ordered the immediate suspension of the removal of villages and townships said to be located in reserve areas. He further called upon relevant ministers to determine the process of formalizing these villages, and to identify areas within reserves and forests that did not have wildlife or tree cover but with fertile soils to be distributed to herders and farmers who were struggling to find land to raise animals and cultivate crops.
In 2020, a ministerial delegation was dispatched to Mbarali to see the “real situation” in the district and to advise the president accordingly. After president Magufuli’s death in 2021, the situation began to change, Esther said. “The authorities of RUNAPA started putting up beacons (boundary markers)”.
On October 25, 2022, the Minister for Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement Developments, Dr. Angeline Mabula, made a public announcement that the villages of Luhanga, Madundasi, Msanga, Iyala, and Kalambo, along with 47 hamlets within the Mbeya region would be deregistered and their residents evicted for the expansion of RUNAPA.
“Since then, people have not been able to cultivate anything. They do not know the fate of their land. Legal actions have been taken against people in the area…women have been harassed, they have been stripped of their clothes,” Esther said, adding that brutal violence had occurred at the hands of rangers from the Tanzania National Parks Authority (TANAPA), including people being attacked with machetes that had been heated on fires.
Similar, and often fatal, violence was also recorded in a report prepared by the Mbarali Pastoralists Association. It details attacks on pastoralists in search of forage areas by TANAPA forces and the police between the period of 2017 and 2021.
The incidents of violence include people being shot, their cattle being slaughtered, people being chased, run over with a vehicle, and multiple cases of people being hung by their neck, including a 14-year-old child.
“The people are asking a simple question— How can you remove us?” Esther said. “People do not know where they will live, they do not know how they will feed themselves…if you [the minister] say I should leave, where should I go? What will you give me if I leave? This move of the government, what does it really want to do, if not to kill me?”
Mbarali villagers seek court action
Approximately 1,000 families in Mbarali have now approached the High Court of Tanzania, Mbeya Division against the government’s plans to evict them.
A group of farmers also spoke about the conditions in the district in front of the then Chairperson of the Permanent Parliamentary Committee during the 2022 Annual General Meeting of Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania or the National Network of Small-Scale Farmers Groups in Tanzania (MVIWATA) — the largest smallholder farmers grassroots movement in Tanzania with over 300,000 members.
MVIWATA has organized farmers in Mbarali, including by building farmers’ groups and cooperatives, to facilitate collective marketing of rice, savings and credit mechanisms, and the establishment of an Igurisi rice market.
“Faced with the harsh reality of being displaced from their land, the farmers joined and forged a collective from the affected villages and took the lead in pursuing legal action against the eviction order,” Asha (Name changed), an activist, told Peoples Dispatch.
“All those who have been affected, they are mobilizing, be it to attend court hearings or even to organize financial resources,” she said. “There are those who may have lost their spouses, or their child may have been shot, or they might have been taken into police custody, but there is a belief that they will win and go back to their land.”
In March, the High Court of Tanzania in Mbeya heard one such petition brought by three applicants— including one person from Iyala village (among the five villages slated for removal) — against the Minister for Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Developments, her Permanent Secretary, and the Attorney General.
The petition sought the orders for the writs of Mandamus and Certiorari to quash the October 25, 2022 decision by Minister Mabula, highlighting that no prior notice or right to be heard had been granted to the communities. The applicants had also notified the court that the government was currently carrying out evictions without prior notice nor any compensation.
The applicants had maintained that following their relocation under G.N. 28, there had been no formal allocation of the reallocated areas through a registration process. However, they stated that they had been residing in their villages for more than 20 years.
In a welcome development, the High Court ruled in favor of the petition in August, noting that Mabula had not followed established procedures regarding the transfer of land, and that the people of the village had been “denied their fundamental right to be heard”.
It is also important to note that the evictions and violence facing farming and pastoralist communities in Mbarali is not isolated to the area. Tens of thousands of Maasai people in northern Tanzania are currently resisting displacement, and facing immense violence, in a bid by the government to expand the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and build a game reserve.
Meanwhile, RUNAPA is one of the main beneficiaries of the World Bank’s USD 150 million Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW) project. Under this it is one of the four “Protected Areas” slated for “improvement” in a bid to boost tourism in the country.
According to Planetary Health Alliance, this approach, called Fortress Conservation which seeks to “preserve” “pristine” or “untouched” nature finds its roots in colonialism, “where colonial state authorities, seeing the need to police “savage” wildlife-encroaching peoples, undertook technical acts of surveying the biological resources of an area.”
This kind of conservation rhetoric, which when deployed leads to the violence displacement of Indigenous peoples and local communities from their lands, has found currency in official discourses around the climate crisis.
“An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers,” notes Aby L. Sène-Harper, an environmental social researcher and professor at Clemson University.
“They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists.
“Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations… But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction.”
Highlighting the colonial undertones of conservation, Asha says that “these pacts on climate change, on mitigation, on adaptation that are coming out of COP meetings, that try to decide on the fate of the majority of the population are basically greenwashing…they create more crises.”
“You cannot have a model of conservation while you are displacing people from their land. You have people that do not know what they are going to eat tomorrow or where they are going to sleep, if they will have a place to call home.
“Conservation at the expense of displacing people is a trend that is growing and people have warned against this. If we talk about issues of conservation, of actions on climate, without centering the rights of Indigenous people and local communities, we are going to endanger their lives.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/10/16/ ... and-lives/
It is this sort of crap, applauded and sometimes expressed in a rather bloodthirsty manner as experienced on message boards 20 years ago which drove me away from the environmental movement and into the arms of Marx.<sic> The idealistic assholes do not understand the implications of the Anthropocene.
October 11, 2023
India’s fertilizer-intensive ‘Green Revolution’ is a warning, not a blueprint
by Glenn Davis Stone
Research Professor of Environmental Science, Sweet Briar College
Feeding a growing world population has been a serious concern for decades, but today there are new causes for alarm. Floods, heat waves and other weather extremes are making agriculture increasingly precarious, especially in the Global South.
The war in Ukraine is also a factor. Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain exports, and fertilizer prices have surged because of trade sanctions on Russia, the world’s leading fertilizer exporter.
Amid these challenges, some organizations are renewing calls for a second Green Revolution, echoing the introduction in the 1960s and 1970s of supposedly high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice into developing countries, along with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Those efforts centered on India and other Asian countries; today, advocates focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the original Green Revolution regime never took hold.
But anyone concerned with food production should be careful what they wish for. In recent years, a wave of new analysis has spurred a critical rethinking of what Green Revolution-style farming really means for food supplies and self-sufficiency.
As I explain in my book, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, the Green Revolution does hold lessons for food production today – but not the ones that are commonly heard. Events in India show why.
A triumphal narrative
There was a consensus in the 1960s among development officials and the public that an overpopulated Earth was heading toward catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, famously predicted that nothing could stop “hundreds of millions” from starving in the 1970s.
India was the global poster child for this looming Malthusian disaster: Its population was booming, drought was ravaging its countryside and its imports of American wheat were climbing to levels that alarmed government officials in India and the U.S.
Then, in 1967, India began distributing new wheat varieties bred by Rockefeller Foundation plant biologist Norman Borlaug, along with high doses of chemical fertilizer. After famine failed to materialize, observers credited the new farming strategy with enabling India to feed itself.
Borlaug received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is still widely credited with “saving a billion lives.” Indian agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan, who worked with Borlaug to promote the Green Revolution, received the inaugural World Food Prize in 1987. Tributes to Swaminathan, who died on Sept. 28, 2023, at age 98, have reiterated the claim that his efforts brought India “self-sufficiency in food production” and independence from Western powers.
Debunking the legend
The standard legend of India’s Green Revolution centers on two propositions. First, India faced a food crisis, with farms mired in tradition and unable to feed an exploding population; and second, Borlaug’s wheat seeds led to record harvests from 1968 on, replacing import dependence with food self-sufficiency.
Recent research shows that both claims are false.
India was importing wheat in the 1960s because of policy decisions, not overpopulation. After the nation achieved independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru prioritized developing heavy industry. U.S. advisers encouraged this strategy and offered to provide India with surplus grain, which India accepted as cheap food for urban workers.
Meanwhile, the government urged Indian farmers to grow nonfood export crops to earn foreign currency. They switched millions of acres from rice to jute production, and by the mid-1960s India was exporting agricultural products.
Borlaug’s miracle seeds were not inherently more productive than many Indian wheat varieties. Rather, they just responded more effectively to high doses of chemical fertilizer. But while India had abundant manure from its cows, it produced almost no chemical fertilizer. It had to start spending heavily to import and subsidize fertilizer.
India did see a wheat boom after 1967, but there is evidence that this expensive new input-intensive approach was not the main cause. Rather, the Indian government established a new policy of paying higher prices for wheat. Unsurprisingly, Indian farmers planted more wheat and less of other crops.
Once India’s 1965-67 drought ended and the Green Revolution began, wheat production sped up, while production trends in other crops like rice, maize and pulses slowed down. Net food grain production, which was much more crucial than wheat production alone, actually resumed at the same growth rate as before.
But grain production became more erratic, forcing India to resume importing food by the mid-1970s. India also became dramatically more dependent on chemical fertilizer.
India’s Green Revolution wheat boom came at the expense of other crops; the growth rate of overall food grain production did not increase at all. It is doubtful that the ‘revolution’ produced any more food than would have been produced anyway. What increased dramatically was dependence on imported fertilizer. (Glenn Davis Stone; data from India Directorate of Economics and Statistics and Fertiliser Association of India, CC BY-ND)
According to data from Indian economic and agricultural organizations, on the eve of the Green Revolution in 1965, Indian farmers needed 17 pounds (8 kilograms) of fertilizer to grow an average ton of food. By 1980, it took 96 pounds (44 kilograms). So, India replaced imports of wheat, which were virtually free food aid, with imports of fossil fuel-based fertilizer, paid for with precious international currency.
Today, India remains the world’s second-highest fertilizer importer, spending US$17.3 billion in 2022. Perversely, Green Revolution boosters call this extreme and expensive dependence “self-sufficiency.”
The toll of ‘green’ pollution
Recent research shows that the environmental costs of the Green Revolution are as severe as its economic impacts. One reason is that fertilizer use is astonishingly wasteful. Globally, only 17% of what is applied is taken up by plants and ultimately consumed as food. Most of the rest washes into waterways, where it creates algae blooms and dead zones that smother aquatic life. Producing and using fertilizer also generates copious greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.
In Punjab, India’s top Green Revolution state, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides has contaminated water, soil and food and endangered human health.
In my view, African countries where the Green Revolution has not made inroads should consider themselves lucky. Ethiopia offers a cautionary case. In recent years, the Ethiopian government has forced farmers to plant increasing amounts of fertilizer-intensive wheat, claiming this will achieve “self-sufficiency” and even allow it to export wheat worth $105 million this year. Some African officials hail this strategy as an example for the continent.
But Ethiopia has no fertilizer factories, so it has to import it – at a cost of $1 billion just in the past year. Even so, many farmers face severe fertilizer shortages.
The Green Revolution still has many boosters today, especially among biotech companies that are eager to draw parallels between genetically engineered crops and Borlaug’s seeds. I agree that it offers important lessons about how to move forward with food production, but actual data tells a distinctly different story from the standard narrative. In my view, there are many ways to pursue less input-intensive agriculture that will be more sustainable in a world with an increasingly erratic climate.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/1 ... ry-planet/
More on the Insect Apocalypse
October 15, 2023
New research shows insect decline poses major threat to important tropical crops
by Ian Angus
My articles on the rapid decline of Earth’s most numerous animals have been widely republished. Read them here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. This news release, issued on October 12 by University College London (UCL), confirms and further emphasizes the dangers posed by the massive destruction of insect life.
Coffee and cocoa plants at risk from pollinator loss
Tropical crops such as coffee, cocoa, watermelon and mango may be at risk due to the loss of insect pollinators, finds a new study led by UCL and Natural History Museum researchers.
Published in Science Advances, the study explores the intricate interplay between climate change, land use change, and their impact on pollinator biodiversity, ultimately revealing significant implications for global crop pollination.
The study, which compiled data from 1,507 crop growing sites around the world and catalogued 3,080 insect pollinator species, exposes a concerning trend – the combined pressures of climate change and agricultural activities have led to substantial declines in both the abundance and richness of insect pollinators.
Crops which depend on pollination by animals to some degree make up around 75% of crops. The model created by the research team looked at which pollination dependent crops were most at threat all the way up to 2050 in the hope of providing a warning to both the agricultural and conservation communities.
Lead author Dr. Joe Millard, who completed the study as part of his PhD at the UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, before moving to the Natural History Museum London, said:
“Our research indicates that the tropics are likely most at risk when it comes to crop production from pollinator losses, primarily due to the interaction of climate change and land use. While localized risks are highest in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and south-east Asia, the implications of this extend globally via the trade in pollination dependent crops.”
The tropics were identified as having a heightened vulnerability to the interaction of climate change and land use, meaning crops such a coffee, cocoa, mango and watermelon which all rely on insect pollination are at the greatest risk. These crops play vital roles in both local economies and global trade and their reduction could cause increased income insecurity for millions of small-scale farmers in these regions.
Dr. Millard continued:
“As insects decline, due to being unable to cope with the interacting effects of climate change and land use, so too will the crops that rely on them as pollinators. In some cases, these crops could be pollinated by hand but this would require more labor and more cost.”
The study also underscores the importance of pollinator abundance and richness in delivering pollination services. It is evident that efforts to mitigate climate change could significantly reduce the risk to future crop production, but challenges remain.
As the world grapples with the intricate web of climate change, land use, and biodiversity loss, this study serves as a stark reminder of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the critical role played by pollinators in sustaining agriculture and food security.
Senior author Dr. Tim Newbold (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said:
“Climate change poses grave threats not only to the natural environment and biodiversity, but also to human well-being, as the loss of pollinators can threaten the livelihoods of people across the globe who depend on crops that depend on animal pollination. Our findings underscore the urgent need to take global action to mitigate climate change, alongside efforts to slow down land use changes and protect natural habitats to avoid harming insect pollinators.”
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2023/1 ... pocalypse/This is the Abstract of the study described in UCL’s News Release.
Key tropical crops at risk from pollinator loss due to climate change and land use
Science Advances, October 12, 2023
Insect pollinator biodiversity is changing rapidly, with potential consequences for the provision of crop pollination. However, the role of land use–climate interactions in pollinator biodiversity changes, as well as consequent economic effects via changes in crop pollination, remains poorly understood.
We present a global assessment of the interactive effects of climate change and land use on pollinator abundance and richness and predictions of the risk to crop pollination from the inferred changes. Using a dataset containing 2673 sites and 3080 insect pollinator species, we show that the interactive combination of agriculture and climate change is associated with large reductions in insect pollinators.
As a result, it is expected that the tropics will experience the greatest risk to crop production from pollinator losses. Localized risk is highest and predicted to increase most rapidly, in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, northern South America, and Southeast Asia. Via pollinator loss alone, climate change and agricultural land use could be a risk to human well-being.
This is real and scares me more than most of our basket of woes.Thirty Five years ago I could set up a light trap for insects and get deluged with a vast assortment of species. Today, 15 miles from that location and about a miles from a river with a pond alongside the driveway and the porch light attracts a paltry collection. Chuck Wills Widow, a bird that feeds on large insects at night has disappeared from our neighborhood where it had been common in season. Other bird species populations fluctuate but the trend is down. Reptile diversity over 20 years is down, frog and toad calls are waning. Not good, not good at all.
******
Tanzanian farmers are paying for “conservation” with their land and lives
For over 15 years, small farmers and pastoralists in Tanzania’s Mbarali have been facing threats of eviction, criminalization and violent attacks by the state to expand the Ruaha National Park
October 16, 2023 by Tanupriya Singh
Photo: Tanzania National Parks/Facebook
Located in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands, the district of Mbarali in the Mbeya region has long been considered the country’s “rice basket”. However, for the past year, smallholder farmers in the area have been unable to cultivate the grain even to securely feed themselves, let alone produce for the market.
These farmers are among 21,252 people in Mbarali who are facing eviction from their land under the guise of a ‘biodiversity conservation’ project— namely, the expansion of the Ruaha National Park (RUNAPA) — being undertaken by the Tanzanian government, with funding from the World Bank.
There is an extensive history of displacement of local communities along the Great Ruaha River, that runs through parts of Mbarali. But much of what is unfolding now in the district dates back to a government notice (G.N. 28) issued in 2008, when the government initiated plans to expand the area of RUNAPA. Among the areas demarcated for this expansion, which included the Usangu Game Reserve and the Ihefu wetlands, were local villages.
Speaking to Peoples Dispatch, Esther (name changed), who has been among those at the forefront of the struggle in Mbarali, stated that at the time, residents of one ward as well as one village and two hamlets in a separate ward in the district were slated for removal. However, she said, the people were not given any compensation and were essentially left to fend for themselves.
“Over 90% of elders [among the displaced] have died since 2008 because it was difficult for them to move and adjust to a new environment,” Esther said.
Trespassers on their own land?
A report published by Tanzania’s National Audit Office in 2009 also noted that there was no evidence to suggest that a sum of USD 3.3 million which had been authorized as compensation to affected people had indeed been disbursed.
Over the next few years, there were further reports of expansion plans. However, after president John Pombe Joseph Magufuli assumed office in 2015, these plans were halted.
“During this time, the president was provided with differing narratives regarding the situation in Mbarali,” Esther said. “The district and regional commissioners insisted in their reports that the villagers were trespassers, that the area was not residential, that people were claiming land that was not theirs.”
“Meanwhile, independent commissions were saying otherwise,” she added. “They documented that there were schools, hospitals and houses in the area. That these were recognized villages and people had been living there since 1974.”
In January 2019, President Magufuli ordered the immediate suspension of the removal of villages and townships said to be located in reserve areas. He further called upon relevant ministers to determine the process of formalizing these villages, and to identify areas within reserves and forests that did not have wildlife or tree cover but with fertile soils to be distributed to herders and farmers who were struggling to find land to raise animals and cultivate crops.
In 2020, a ministerial delegation was dispatched to Mbarali to see the “real situation” in the district and to advise the president accordingly. After president Magufuli’s death in 2021, the situation began to change, Esther said. “The authorities of RUNAPA started putting up beacons (boundary markers)”.
On October 25, 2022, the Minister for Lands, Housing, and Human Settlement Developments, Dr. Angeline Mabula, made a public announcement that the villages of Luhanga, Madundasi, Msanga, Iyala, and Kalambo, along with 47 hamlets within the Mbeya region would be deregistered and their residents evicted for the expansion of RUNAPA.
“Since then, people have not been able to cultivate anything. They do not know the fate of their land. Legal actions have been taken against people in the area…women have been harassed, they have been stripped of their clothes,” Esther said, adding that brutal violence had occurred at the hands of rangers from the Tanzania National Parks Authority (TANAPA), including people being attacked with machetes that had been heated on fires.
Similar, and often fatal, violence was also recorded in a report prepared by the Mbarali Pastoralists Association. It details attacks on pastoralists in search of forage areas by TANAPA forces and the police between the period of 2017 and 2021.
The incidents of violence include people being shot, their cattle being slaughtered, people being chased, run over with a vehicle, and multiple cases of people being hung by their neck, including a 14-year-old child.
“The people are asking a simple question— How can you remove us?” Esther said. “People do not know where they will live, they do not know how they will feed themselves…if you [the minister] say I should leave, where should I go? What will you give me if I leave? This move of the government, what does it really want to do, if not to kill me?”
Mbarali villagers seek court action
Approximately 1,000 families in Mbarali have now approached the High Court of Tanzania, Mbeya Division against the government’s plans to evict them.
A group of farmers also spoke about the conditions in the district in front of the then Chairperson of the Permanent Parliamentary Committee during the 2022 Annual General Meeting of Mtandao wa Vikundi vya Wakulima Tanzania or the National Network of Small-Scale Farmers Groups in Tanzania (MVIWATA) — the largest smallholder farmers grassroots movement in Tanzania with over 300,000 members.
MVIWATA has organized farmers in Mbarali, including by building farmers’ groups and cooperatives, to facilitate collective marketing of rice, savings and credit mechanisms, and the establishment of an Igurisi rice market.
“Faced with the harsh reality of being displaced from their land, the farmers joined and forged a collective from the affected villages and took the lead in pursuing legal action against the eviction order,” Asha (Name changed), an activist, told Peoples Dispatch.
“All those who have been affected, they are mobilizing, be it to attend court hearings or even to organize financial resources,” she said. “There are those who may have lost their spouses, or their child may have been shot, or they might have been taken into police custody, but there is a belief that they will win and go back to their land.”
In March, the High Court of Tanzania in Mbeya heard one such petition brought by three applicants— including one person from Iyala village (among the five villages slated for removal) — against the Minister for Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Developments, her Permanent Secretary, and the Attorney General.
The petition sought the orders for the writs of Mandamus and Certiorari to quash the October 25, 2022 decision by Minister Mabula, highlighting that no prior notice or right to be heard had been granted to the communities. The applicants had also notified the court that the government was currently carrying out evictions without prior notice nor any compensation.
The applicants had maintained that following their relocation under G.N. 28, there had been no formal allocation of the reallocated areas through a registration process. However, they stated that they had been residing in their villages for more than 20 years.
In a welcome development, the High Court ruled in favor of the petition in August, noting that Mabula had not followed established procedures regarding the transfer of land, and that the people of the village had been “denied their fundamental right to be heard”.
It is also important to note that the evictions and violence facing farming and pastoralist communities in Mbarali is not isolated to the area. Tens of thousands of Maasai people in northern Tanzania are currently resisting displacement, and facing immense violence, in a bid by the government to expand the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and build a game reserve.
Meanwhile, RUNAPA is one of the main beneficiaries of the World Bank’s USD 150 million Resilient Natural Resource Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW) project. Under this it is one of the four “Protected Areas” slated for “improvement” in a bid to boost tourism in the country.
According to Planetary Health Alliance, this approach, called Fortress Conservation which seeks to “preserve” “pristine” or “untouched” nature finds its roots in colonialism, “where colonial state authorities, seeing the need to police “savage” wildlife-encroaching peoples, undertook technical acts of surveying the biological resources of an area.”
This kind of conservation rhetoric, which when deployed leads to the violence displacement of Indigenous peoples and local communities from their lands, has found currency in official discourses around the climate crisis.
“An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers,” notes Aby L. Sène-Harper, an environmental social researcher and professor at Clemson University.
“They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists.
“Colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy birthed this incommensurable ecological crisis including the rapid decline of wildlife populations… But the propaganda machine in the capitalist core has convinced its population that the poor African and their exploding population are the major drivers of wildlife extinction.”
Highlighting the colonial undertones of conservation, Asha says that “these pacts on climate change, on mitigation, on adaptation that are coming out of COP meetings, that try to decide on the fate of the majority of the population are basically greenwashing…they create more crises.”
“You cannot have a model of conservation while you are displacing people from their land. You have people that do not know what they are going to eat tomorrow or where they are going to sleep, if they will have a place to call home.
“Conservation at the expense of displacing people is a trend that is growing and people have warned against this. If we talk about issues of conservation, of actions on climate, without centering the rights of Indigenous people and local communities, we are going to endanger their lives.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/10/16/ ... and-lives/
It is this sort of crap, applauded and sometimes expressed in a rather bloodthirsty manner as experienced on message boards 20 years ago which drove me away from the environmental movement and into the arms of Marx.<sic> The idealistic assholes do not understand the implications of the Anthropocene.