Biodiversity in Crops
I think I can fairly say that the loss of biodiversity in the world is something the media reports regularly. We hear about polar bears and how many other animals face extinction. We hear about how much rain forest is being cut down each day and what a loss that presents not only for the animals and plants that live there, but also the future of pharmaceutical discovery.
What I personally have heard less about is the loss of crop diversity. Here's something I came across today on the Web site of the Global Crop Diversity Trust: "...of the 7100 varieties of apple cultivated in USA 100 years ago, 6800 have disappeared forever."
We're down to 300 varieties of apples here. That's nearly a 96% drop! Of something we eat! They also say that about 165,000 crop varieties (all types of food) are currently endangered. It's not boding well for food security in the world.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust site gives several reasons that crop diversity is dropping, and one of them is climate change. Rising temperatures and drought are not helpful to many crops, especially in places that already trend toward the hot and dry.
There are lots of ways that climate change affects hunger in the world. Killing off the things we eat is the most direct one I've considered.
What I personally have heard less about is the loss of crop diversity. Here's something I came across today on the Web site of the Global Crop Diversity Trust: "...of the 7100 varieties of apple cultivated in USA 100 years ago, 6800 have disappeared forever."
We're down to 300 varieties of apples here. That's nearly a 96% drop! Of something we eat! They also say that about 165,000 crop varieties (all types of food) are currently endangered. It's not boding well for food security in the world.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust site gives several reasons that crop diversity is dropping, and one of them is climate change. Rising temperatures and drought are not helpful to many crops, especially in places that already trend toward the hot and dry.
There are lots of ways that climate change affects hunger in the world. Killing off the things we eat is the most direct one I've considered.
-Nancy Michaelis
Labels: biodiversity, causes of world hunger, climate change, environment
posted by Nancy Michaelis |
1 Comments:
Nice post, and it is good to see my friends at the Global Crop Diversity Trust getting some love. But you know, while climate change is a very real threat to agricultural biodiversity in the medium term, the biggest threat to existing diversity is the replacement of older varieties, with their diversity, by more modern and more uniform varieties. And in Europe, there's something even worse: legislation that does not permit the marketing of unregistered varieties. I write about this often. This post http://agro.biodiver.se/2008/03/association-kokopelli-fined-again/ is a good place to start finding out more about this truly strange state of affairs.
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