Need to boost harvests? Slow down wildlife extinction
Disappearing wildlife is threatening the world's food supplies. At first blush that does not sound right. Surely wild species and the domesticated crops we grow to eat are two quite seperate things? Indeed,you might think that, if anything, wildlife poses a threat to crops since animals, from elephants to insects, trample or eat them before they can be harvested.
Yet, we depend crucially on wild relatives of the plants we grow for food for genes that enable us to fight off the diseases that spread through our monocultures and to increase productivity to feed a growing human population: indeed, concludes the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) in a recent report, half of the yield increases of recent years has come from new varieties of seeds. But the FAO also points out that these wild relatives are increasingly vanishing under the impact of human activities and are set to continue to do so. To take one example, it estimates that 22 per cent of such cousins of important potato, bean and peanut crops will be forced into extinction by 2050 by climate change alone.
This is one reason to celebrate last weekend's agreement in Japan to try to cut the wildlife extinction rate by half over the next decade, not least because international accords have themselves become something of an endangered species. The new Nagoya Protocol of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity - which environment secretary Caroline Spelman played an important part in bringing about, despite a less impressive record so far at home - also promises to increase marine protected areas tenfold from their present pitiful one per cent of the world's oceans and to end overfishing. And, after 20 years of often bitter dispute, it has established that countries whose wild species provide new medicines, foods or other products, should receive royalties from the proceeds.
There are of course many reasons for caution. The US has not ratified even the basic convention, nearly 20 years after it was first approved. Previous – if less detailed and informal – international targets to reduce the rate of species loss have been almost universally disregarded. And, above all, little funding has been made available to implement the plan. But it still offers hope that, after all, 190 governments can still agree on an environmental measure that seeks to safeguard the future of their peoples.
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