Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance

Fair food for all Australians

Biodiversity & Livestock: our intervention at the UN

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The following text is the intervention delivered by AFSA President Tammi Jonas in regards to animal genetic resources for food and agriculture at the recent meetings of the UN Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture in Rome.

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We would like to congratulate the Commission on its critical work around the role of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture, with an impressive set of reports that unfortunately tell a grim story.

We welcome the Review of methods for identification and valuation of the ecosystem services provided by livestock breeds, which, along with the report on the Status and Trends of Animal Genetic Resources provides sharp detail on the role and status of livestock in agriculture and ecosystems. The former clearly spells out the positive potential of livestock while acknowledging that in the world’s industrial livestock systems that potential is mostly transformed into a net negative impact. The latter report highlights the loss of biodiversity caused by industrialisation and a narrow focus on yield.

Selective breeding and genetically engineering livestock to increase yield has been an animal health & ethical disaster. Even Perdue, one of the world’s biggest producers of chicken, was reported to say in 2017 that they had taken the breed too far and were working to bring the genetics back towards a healthier animal than that which inhabits most intensive sheds across the globe. The FAO tells us that extinct breeds have mainly been reported among chickens.

Industrial meat producers in North America have aggressively pursued yield in highly industrialised intensive production models, and according to the FAO Report on Status and Trends this has resulted in the least number of local breeds of cattle, pigs, and poultry of any region. The countries of this region regularly work in these spaces to block urgent progress to shift away from destructive production models.

The public health risks and costs of sheds of pigs and poultry are profound. The combination of genetically similar animals in unhealthy production environments (with their attendant over-use of antimicrobials that threaten our ability to combat the most basic diseases due to the rise in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria) is what evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace calls ‘food for flu’ – a global pandemic in the making.

The 2016 HLPE Report on ‘What Roles for Livestock?’ report highlights the need for coherence and integration among agriculture, economic, nutrition, education and health policies at the national level, and we strongly support this recommendation.

Pulling together the issues facing forest genetic resources with animal genetic resources, countries must take more holistic actions and consider ecosystems, not merely sectoral concerns. De-forestation is largely driven by industrial livestock agriculture as trees are felled to make room for monocultures of soy, corn, and other grains to be fed to animals in intensive production models. Both intensive industrial livestock production and monocultures of grain are significant contributors to loss of biodiversity and polluters of waterways, thereby also contributing to the loss of biodiversity in terrestrial and marine waters.

We small-scale farmers of the world want the governments of the world to support us in our efforts to farm agroecologically. We don’t need to upscale agroecology, we need to multiply it. Governments should move rapidly to remove barriers to small-scale livestock farmers and pastoralists, and stop subsidising industrial livestock agriculture that is destroying ecosystems from the genes up.

Biodiversity and climate change – we need action now!

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18 February 2018

AFSA President Tammi Jonas is with our allies in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty representing civil society at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture.

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The people are speaking!

Huge first day at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture here in Rome, with many interventions from those of us here representing civil society as part of the IPC for Food Sovereignty. I’ll report more fully when I get home (and am not in the midst of 10-hour-meeting days), but below is one of my interventions today on the role of genetic resources for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change:

 

Back home in Australia, climate change is manifest and devastating. Over the past year we have suffered unprecedented drought across the eastern states, with serious loss of livestock and wildlife as pasture turned to dirt, and then the topsoils blew away. The drought was followed by extraordinary flooding, which led to the deaths of as many as 500,000 cattle, and subsequently resulted in flood waters rushing into the sea and smothering the Great Barrier Reef, which has already suffered repeated bleaching events and is rapidly losing biodiversity as sea temperatures rise.

While the north flooded, fires burned in parts of Australia’s southernmost island of Tasmania, only to be covered by snow as they declined – in the middle of summer. It is estimated that 2% of the world’s pencil pines perished in the fires – a non-recoverable loss – some of the trees lost in the fires were over 1000 years old.

To personalize the impacts of climate change on small-scale farmers in Australia, let me share that amongst the members of the committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, in the past month alone, one of our farmers lost half his flock of heritage poultry in the northern floods, another has completely de-stocked and is carting water in for basic needs in southern Queensland, and the town of 600 people nearest my own farm was evacuated for two days under threat of a severe bushfire at its borders. Meanwhile dozens of our farmer members in Tasmania were repeatedly evacuated under threat of fire in regions that are not traditionally considered a fire risk.

I tell these stories because the sub-sectoral reports for these meetings and indeed the proposal for a scoping study on the role of GRFA in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change do not go far enough for the level of emergency we face. We must act now – every country has a responsibility to its people and the generations that will come after them to immediately transition away from logging and clear-felling of biodiverse forests for the purposes of planting monocultures – imagine standing passively while someone ripped the lungs out of your body – this is what we’re allowing with continued de-forestation across the globe.

While the Commission nor national governments can force the practitioners of industrial agriculture to sow more genetically diverse plants nor grow more diverse breeds of livestock, they can regulate the conditions under which these homogenous seeds and breeds are grown, and limit the use of harmful agri-chemicals such as the much-cited pesticides and antimicrobial pharmaceuticals for livestock. If countries ban these band-aids that are repeatedly applied to the cancer of industrial agriculture, the production models will have no choice but to shift to healthier, more resilient practices.

Every person in this room – like every child in a primary school science classroom – knows that biodiversity is critical for a resilient and sustainable food system, and that we need now more than ever resilience to deal with the impacts of climate change. It is up to the governments of the world to do what is necessary to build this resilience back into our food and agriculture systems, by supporting best those who have always and will continue to maintain and develop biodiversity – the indigenous peoples, peasants, and small-scale farmers and fishers of the world.

Viva la via campesina!

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