The term biodiversity usually brings to mind a vivacious collage of animals in the backdrop of pristine wildernesses such as a courtship display by the birds of paradise in Papa New Guinea; the epic migration in the Serengeti; the boisterous howling of new world monkeys inhabiting Latin American rainforests; darting schools of iridescent fish in the Great Barrier Reefs and so on. However, most people are unaware of the role of agro-biodiversity.
Biodiversity doesn’t often bring to mind agricultural farms fielding an assortment of food crops, grains, vegetables, cereals and fruits. If it does, then you may pat yourself on the back because that is absolutely spot on! Variety amongst crops and vegetables also constitutes biodiversity and it plays a crucial role in sustaining farming livelihoods and supporting the food demands of the growing populace across the world.
Throughout history, the development of most food crops can be credited to ethnic communities who have carefully selected and cultivated diverse plant variants for consumption from wild plants over several generations. These wild plants have been gradually domesticated keeping in mind their suitability for cultivation across different soil types, climate patterns, nutritional benefits, and tastes.
Ethnobotanists studying the origin of crops have thus identified centres of agricultural diversity across the world namely, Central America; Latin America, mainly Ecuador, Peru and Chile; North Africa and the Mediterranean; Ethiopia and surrounding parts of East Africa; the Middle East; Eastern China; Southeast Asia; Penisular regions of the Indian subcontinent; and the Western Himalaya1,2. These hotspots of agro-biodiversity have quite literally acted as gardens of Eden for humans to identify, isolate and breed cultivars of food crops throughout history.
Industrial Farming is reducing agro-biodiversity
However in the last century, to prioritize yield and generate surplus food to promote industrialization and rapid economic growth, food production systems have undergone a tremendous change towards intensive monocropping systems using genetically modified high-yielding varieties on large swathes of land that require capital-intensive inputs such as irrigation channels; mechanised tillage and harvesting; and fertiliser and pesticidal inputs.
This is reflected in the fact that although over 2,400 varieties of edible plants are known; about 20 or so dominate current agricultural land use and form the majority of human diet across the globe today3. Such a tumultuous advancement in agricultural systems has been adopted throughout the world save for some remote regions such as the Western Ghats of India, the Satoyama landscapes in Japan, the Milpa cultivation systems in Mexico, traditional village systems in Eastern Europe and South-western China’s terrace landscapes4. Here, traditional farming practices have remained the same or changed comparatively little over a long time.
Traditional agriculture in the Western Himalaya
Farming in the Western Himalaya too has been mostly shielded from such trends of agricultural modernization. This is because mountainous terrains are characterised by topographic constraints such as small landholdings, the unfeasibility of irrigational infrastructure, poor transport networks and lower soil productivity. Due to contiguous undulations, elevation changes rapidly over short aerial distances leading to greater variability in climate, edaphic profiles and the resultant vegetation.
Mountain agro-systems are thus amongst the most susceptible ecosystems to the threat posed by climate change with rising temperatures increasing instances of erratic precipitation leading to unpredictable variations in seasonality. This is projected to have a tremendous impact on the certainty of agricultural produce in the region5. These factors coupled with marginal landholdings (small-sized farms usually averaging a hectare or less due to terrain restrictions) render the implementation of modern agricultural techniques involving high-yielding crop varieties exceedingly difficult. Therefore, agriculturalists in Western Himalaya are among the most vulnerable communities in the world.
Traditional farmers cultivating wheat and barley in Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand.
Challenges of Mountainous Communities
Mountainous communities have long since adapted to these limitations by developing traditional agricultural systems and appropriate farming behaviours such as terrace/step cultivation of a diverse group of rain-fed, multipurpose, and native varieties aimed at sustenance-based livelihoods. Farmers here do not cultivate two or three crops aimed for commercial sale; rather they grow a diverse assortment of crops in mixed and inter-cropping systems.
This is due to poor access to markets which makes commerce difficult and so, farmers have to source different components of their diet from their farms directly. Another crucial adaptation is that they not only cultivate different native crops, but also diverse varieties of the same crop called landrace6.
Landraces are native varieties of a crop that have beneficial morphological and physiological traits such as crop height, inflorescence length, grain size, grain per inflorescence, maturation period, and taste. These landraces have been reared by the farmers through meticulous selective breeding of indigenous crops facilitated by proximity to their wild counterparts. They often have superior qualities such as resistance to disease; tolerance toward pests; resilience to environmental stresses; additional nutritional benefits; better taste; higher water use efficiency; and many more. They are also cultivated to be multipurpose such as supplementing fodder requirements for livestock in addition to providing grain.
The Agro-Biodiversity of the Western Himalayas
The Western Himalayan region is an agro-biodiversity hotspot and a vast diversity of crops are cultivated here, from standard cereals like wheat, rice, maize and barley; to pulses such as black gram, horse gram, lentil, black-eyes peas (no, it’s not just the name of a band); oilseeds such as sesame and mustard; pseudocereals such as amaranth, naked barley and buckwheat; an array of millets such as foxtail, barnyard, pearl and hog millets; and many more7. This is in addition to numerous vegetables and fruits and one could go on listing them endlessly.
Even within crops, the diversity is bewildering from hundreds of landrace varieties amongst paddy (rice) alone! Similarly, there are dozens of landraces amongst wheat, finger millet, and maize recorded at present and there could be many more that have remained undocumented. The hundreds of varieties of paddy in the Western Himalayan region show diversity in land use such as variants suited to rain-fed or irrigated land.
Such variants could be of use in building climate-resilient varieties in water-stressed regions such as Marathwada in Central India. Variations amongst landraces also exist in scent, husk, kernel length, grain length, colour, and taste which could have important commercial implications. Some varieties also hold religious value being used as offerings while others have been bred by farmers to maximize fodder biomass by selecting varieties with longer shoots.
Variety is crucial
Similarly, there are paddy varieties with stalks containing high cellulose and protein but low lignin content to enrich the nutrient value and ease the digestibility of the dry stalk for use as fodder7. Such adaptations are pivotal in a region where seasonal feed availability for livestock is limited and could alleviate such issues elsewhere.
Landraces amongst wheat also show variation in colour, inflorescence size and presence/absence of awn which influence crop depredation by animals (varieties with awn are generally not preferred by livestock and other herbivores). Thus, landraces have great potential in mitigating crop depredation and highlight the importance of incorporating indigenous knowledge towards addressing longstanding issues such as human-wildlife conflict, particularly at farm-forest interfaces.
Crop depredation by Rhesus macaques in Himalaya is a frequent source of conflict.
The Role of Millet Based Diets
The Himalayan region also has a rich history of traditional millet-based diets, both greater and small millets including foxtail, barnyard, hog and pearl millets. Millet crops cover a wider base of nutrition having relatively higher profiles of protein, Vitamin A, minerals, and fibre as compared to other cereals whilst also being resilient to climate variability as they have meagre water requirements8.
They are more suited to organic farming and can give modest yet sustainable yields even during sustained dry periods or delayed rains. Their importance in addressing hidden hunger (micronutrient deficiency) amongst women and children has been greatly stressed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)9. The above examples underline the significance of crop and landrace diversification as a crucial strategy to sustain food security and self-sufficiency in resource-limited regions, particularly in the context of climate-influenced yield unpredictability.
Reasons for concern and the way forward
Unfortunately, traditional agricultural systems both in the Himalaya and elsewhere in the world are on a decline. The influence of globalisation and the allure of cash income has permeated into these remote regions as well. Concerns regarding the rising popularity of cash crops loom as they seem to have a direct consequence on the decline in native crop diversity and landraces.
A shift towards cash crop cultivation comprising of monocropping of potato, soybean and high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat will gradually dilute traditional crop diversity and their landraces. Unlike modern varieties, seeds for traditional landraces are borne out of previous years’ produce. Therefore, years of successful cultivation of modern varieties contribute towards the permanent extinction of landraces as farmers no longer have access to their viable seeds and there is a dearth of markets catering to their preservation.
Unpredictable Climates prove chaotic
High-yielding varieties also render the farmers more vulnerable to climate risk as hybrid varieties are at the mercy of climate predictability such as the cyclical onset of rains. Asynchrony between farm activities and weather either due to prolonged drought, excessive rainfall or change in their temporality often proves catastrophic to harvest.
And since the initial investment is higher, the consequences of crop failure are more devastating. Monocropping trends also put farmers’ food security at risk since they now have to depend on markets to fulfil their nutritional requirements. Declining agrobiodiversity also endangers the vigour of the overall crop genetic pool and leaves them at risk of new pest and pathogen attacks i.e. if the base gene pool of a crop is limited then there are fewer genetic mutations possible in turn leading to fewer new varieties that could potentially harbour resistances and tolerances.
Several studies have depicted how mixed stands (multiple landraces) offer higher productivity by showing greater resilience to diseases as resistant varieties act as barriers to pathogen evolution10.
Traditional step farms are being abandoned as people lose interest in agriculture.
Conclusion
Consequently, the conservation of native cultivars by the in-situ practice of indigenous crops along with their ex-situ preservation is imperative. Agricultural policies and institutional networks need to give increased impetus to maintaining and proliferating native landrace varieties across farmlands.
This can be done by enabling access to seed banks of native cultivars whilst also providing incentives such as assured markets with minimum support prices for traditional crops/landraces. Enhanced market access and good price distribution can promote traditional varieties and enable farmers to opt for higher crop diversity. Maintaining crop diversity is pivotal for ensuring sustainable food production and by extension, safeguarding regional food security.
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Written by: Rishabh Srikar