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  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] A Domestic Breed Disappears Every Month
  • Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:13:05 -0600


A Domestic Breed Disappears Every Month
By Fabien Deglise, Le Devoir
Tuesday 19 June 2007
French source
http://www.ledevoir.com/2007/06/19/147839.html
The FAO sounds the alarm over a global threat to farm
animal diversity.

Under pressure from the industrialization and
homogenization of food products, one breed of chicken,
beef cattle, pig, or even rabbit is now erased from the
surface of the globe every month.

This trend deeply worries the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization (FAO) which sees these
disappearances as "the biggest global threat to farm
animal diversity," which, at the same time, reduces the
ability to confront natural catastrophes such as global
warming and the emergence of new diseases, the
international organization indicates in a report made
public last week.

With the first genetic portrait of breeding stock
animals in the world in hand, the FAO is, in fact,
sounding the alarm: by always wanting to produce more
at lower cost, intensive agriculture is in the process
of speeding to its ruin. How? By concentrating on a
too-limited number of animal breeds, like the Holstein
in the milk-production sector, the Duroc pig for pork-
breeding and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens,
with, as an inevitable consequence, "a risk of
extinction of several other indigenous and heirloom
varieties," but also an "erosion of genetic diversity"
that today's children risk paying for tomorrow, as one
may read in the 500-page document.

Entitled, "The State of Zoogenetic Global Resources for
Food and Agriculture," this report was unveiled last
Thursday by the Commission of Genetic Resources for
Food and Agriculture during a meeting in Rome, Italy.

Chronicles of a Death Foretold

According to the FAO, the situation begins to be
worrying. Today, 11 percent of domesticated mammal
breeds and two percent of domestic bird food breeding
stock varieties have, in fact, been definitively
extinguished through the need to respond to the new
requirements of intensive agriculture, and of markets,
but also in order to please new consumer tastes. And
1,400 other breeds of domesticated animals of the 7,500
kinds of breeding stock could undergo the same fate in
the near future, continue the authors of this analysis.

"Over the course of the last seven years, one domestic
breed has disappeared every month. Time is running out
for a fifth of bovine, goat, porcine, equine and
poultry breeds in the world," commented FAO Under-
Director General Alexander Muller, in a press release.
He acknowledges that this portrait of biodiversity is
still incomplete, since several of the organization's
member countries have not yet completed the inventory
of their domestic breeds.

"Although sometimes less productive, many of the breeds
threatened with extinction incorporate unique traits
nonetheless, such as disease resistance or tolerance
for extreme climatic conditions," declares the head of
the FAO's Animal Production Service, Irene Hoffmann.
"Yet, future generations could need those traits to
brave the problems of climate change, new animal
diseases and the growing demands for the products of
animal husbandry." At present, the planet contains 2.3
billion beef cattle and pigs, as well as 17 billion
chickens. The genetic range of these animals is
nevertheless extremely limited, especially in Europe
and in North America, where the processes of breeding
animal standardization and homogenization begun during
the 1970s have considerably reduced the diversity of
domestic animal breeds, the FAO indicates.

The phenomenon does not, however, spare developing
countries. In fact, in Vietnam, the percentage of
indigenous sows was 72 percent in 1994. It is now no
higher than 25 percent, according to the report, those
sows having been replaced by so-called hybrid "models"
that better fulfill the productivity logic that
presently prevails in the agricultural world.

Still worse, in this corner of Asia, of the 14 local
breeds of pig, three are now threatened with
extinction, while seven others are in "critical
condition" or deemed "vulnerable" by the international
organization.

"From an ecological perspective, there's nothing to
celebrate," biologist and professor at the University
of Montreal Pierre Brunel stated yesterday to Le
Devoir. "Biodiversity is insurance against all risks.
When there's too much uniformity in nature, the damage
is much more significant in the event of catastrophe.
Biodiversity allows risks to be spread out (in an
epidemic, for example) among several breeds balanced in
the ecosystems, which then rebound more quickly."

Advocated and recognized by the scientific community,
biodiversity in the agricultural sector seems still not
to concern the majority of the FAO's 169 member
countries: in fact, 48 percent of them have no in vivo
conservation program for the heirloom breeds that
participated in the construction of their agriculture.
Moreover, two-thirds of these states have yet to take
any measure whatsoever to conserve the genetic material
of these breeds in vitro in order to confront potential
catastrophes.

These regulatory gaps represent a drama for the FAO,
since "genetic resources are essential for the
adaptation of agriculture to new climatic realities,"
but also "for global food security and the subsistence
of millions of people," the international organization
indicates. That adaptation is all the more important in
that the earth, which must nourish 6.2 billion people
today, will have to provide for 9 billion human beings
40 years from now, it states.






  • [Livingontheland] A Domestic Breed Disappears Every Month, TradingPostPaul, 06/24/2007

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