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Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times)

From: "Robert Jensen" <robertscroft@hotmail.com>
To: permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu
Subject: Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times)
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 09:29:19 +1000

Wow Marsha,
What a thought provoking response, thank you for sharing this with us.

I think your insight is wonderful.
Best wishes
Robert

From: "Marsha Hanzi" <hanzibra@svn.com.br>
Reply-To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times)
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 08:30:28 -0300

Dear Friends - maybe you can send this reply back to the source o the
article for me..Thanks.
Marsha

Dear Sirs:
I would like to give another point of view to the witch´s broom invasion of
the cocoa plantations of Bahia.

The fungus is attacking the cocoa because it was already debilitated by poor
management methods, encouraged by "modern" agriculture, with monocultures,
chemicals etc. The organic cocoa farms, whose trees are healthy, are only
slightly affected by the fungus.

I would suggest that the problem is not the universalization of pathogens
but rather the general degeneration of our ago-ecosystems, and even natural
ecosystems. A healthy plant resists pathogens just as a healthy child
resists disease, even when exposed...We don´t need to combat pathogens, who
have the simple function of cleaning out the system for us ( they are the
janitors), removing weakend plants. We need to strengthen our agriculture,
bringing back vitality and health which only organic management can do...

As to Mars( the chocolate company), they are financing a very good
experimental center in Bahia, where the most diverse genetic meterial is
being tested. I just took them to meet Ernst Gotsch, who has perfected
organic cocoa management systems, and I believe that there will be a good
hookup from this contact. So I would say that , far from being indifferent,
Mars is investing heavily to help farmers find a solution for the general
decadence of the cocoa farms...

I would argue that this article suffers a basic flaw due to superficial
thinking, confusing outcome with causes...

Sincerely yours,
Marsha Hanzi
Instituto de Permacultura da Bahia
Brazil
http://www.geocitis.com/ipbbr

----- Original Message -----
From: <bestworms@usa.net>
To: permaculture <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 11:20 AM
Subject: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times)

This is an interesting overview, especially since it's in a major newspaper.
Local stewardship is a good stategy to deal with this...anyone see "Men in
Black"? Some aliens are our friends, some will eat us, our plants, and pets.

one love,
Worms

--------------
Brazil's Cocoa Blight Points to Global Spread of Farm Pests Agriculture:
Although decade-long devastation is leveling off, the mysterious fungus has
taken a heavy toll on nation's economy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/updates2/lat_cocoa010415.htm

By CHRIS KRAUL, Times Staff Writer

LHEUS, Brazil--The European foot-and-mouth epidemic offers few insights
about
agricultural devastation that Jose Bardaro doesn't already have. An
invisible
airborne pest, a virtual organic neutron bomb, has destroyed his crops and
livelihood and the entire region's economy.

Bardaro and thousands of other cocoa growers in northeastern Brazil have
stood
by helplessly as a mysterious fungus called witch's broom has cut a swath
through their plantations, underscoring the alarming tendency of
once-isolated
pests to leapfrog regions and continents.

Only now is the devastation finally leveling off, 12 years after the fungus
appeared in this corner of Bahia state. Sincethen, a quarter of a million
farm jobs and $1 billion in annual cocoa exports have been lost--as has a
way
of life celebrated in the novels of Brazil's best-known writer, Jorge Amado.

'I couldn't sell my land if I wanted to. There is too much debt on it,' said
Bardaro, 68, whose farm produces one-tenth the
cocoa it did in 1992. To
retrench, Bardaro has fired employees,
rented out his main
house,
trimmed a lifestyle once marked by
European and U.S.
vacations
and seen his wife go to work in a
fitness salon.
How the fungus once
confined to the Amazon conquered the
former world capital of
cocoa is a mystery. With little
information about the
fungus' origins, conspiracy theories
abound. Rival producing
nations, chocolate companies, even the
Brazilian government are
blamed.
Whatever its origin,
the Brazilian cocoa plague is an example
of how agricultural
pests,
especially fungi, have become

increasingly mobile. In
recent years, an Indian wheat plague has
invaded California's
Imperial Valley, an African coffee pest has
ravaged Colombia and
Costa
Rica, and an oak tree killer of
uncertain origin has
spread
to six California counties.
'With the greater
mobility of people and trade items, it's an
accelerating process,'
said
Stephen Rehner, a Department of
Agriculture scientist in
Beltsville, Md. 'We're moving these
organisms around the
world,
and every once in a while one will
find a new susceptible
host, and you get these widespread
epidemics.'
Given the
interconnections of the world through trade and
tourism, chances are good
that the pace of new agricultural
epidemics will pick up,
said Joseph Saunders, pest management
professor at the
Institute
for Tropical Agricultural Research and
Higher Education in
Coronado, Costa Rica.
'A disease brought
from one area where it is indigenous to
one where it is exotic is
especially dangerous because there are
no biological controls or
defenses,' Saunders said.
Saunders noted that
2,000 new fungus varieties are
discovered every year,
many
of them pathogenic. Since fungi are
so hard to control--as
anybody with lawn mushrooms or athlete's
foot knows--potential
plant
diseases can quickly devastate entire
regions.
The world's
second-largest cocoa producer as recently as
1985, Brazil has seen its
production fall so sharply that it
probably will never
regain
its preeminence. Last year's harvest
of 124,000 tons is
one-quarter of Brazil's 1985 record and
one-tenth of leader Ivory
Coast's 1.3-million-ton output last year.
The economic
devastation is palpable in this once-thriving
port town now dotted with
empty warehouses and crumbling
mansions. Its slums are
inhabited by thousands of unemployed
farm workers who have
left
the countryside.
'The cities weren't
ready for them,' said Antonio Zugaib,
economic development
director for Ilheus. 'The unemployed
don't consume but need
housing, health services and cause
crime. Many are living on
biscuits. A culture that lasted two
centuries is gone.'
The fungus that has
wrought so much misery causes foliage
on the tops of cocoa
trees
to shrivel and fruit to spoil. The name
witch's broom describes
the
desiccated treetops after the fungus
has sucked them dry of
moisture. Healthy cocoa fruit resemble
overgrown avocados in
shape
and are yellow when ripe.
In pure devastation,
witch's broom could be compared with
the blight that killed
most
of the chestnut trees in the U.S. early
last century; with the
plague that ravaged Caribbean banana
plantations in the 1940s;
and with Dutch elm disease that ruined
the leafy tableau of Main
Street U.S.A. in the 1970s.
All the diseases are
caused by fungi, and all arrived
mysteriously, taking
few--if any--prisoners.
Bahia's reversal of
fortune was inconceivable as recently as
the 1980s, when Ilheus
was
riding a 100-year wave of wealth
generated by global
demand
for cocoa and the region's ability to
supply it.
Although cocoa had
been grown throughout much of Latin
America for centuries,
cocoa plantations proliferated here in the
late 19th century after
fruit trees were found to thrive on
southern Bahia's rich
soil,
80 inches of annual rainfall and forest
cover.
Used mainly for
chocolate flavoring and cosmetics, cocoa in
whole or pressed seeds or
liquid extract was soon being shipped
from Ilheus to all
corners

of the globe. The demand gave rise to
storied wealth among
cocoa
'colonels,' the feudal barons who
ruled northern Brazil and
whose lusty lives inspired Amado.
Brazil lost its lead
in cocoa in the 1950s to Ivory Coast,
which now supplies 45% of
world demand.
By the early 1980s,
Bahia had begun to feel the effects of
global competition,
especially from expanding farms in
equatorial Africa.
As prices fell, doom
knocked on Bahia's door in 1989 when
witch's broom appeared.
The
fungus is now present on 98% of
the state's cocoa farms.
Bardaro said infestation has been 'total'
on his 1,000-acre farm
since 1996.
The pervasiveness of
the fungus caused cocoa shipments
abroad to fall to
virtually
zero, with domestic production now
just enough to meet the
nation's needs. In 1988, Brazil's $1
billion in cocoa exports
represented 6% of the nation's total
trade.
Despite widespread
rancor, there is consensus among
officials, traders and
even
some growers that the fight against the
fungus is finally showing
some success. Nine varieties of
fungus-resistant grafts
have been made on traditional cocoa trees,
such as one called
Scavina
developed in Trinidad. Bardaro has
two such grafts on his
farm.
'Cocoa production
has
not improved yet, but it has stopped
falling,' said Luis
Fernando Brandao, a cocoa trader and grower

based in Salvador, the
capital of Bahia state 125 miles north of
Ilheus.
Brandao's guarded
optimism is borne out by market research
done by ED&F Man
Holdings,
a major London-based
commodities trader, which
predicts that countrywide production
may even increase a bit
this year to 126,000 tons.
It doesn't help the
growers' cause that cocoa prices are near
50-year lows, with the
world glutted by production from African
and East Asian suppliers,
which have stepped into the breach
created by Brazil's
problems.
Nor is there any
great
clamoring for Brazilian cocoa among
international buyers,
such
as Hershey Foods or Mars, once
Brazil's two biggest
customers. A Hershey spokesman said the
roasting and mixing of
cocoa--not its country of origin--are the
critical factors in its
candy's flavor.
To gather political
support, the cocoa industry is trying to
align itself with
environmentalists campaigning to protect the
Mata Atlantica, the
remnants of Brazil's primeval Atlantic
Forest, one of the
world's
most biologically diverse, said
Wallace Setenta, director
of the National Council of Cocoa
Growers in nearby
Itabuna.

Cocoa cultivation
works to preserve the forest because of the
fruit trees' need for
shade
from larger, older trees. Bardaro's
plantation is covered
with
stately 150-foot-high jequitiba, aderno,
araca and conduru trees,
species that are unique to the region.
But neighboring
farmers, cut off from their livelihood by the
plague, are clearing
forests to raise coffee or cattle. An estimated
5% of the forest that
once
covered the cocoa-growing region is
gone, said Zugaib, the
economic development director.
Bardaro is

understandably jaded about the latest purported
fix. But, fondling a
healthy and maturing cocoa fruit that hangs
shoulder-high from a
grafted tree on his hilly estate, he allows
himself a small portion
of
optimism.
Bardaro, warily
checking for signs of infestation in the
8-foot-tall tree, says he
has little choice. He has tried switching
to flower growing and
dairy
farming with no success, blaming
the hilly terrain and
humid
climate.
'I'm not convinced
it
will work. The resistance to the fungus
could break down,' said
Bardaro, a third-generation cocoa
planter whose grandfather
inspired a character in an Amado
novel about feuding cocoa
barons. 'But we are giving it a
chance.'

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Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times), bestworms, 04/15/2001
- <Possible follow-up(s)>
- Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times), Marsha Hanzi, 04/17/2001
- Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times), Robert Jensen, 04/17/2001
- Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times), Claude Genest, 04/18/2001