permaculture

[Claude Genest <genest@together.net>]

Well done Marsha !

Hope you write more often...:-)

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