By Fabien Deglise
    Le Devoir

    Tuesday 19 June 2007

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.