Guest blogger: Heather Ducharme, Senior Policy Officer
A team of UK researchers (including one of RSPB’s own!) has just published a thought-provoking study for those trying of us save tropical forests and other biodiversity-rich tropical habitats.
Noting that most agricultural expansion is one of the biggest threats to these habitats, the paper in PLOS ONE by Ben Phalan and others looked at tropical agricultural data over a ten year period (1999-2008), asking, among other things, what crops expanded the most and where.
Now, think about what you might already know about the biggest threats to tropical habitats : palm oil, pulp and paper in Indonesia? Soya and cattle ranching in Brazil? Perhaps coffee in central America, cocoa in west Africa? These commodities are high up the priority list for many international organizations committed to reducing tropical deforestation and other habitat loss, such as WWF, Greenpeace, the Rainforest Alliance and the Consumer Goods Forum.
But, according to Phalan’s research, the ‘usual suspects’ are only part of the problem. Looking at the global picture, maize is on par with soya as the most rapidly expanding crop by land area in tropical countries. In addition to oil palm, sorghum, beans (from the Phaseolus group), sugarcane, cowpeas, wheat, millet and cassava round out the top 10. Yet the concerned shopper who is faithfully buying certified chocolate and coffee has probably never heard of some of these habitat-threatening crops. Even those of us fed a steady diet of tropical commodity policy are unlikely to be much better informed (as far as I know, there isn’t a Roundtable for Considerate Cowpeas in the works).
There are a number of possible reasons for this knowledge gap. Some of these expanding crops are not exported from tropical countries to the global North in large volumes or in a finished form, making them less obvious targets for campaign actions by NGOs based here. For example, although in some years the UK imports significant quantities of maize from tropical countries like Brazil, usually most of it comes from France. As well, some of these crops may pose greater threats to non-forest habitats like savannahs or tropical wetlands, which are less familiar and perhaps offer less appealing campaign “poster children” than rainforests. (Without thinking about it too much, consider how you feel about grass, armadillos and anteaters compared to trees, tigers and orangutans.... )
But the question remains for the tropical conservation policy community: are some of the most destructive crops going unnoticed? And if so, how do we address these less politically tractable, but still important, threats to tropical habitats and the people and wildlife that depend on them?
This research, as well as lessons learned from the work done so far on tropical commodity supply chains, suggests that prioritizing the land rather than the crop might be the best way to close the gap. This means identifying the most vulnerable areas of remaining wild land in the tropics – central Africa, the Amazon basin and northern Australia are highlighted in Phalan’s work – and advocating for conservation as part of national land use planning and agriculture practice in those areas. This doesn’t mean that applying pressure to international supply chains can’t help, but it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine complexities of a global commodity-by-commodity approach. Committing to sustainably sourcing everything produced in those priority places might be a better – and faster - way out.