- - food security through biodiversity - -
MMRF is a research and training center committed to promoting applied biological diversity as a means of ensuring food security.
Food security means all people have access to safe and nutritious food in adequate quantities and varieties to ensure health. Biodiversity makes this possible.
Species diversity in a system is directly correlated with stability. A well-designed farm rich in biodiversity has no waste. Every bi-product is the food for another useful cycle. This interconnectivity and stability is exhibited as resilience in times of natural disaster or unusual weather patterns, and creates protection within a commercial structure from the vagaries of markets, or the failure of a single crop.
For home consumption, reliance on crop diversity ensures a well-rounded diet. If one crop fails due to a pest or other misfortune, other foods are available to provide the nutrients the failed crop would have supplied. More calories and variety of nutrients can be produced when a wide assortment of species and varieties are grown together than when even a few very nutritious annuals are cultivated on the same plot of land. An established polyculture requires less energy (but more knowledge) to maintain than a monoculture that uses the same amount of land or produces the same number of calories.
Nature tends toward complexity. Therefore, maintaining a monoculture clashes with how an ecosystem tends to function. By accepting that a complex polyculture is the natural state of land and planting useful species that have a similar expression within the managed ecosystem as their counterparts within a wild ecosystem would, we work with, rather than against, nature.
Species diversity is a safety net for farmers cultivating cash crops. Once again, if one crop fails, the others are still available. If the market price for citrus falls, the vanilla vines snaking up the orange trees are still waiting for harvest. An agricultural transition from one predominant crop to another is made easier by inter-planting within a polyculture. Relying on a biologically diverse permacultural system, a farmer can have security for old age or family emergency by planting mahogany or other valuable timber species within the fruiting orchard.
Monocultures are inherently unstable. Nature utilizes every niche, and creates a complex, integrated system. A field of only one or two species is out of balance, and susceptible to pests and diseases. However, when cultivated within a polyculture the same species would be unaffected. The crop ailment is a product of a system out of balance, a symptom of a sickness, not the sickness itself.
The benefits of a balanced ecosystem go beyond the personal farm to the community in which the farm is located and to the earth as a whole. Polycultures provide many ecological services such as carbon sequestration, fodder for pollinators, and habitat creation (especially for neo-tropical migratory bird species). They also provide water and soil retention for the watersheds in which they are practiced, and function as genetic seed banks for indigenous plant species.
Loss of biological diversity in farming is a global problem. Agriculture is being transformed into an energy and input intensive commodity driven industry. As fewer varieties of less species are grown, the genetic heritage of agriculture is lost. Traditional food production techniques that utilize local resources are also being abandoned. National and regional food security is jeopardized by dependance on costly imported agrochemicals and seeds.
MMRF is working to retain and increase knowledge of sustainable food production by demonstrating techniques that are geographically and culturally appropriate.
MAYA MOUNTAIN
RESEARCH FARM
San Pedro Columbia
P.O. Box 153
Punta Gorda
Belize, C.A.
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