[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Invasives Mainstreamed (LA Times)
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.'
>
>
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________
>Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
>
>---
>You are currently subscribed to permaculture as: hanzibra@svn.com.br
>To unsubscribe send a blank email to
>leave-permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu
>Get the list FAQ at:
>http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/documents/permaculture.faq
>
>
>
>---
>You are currently subscribed to permaculture as: robertscroft@hotmail.com
>To unsubscribe send a blank email to
>leave-permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu
>Get the list FAQ at:
>http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/documents/permaculture.faq
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.