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The Peace Diaries Radio Program was broadcast during the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa from August 26 through September 4, 2002. It was broadcast to Africa, Middle East and Europe. |
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SHOW 8: BIODIVERSITY & INCREASED RURAL FARMING |
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SCRIPT, SHOW 8 00:01 – 01:03 (Show intro; Kids quotes, Andersen Quote) 01:03 – 01:31 (Narrated Introduction, Tessa van Staden) In the year 2000 almost 28 billion people lived on less than 2 dollars a day, with just over 1 billion barely surviving on the margins of subsistence. Where the poor and hungry few alternatives than to encroach on the environment for a day’s pay, conservation efforts are likely to fail. Scientists, including the Food Policy Research Institute’s Per Andersen, are focusing on helping rural farmers increase their productivity… 01:31 – 01:47 (Per Andersen, agricultural economist, Food Policy Research Institute) One of the things that we need to do is to make available improved varieties of seeds and improved production systems for those small plots, the family plots and the community gardens and so on. 01:48 – 01:52 (Narration, TvS) Andersen says improved seed varieties could be one answer, if tested… 01:53 – 02:57 (Andersen continued) In terms of the economic importance, in the short-run, yes, if we do import seed into Africa that has not been grown their before it obviously has to be tested. It has to be tested for consumer acceptance; it has to be tested for resistance to insects and diseases and so on. It is not only genetically-modified seeds that have to be tested; ALL seed brought in from the outside have to the susceptibility to the various risk factors, including consumer acceptance. Invasive species-issues are a real one & we have to take whatever precautions are necessary. But I think it’s important that we don’t end up in a situation where we become paranoid about any change. We have to be willing to take risks, but they have to measured risks. They have to be informed risks. 02:58 – 03:05 (Narration, TvS) Ecological phenomenologist, Tamra Raven, agrees that small-scale farmers can only be helped if local vegetation is managed properly… 03:06 – 03:39 (Tamra Raven) What we CAN do is manage local vegetation. We can get plants cover, or vegetation cover of the native plant species back on the ground. We need to encourage bio-regional seed trading of the local plants. We need to protect vegetation. We ought to have zero tolerance for losing any more plants. We predict that there could be more than 34,000 species lost in the short run. 03:40 – 03:45 (Narration, TvS) Raven ads that responsible farming and responsible harvesting begins with ecological restoration. 03:45 – 04:45 (Tamra Raven) When we do ecological restoration, the first thing is we need to get a cover on the soil. Any plant on the soil is better than no plant on the soil, because the rain is a highly erosive force. So we need to get a cover on the soil. The next season you might find that there’s another kind of plant coming up, and that means more than one species and so that’s good. Then maybe you go out and maybe the next year, or next season, you get another plant & then you have 3 different plant species covering the soil. Maybe one of them may be good for attracting a butterfly or a moth or maybe it attracts a little mammal, and maybe then you can actually have a protein source. 04:45 – 04:55 (Narration, TvS) Agricultural economist, Per Andersen, says it’s of no use to improve seed varieties and farming methods without educating farmers at the same time. 04:56 – 05:33 (Per Andersen ctd.) Primary education combined with a balanced educational poverty-alleviation program, in other words, if better technology or better productivity-increasing measures can be made available to farmers, in order for farmers to know how to behave in a changing situation, they need education. What I don’t think works is to go in with education without promoting the opportunities for change. 05:34 – 05:43 (Narration, TvS) Tamra Raven warns that it’s not only farmers, but urban dwellers and tech-savvy residents of cities that need to be educated about ecological restoration 05:44 – 06:16 (Tamra Raven) On the one hand we’re dealing with, sort of, soil and being a farmer, and on the other we’re dealing with the very rapid, high-tech changes that we talk about in participation in the global economy. So, we have to do both. This has to be a new kind of education where practically, daily, we’re looking at ourselves in small groups, going out, performing a process of ecological restoration. 06:17 – 06:22 (Narration, TvS) Raven says this new kind of education is the responsibility of teachers and parents… 06:23 – 06:47 (Tamra Raven) We have to put in place playful activities for children – for the learning of what’s going on in the high-tech world, but also for re-kindling that connection with nature, in playing with each other & finding out how to be human in this over-populated, stressed environment that we’ve created for ourselves. 06:48 – 07:12 (Narration, TvS) East of Lake Tanganyika, in western Tanzania, local farmers is destroying natural vegetation by chopping down trees to erect beehives. University of Cape Town professor Heinz Ruther, who is also scientific coordinator of the Lake Rukwa Basin Integrated Project, says scientists are attempting to teach farmers other methods through an environmental project… 07:13 – 08:35 (Prof. Heinz Ruther, Dept of Geomatics at University of Cape Town) It’s actually quite interesting, the amazing amount of damage caused by bee-keeping. The beehives are made from tree bark, so they ring bark a tree to get a single bee-hive. Then they use another tree form the cover of the hive – it’s like a cylinder – and the end is closed with a different tree. So, in the process of creating this hive they need small trees of which they take the bark, so in the process of making one bee-hive they kill about five trees. There are about 200,000 beehives in the area, so every year 2 to 300,000 trees die. We are thinking of producing beehives which are also produced from wood, because we have to use the resources there, but then you’d create something like 50 beehives out of one tree, in stead of the other way around; not using the bark but the actual wood of the tree. In stead of having one section of the tree, like the bark, you can cut the tree into a beehive – so up to 50 beehives from one tree, in stead of one. 08:36 – 08:43 (Narr) That was University of Cape Town Prof, Heinz Ruther, scientific coordinator of the Lake Rukwa Basin Integrated Project. 08:44 – 09:31 (SHOW OUTRO)  |
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