For some time we have argued that Slow Food should be concerned with domestic biodiversity, because it is domestic biodiversity that provides most of our everyday food. Food is our specific area of interest: our association’s purpose and strategies are based on agricultural issues, farming and food processing. To tell the truth, we have never considered whether this division of life on Earth into domestic and wild isn’t somewhat arbitrary or vague.
Academic science doesn’t refer to the distinction, and when it analyses the effects of human impact on living nature, it is never concerned about which perspective it should be examined from. Whether it is a question of pollution, deforestation or agriculture, science studies the changes, or rather the damage, that human action has caused to the biosphere. It uses specialized approaches, maybe only looking at limited geographical areas, but without making a distinction between domestic and wild.
There are some questions which need clarifying. First of all, not all the food which human beings consume derives from agriculture and farming, the practices which historically have isolated useful species for domestication from biodiversity. Humans take plant food (mushrooms, herbs, berries, truffles) and animals (by hunting and fi shing) from the wild habitat but, if we exclude fishing which requires separate consideration, it appears that the amounts involved are negligible. There are no exact data: the FAO provides detailed statistics on everything to do with food, but tells us nothing about plant food taken from the wild habitat. There probably aren’t sufficient data to produce reliable statistical information and, in any case, it would seem that the activity of gatherers does not constitute a serious threat to biodiversity.
Hunting and fishing are something else. They are carefully monitored because the catching of excessive amounts is reducing natural resources down to the levels essential for survival. In fact, in many countries hunting is strictly regulated, and raised species are being released into the natural habitat in order to maintain biodiversity at levels that allow people to practice recreational hunting. The latter is still a widespread activity, but marginal in terms of providing food—people hunt for sport—and will only survive, at least in developed countries, if assisted. With fishing it is the increasing demand for fish as a food that is putting pressure on natural resources to the very limits of sustainability. The ‘domestic’ alternative of fi sh farming presents a series of problems (environmental, technological, health) that do not at present allow us to replace wild fishing. On account of its specific characteristics, which are bound to to global eating habits, Slow Food classifies fishing as similar to domestic biodiversity, even if this does not strictly correspond to truth. But if we ask a second question, we can see there is partial justification for this arbitrary classification. For some decades human beings have consciously and methodically attacked domestic biodiversity in order to reduce, simplify and standardize it. However indirect threats to wild biodiversity are, they are an effect of our increasingly mindless exploitation of the planet: nobody wants to intentionally cause the extinction of butterflies, pandas, Bengal tigers, holm oaks or the rainforest. Human beings are endangering them because they are digging wells, cultivating virgin land, releasing chemical substances into the soil, artif cially increasing the fertility of crops, exhausting water resources, changing the climate, removing natural habitats and modifying ecological communities. We are not intentionally putting species at risk. Instead we are consciously uprooting ancient local varieties of fruit, vegetables and cereals, and replacing traditional breeds of cattle, sheep and pigs with modern hybrids.
It is a worldwide attack on the wealth of countries and the knowledge of people, allegedly carried out to rationalize herbs and crops to achieve greater profitability. What human beings have knowledgeably and patiently selected over 10,000 years, conjuring up extraordinary biodiversity from nothing, is now being progressively eliminated by human beings. It might be objected that the few thousand species selected by humans that are now at risk of extinction, constitute a tiny proportion of biodiversity compared to the total. In fact it is estimated that the number of species existing today is much greater than the 1,400,000 officially classified. In her The Work of Nature, Yvonne Baskin speaks of 30 million species, though a number between 10 and 15 million is probably more realistic. These numbers are so high they make one wonder whether the end of the Burlina cow or criollo corn is no more than a whisper in the deafening concert of life on Earth.
It’s true that, thousands of years ago, agriculture and livestock farming began to simplify the human diet somewhat.
When humans were hunters and gatherers—some people maintain this was the true golden age of Homo sapiens—they obtained nutrition from at least 8,000 plant species. Sedentarization progressively reduced this range to the current 150 species, of which five provide 50 percent of food needs. But now interspecies biodiversity, variability and the ability created by evolution to multiply differences to ensure better defense against pathogens and disease are also seriously threatened. The monocultures promoted by agroindustry— controlled and without interspecies differences— represent zero level biodiversity. Yet this method of farming is universally applied in the name of greater productivity, with chemical substances being used to make up for the fragility of these simplified species. Monocultures require extensive areas of land to eliminate obstacles: they mean the end of hedgerows, trees, mixed crops, rotation, fallow land and soil vitality. They mean removing anything that does not assure maximum efficiency and income—meaning traditional breeds and species.
This attack on biodiversity is also being launched at sea. Fishermen know that they are seriously depleting resources, that there is excessive pressure on some species.
But they continue to fish because the world fishing system is demanding greater availability and guarantees ever growing markets. The context is obviously different: in the oceans the attack on marine biodiversity risks being fatal and definitive, whereas on land its effects are partial and quantitatively non-relevant, as we have seen. It is the implications that are different and much more worrying. By eliminating domestic biodiversity, we inflict a fatal attack on local cultures and historic habitats, where the interaction between local species and wild biodiversity had been consolidated and tested over centuries of agricultural practice. The coexistence of wild and domestic biodiversity was necessary: it assured the vigor of the soil, the presence of animals capable of attacking harmful insects, variability inside species, the vitality of the landscape, and natural productive processes.
It is no coincidence that the organic methods now desirable for agriculture were general practice only 50 years ago, maybe less. And while the disappearance of local crops in rich countries means the loss of values and traditions but not poverty, in poor countries it has led to the total loss of food sovereignty which, with ongoing food price increases, risks degenerating into a frightening food tragedy.
Slow Food is developing its activities on these two fronts, defending traditions in developed countries to preserve local identities, wholesome produce and the pleasure of eating, and preserving local economies in poorer countries as their only defense against hunger and the food crisis.

Piero Sardo

President

Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity