Page 149 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

132 M. Adomßent and U. Stoltenberg

A number of ecosystems – including the oceans, which had once been almost
impossible to imagine as being affected by human activity – have been fundamen-
tally disrupted and even destroyed.
These phenomena can be ignored or considered part of an unpredictable natural
world so long as humans are not directly affected by the consequences. There are
many natural interrelationships associated with a loss of biodiversity that are able to
arouse interest, even among people with different social and cultural backgrounds.
However it is more likely that biodiversity will receive more attention when individu-
als can connect such interrelationships with a desirable life or with specific interests.

Biodiversity and Food

The concept of agrobiodiversity provides general access to the problem of bio-
diversity, because food security concerns everyone, whatever their age, social or
cultural background. The number of different cultivated plants in the world can only
be estimated. There are tens of thousands of different types of wheat, corn, rice and
potato. However estimates show that generic diversity is now 75% less than at the
beginning of the twentieth century. This means that an ever increasing number of
people is dependent on an ever decreasing number of species and breeds, which
moreover originate from more or less the same genetic material. Five types of grain
(wheat, corn, rice, barley and millet (also known as sorghum)) account for over half
of total human consumption, and 95% of all plant-based foodstuffs come from just
30 species (FAO 2005).
Global interrelationships, such as securing world food supplies through the use of
adapted regional varieties, may not be appreciated by everyone. A better way of com-
municating the value of biodiversity is to show its effect on daily food consumption.
The loss of diversity in species and in plant types not only affects the flavour of food
but also its healthfulness (when important plant compounds are lost).

Biodiversity and Seeds

For thousands of years, genetic diversity has been a guarantee that – under a variety of
environmental conditions and without the use of external means of production – crops
could be harvested in a sustainable fashion, offering protection against the wide-
spread outbreak of diseases and providing a degree of food security. In countries in
the southern hemisphere this is still the core of a stabile and sustainability-oriented
agricultural and land use system. Diversity provides the security necessary for sur-
vival by partially compensating for a loss of crops due to adverse conditions (e.g.
drought). By contrast in industrial countries the focus is on breeding genetic char-
acteristics that promise high yield crops. In order to breed qualities that are as uni-
form as possible (e.g. synchronous harvest times), sexual reproduction is prevented