S1: maybe i'll take this opportunity while the uh light bulb is getting changed to um, welcome you all on behalf of the Environmental Faculty Steering Committee to the last of this semi- uh this semester's seminars in the series Research in the Interest of the Public and the Environment. this is a series that, is about environmental challenges and their interdisciplinary s- solutions from the perspective of faculty and students at the University of Michigan. the seminar series is sponsored by, the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Urban Environmental Management Institute. before i, uh mention today's speakers and their title let me say that the seminar series will continue into the next term. the first of the seminars next term will be January thirteenth that's also a Thursday afternoon, the seminars next term will run from four to six instead of from three to five. they will all be held in the Michigan League, uh not all in the same room but all in um one of two of the nice seminar rooms over there and we will have a um, a schedule set by the time of the first meeting. and the first, uh seminar next semester will feature a group of, faculty and uh graduate students who are designing an energy track for, the University of Mini- Michigan that will involve collaboration among, about half-a-dozen units across campus. by an energy track, i mean a program in research and education at all levels and outreach. it focuses on, the, sources, uses, of energy, alternative energies, the problems created by energy use for both technologies and for society. so this is a very interesting, um subject that has been the s- uh, that has been the focus of several informal meetings over this, fall, and we'll hear about that f- uh for, we'll hear about that in January. today we have, uh, this, the theme of sustaining agriculture, and our speakers are John Vandermeer of the Department of Biology and Ivette Perfecto of the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. the title of their talk is Challenging Old Assumptions about Agriculture and Finding the Ecological Bases for New Forms of Production. 
S2: okay thank you Katherine. um, what we plan to do here, i don't know if i can get out of the way of this or not, but, what we plan to do here is uh i'll talk for a little bit, um, about sort of the underlying theoretical framework that we think we're operating under here, and then when i finish that, that'll just be about five minutes or so, and then i'll talk about the work that we're doing in Nicaragua, and when I finish talking about the work that we're doing in Nicaragua, why Ivette will talk about the work that we're doing in Mexico, and finally when fe- she finishes why i'll come back up here talk uh, um a little bit s- more reflective about how the, uh theoretical framework fits into the work that we're doing and we'll be planning to do in the future and how other people might be, might b- uh be wanting to join us, okay? so, first of all, i guess the first thing that we have to talk about is why agriculture at the University of Michigan. the University of Michigan is an, ivory tower school uh, it's not Michigan State we're not the cow college obviously, we really shouldn't be doing agriculture. um, and so we have to justify that to some extent i suppose um, besides the fact that most of the terrestrial surface of the earth is agroecosystem, whether y- people like to admit that or not, um the truth is that the modern agricultural system, when i talk about the modern agricultural system i'm principally talking about the agricultural system that has evolved since World War Two. uh, that agri- modern agricultural system has been in fact and and everyone has to admit cornucopian, i mean we now produce more than enough food for every person, a- way more than enough food for everyone in the world. as a matter of fact the principle problem with agriculture right now is over- overproduction, um, so it has been cornucopian and in that sense very successful, but successful in very narrow terms. along with that success has come kind of a Faustian bargain, that people are beginning to realize now, or a lot of, lot of people are realizing uh strongly at the present time, and that Faustian ba- bargain has to do with the problems that agricultural is cau- that agriculture is causing. this is first highlighted by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring. which is sometimes, sometimes cited as the, uh the beginning of the modern environmental movement, and you'll recall that that book was mainly about agriculture as a matter of fact about pesticides. and more recently we have been seeing, the human use. and second of all we need to get away from this narrow, traditional, uh this narrow technical specialization, where uh people are cubbyholed into their particular disciplinary units. and we have to get out_ agroecosystems involve all sorts of different disciplines, and so by very, by its very nature the ecological approach to studying agro- agroecosystems, is going to be and needs to be by the very nature a interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, uh approach. so, this this focus that we're, we're trying to develop here is an ecological focus where we're looking at agricul- agri- an agricultural an agroecol- an ecological approach to agroecosystems, at multiple scales in multiple disciplines. okay? that's the background. now, let me show you some slides to talk about the Nicaragua work that we've been doing, and i will definitely n- need the lights out as ne- as much as i can get because my slides will not withstand a lot of light pollution. [SU-F: no, i think we should ] in the Peten in Guatemala, with a very similar project, actually it's a paired project to the project that we're working on in Nicaragua, but i won't say anything about the Peten site today. and then in addition to that, where Ivette will talk about is the work that we're doing up here in the highlands of Chiapas in, in Mexico. next slide. uh this is in the uh National Geographic map that was published several years ago of the, of forest cover in Native American lands in Central America, and i just wanted to show you in, the, to put this whole thing in context, this is Nicaragua and as you can see the Pacific side or the western side of Nicaragua is, almost entirely deforested, and as you move from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side, why you get more and more forest although it's ve- highly fragmented forest of course, as you can see. once you get on the eastern side, you see there's a big chunk of forest here, this is the Indio-Maiz Reserve and a big chunk of forest here in the Uaxactn Reserve and, and uh well, and non-preserved they're just rain forests here, okay? but what you also can see is that the agricultural frontier is pushing in through here and it's kinda cut through the forest right here. we work in general in this area right here. next slide. the context of the work, oh, excuse me, i did wanna show you some aerial photographs to give you an idea of the overall landscape. the landscape itself is very, is r- really quite heterogenous. this is uh, this particular slide here is of a meandering uh, meandering river, meandering through swamp forest. this is all forest here but it's swamp forest, and then herbaceous swamp that's in through here. this is pretty much natural vegetation which has not been uh too, uh influenced by Homo sapiens other than some sort of traditional agricultural, uh agricultural rice production that goes on in the swamp areas. next slide. uh, many areas that y- uh that you find around there, uh in th- in the area are, pretty much continuous forest. this forest was damaged by the hurricane in nineteen eighty-eight, which i'll tell you about in just a moment, but you do see landscapes like this. the next slide uh, shows you uh, a much more common type of landscape you see natural forest here, but then you see a patch of agriculture, uh, a patch of forest that has been cut down, ready for slash and burn agriculture here. here's a patch that's been in agriculture and may have been abandoned, i really don't know. but uh, you you see this kind of mosaic there next slide. uh, and this is a very common feature here, you see forest in the background and cattle pasture in here. not very good cattle pasture but cattle pasture next slide. uh, and here you see the mosaic of, a combination of forest and cattle pastures. uh much of this forest is sort of riparian forest, others of this is highland forest, but also much of this is agroecosystem, you can't really tell that it's agroecosystem which is part of the point, which i'll get to in just a moment. next slide? uh, uh historically, the area has been not nearly as important agriculturally a- as it has been as, uh for forestry. and uh, wood gets a variety of uses, sort of the artis- ar- ar- artisanal uses of wood, uh making canoes, which is the only means of transport in the area. there are no roads in the area, it's all by water. next slide. and here is uh, a a family wood production system. i mean they just uh these are, these are crude boards cut with a chain saw, like that cut with a chain saw, and they're for sale on the side of the river here and, if you want some boards to build a house with why you, come up here with your dug out canoe and and you buy them from the person who lives in that house, and in addition, you can see these bags of charcoal also are here, are displayed here in this very nice, uh K-mart type fashion <SS LAUGH> for anybody who wants to buy a bag of charcoal. uh, next slide shows we do indis- in in a- in addition, we do have your sort of garden variety of clear cutting, uh so there is some extensive forest cutting going on, although the present time, um at the present time that's sort of stagnated because of uh, a lack of organizational, uh efficiency, i would say. next slide? uh, the the ar- the the natural vegetation of the area is tropical rain forest. and indeed it's very, it's a beau- beautiful tropical rain forest no question about it. it's highly diverse although not nearly as diverse as the upper Amazon in Ecuador but it still is very diverse, and there's no doubt about it i don't have to go through the, thr- though the litany of all of the things that are important about it, uh it's important aesthetically, it's important in terms of its biodiversity there's undoubtedly somewhere in here there's a compound which will provide us with a cure for cancer for AIDS for anything else you like. okay? and, of course it also is being chopped down, as most tropical rain forests in the world are being chopped down. uh, the next slide shows, just very briefly, the next slide please, miss? uh um, um this is the reason that we originally started working there. in nineteen eighty-nine hurricane Joan came through the area and turned that tropical rain forest into a la- uh a landscape more or less like this. that is, there was complete devastation. and what um, there the uric- hurricane hit in October of nineteen eighty-eight in February of nineteen eighty-nine we went down there to do an assessment of the damage that the hurricane had done. and the next slide shows the kind of thing that we found, and the important thing about this slide, to note about this slide is that, uh these are very very damaged trees, but they're not dead trees and that's really the whole point of it. they're resprouting, these are all resprouts here. this is a palm leaf that has resprouted in four months. these are all resprouts coming out of these trees, all, every single one of these trees that you see here has resprouts coming out of it. and basically the forest, had a tremendous, uh capability for rejuvenating itself after this extensive damage. that led us to, ask the question about how damage, or what we call in ecology perturbation, uh what perturbation or disturbance, how that how that, uh affects the natural processes of, uh, biolo- of of the ecological functioning of the system, basically for those of you who know ecological succession, okay? and, uh we've been working on that now for about ten years. but that's just the background for why we're working, uh there. now, the, results of these studies, looking at this perturbation or this damage that's caused by a natural event, the hurricane. which by the way hits this area about once every hundred years according to what we can figure out from the historical record. and from the point of view of a rain forest of course once every hundred years is actually quite frequent. okay? so, the rain forest naturally as you would expect has kind of adapted to, be responsive to this kind of a damage event. now the question arises, what about other kinds of damage events that you might have there? like for example, agriculture. from the point of view of a rain forest, agriculture is a damage event. for us, from the point of view of w- of us, a- agriculture is something that we do to try and produce something that we can eat or wear. but from the point of view of a forest agriculture is a damage event. so the idea is to ask, to what extent, is the damage event caused by agriculture, similar, to the kind of damage event that's caused by the hurricane? can we make any predictions at all can we gain any insight about what's gonna happen to the forest after agriculture compared to what happened to the forest after the hurricane? now, in a sense this seems like a silly thing to do, i know, because agriculture is not a natural damage event or anything like that. the real point here is that, agriculture is not permanent. okay? in contrary to what an awful lot of, sort of preservation-minded, conservation people would like to think, that once the rain forest is gone, it's gone forever, that really isn't true. that rain forests do, as a matter of fact come back and the question of how they come back, is a very important questern question for the future. and the one thing that i always like to cite is that one tropical country that everybody knows of in the world that everyone knows has had in the past, thirty years has had an actual increase in cover of forest, uh the only one in the world everybody knows what that is, right? [SU-M: (United States) ] [SU-M: huh? ] tropical country that has had an increase in forest cover in the past thirty years? [SU-M: Costa Rica? ] no, Costa Rica has had one of the highest rates of deforestation. <S2 LAUGH> [SU-M: Sri Lanka? ] no, uh'uh, this is good, keep guessing. i do- i don't have time to let you guess until you go through all the countries. and i guarantee you won't get it. it's Puerto Rico, as a matter of fact. and there's a pretty obvious reason why okay? and the reason is that Puerto Rico went through its industrialization program. i don't want to defend its industrialization program especially in front of Ivette. um but uh it did in fact go through an industrialization program and people just left the countryside. and so the notion of a Puerto Rican landless peasant looking for a piece of land to form, a farm on is pretty silly for anybody who knows who knows anything about Puerto Rico. so the whole industrial fr- uh uh, the industrial program in the fifties in th- in Puerto Rico caused people to move into the cities, caused uh caused basically caused development, albeit the fairly, uh unequal and sort of distorted form of development. but people left the countryside, and indeed the forest came back, and it's still coming back, and we have much more forest cover in Puerto Rico than we did, thirty years ago. [SU-M: is any of this uh protected, reserve? ] no, no that's not a the the the, well, no excuse me i shouldn't say none of it is protected reserve, some of it is yeah, but that really isn't the major part of it. the major part of it is, well i don't wanna tell you what the major part of it is because it'll give away what i'm gonna say next [SU-M: okay. ] okay? <S2 LAUGH> <SS LAUGH> so, um, the the logic of what we're trying to do here, is that you know when we're thinking of forests, we're thinking of long-term things. and we're thinking of landscapes, we're thinking of long-term things. and so agriculture isn't forever. it really isn't. and we don't know what's gonna happen either in the Peten in Guatamala or in Nicaragua, who knows, they might industrialize soon i doubt it. but they might. uh who knows, we might even have the kind of government which will permit us to plan, land use better than the current governments do. but when any of that happens, it will be useful for us to know, what as a matter of fact are the processes that happen in the post-disturbance phase, of forest recuperation when the disturbance is agriculture itself. now, it's not just agriculture, there's agriculture and there's agriculture there's a variety of different kinds of agriculture that occur in the region, that was that's the rationale for the project. let me just go quickly through the types of agriculture that there are in the region. next slide? uh first off i hav- all we have your your your standard sort of slash and burn agriculture where you cut the forest down next slide you set it on fire next slide it burns next slide, t- try to get 'em in focus before i say next slide <SS LAUGH> it might not be easy. uh, so you have your nice um, your nice burned area and the next slide and then you, uh in this burnt area, why you have this wonderful ash here which is really rich with nutrients. the next slide, you take and you plant your corn and beans, in in the case of Central America usually or some other crop you plant that right into the ash, the next slide, uh shows you your little your little plants coming up through this wonderfully nutrient-rich ash the next slide then shows the kind of production you can get out of this, uh the first year at least. now this is not a small person. this person is six feet tall. okay? and this is the corn that you get out of there that's the first year of work in production in a slash and burn system. which is very very high production. however, the soils are of the type, as probably most of you have heard, they don't have a great nutrient-holding capacity to them, so the first rain sea- rainy season comes, and the nutrients all either flow out or flow down to the deeper levels and the second year you might get a cornfield that looks like this. which, you can see that there's a difference there and the next year something sorta like this. and at that point, what do you do? and at this point, the nutrients are all leached out of the system, the weeds are all coming into the system, the pests are all coming into the system, and you're not left with much left to do but migrate on to a different place. this is the classic migratory slash and burn agriculture and this is really quite common in the area that we work. it's very complicated but it's common. okay that's one kind of agriculture. second, we have, uh at the other extreme, actually we have a very modern form of agriculture. this is a sugar cane field. this is a very, very monotonous, uh highly chemicalized form of agriculture. this is what we're referring to as intensive agriculture. this is the closest we have to what you would call the modern model of agriculture with large amounts of, uh chemical fertilizer and chemical pesticides applied to the system next slide. in addition, there's a sociological component to the whole thing, sociological-economic component to the whole thing. these are Miskito Indians that migrate into the area every year to cut the cane by hand. okay another very important component of the whole process. uh, so that's the second kind of agriculture. f- first of all you have slash and burn, then you have, uh intensive agriculture. next slide, thirdly, you have cattle pastures, the famous cattle pastures that are that are eating away into the rain forest. uh next slide shows a, uh cattle pasture that we're working in and these cattle pastures tend to be highly degraded. they tend to gr- degrade fairly rapidly once they're set up as cattle pastures. that's the third kind of agriculture. and then fourth, well i'm standing in a cattle pasture right here and i'm taking a picture of this. well, uh, that sort of looks like you know a sec- second-growth forest or something like that, well the point is, that that is itself, that is also an agroecosystem. okay? that is a traditional agroforestry agroecosystem. the next slide shows a slide from inside here. uh and as you can see, there's a coconut tree here, there's uh, this is actually a a timber tree that was planted. another timber tree that was planted there's fruit trees all over the place next slide shows a component of this system. this is the owner of the farm his name is Daniel, Daniel Cuthbert. and um, and well, one of the things that you have to do when you visit his farm is you have to eat coconuts and he's up there, cutting coconuts down for us another sociological component of all of this. next slide, shows a p- piece of the farm, uh in what you might might call a a light gap inside of the farm, where you have this kind of production. that's not really a crop, but this is uh, for those of you who know the terminology, this is a buen monte actually. this is what he calls a good weed. this is heliconia, uh which sorta keeps out the bad weeds, and when you chop this down when you plant corn and beans in here. and then you let this go back to fallow after you do that. that's just one component of the whole thing and you can see the coconut trees on either side of it. these coconut trees are in the process of growing up. this field will not be a corn and bean fields after these things grow up but then some other part of the farm will. so it's sort of a little bit of shifting cultivation right within the farm itself. okay? this is what we refer to as a traditional agroforestry system next slide shows another example. uh here we have what's a combination, of a pasture with fruit trees. this is what's called a silvo-pastoral system, again a very traditional form of production in the area. and you have all these fruit trees around here. fruit trees and timber trees also. and the cattle graze underneath them. this is a system that has been in operation at this one site, on these supposedly very bad soils for at least thirty years uh, without any kind of a rotation system going on at all. mkay? so what we have are we have these four systems of agriculture, we have the s- traditional slash and burn. we have the intensive agriculture the the sugar cane, we have the cattle pastures. and we have the traditional agro-forestry systems. now the i- the idea of the research is to ask the question, what happens when each of these types of agriculture is abandoned? does the same thing happen in all cases, or is it the case, as i strongly expect, that this kind of system, when abandoned, would lead to a totally different process of forest regeneration than, for example the sugar cane field will? and that's the context of the research. i won't go into any more details about it because i wanna talk just a little bit before my time runs out here, i wanna talk a little bit about some of the bigger con- contextual elements of it. and that has to do with the socio-political aspects of what's going on in this region of Nicaragua and i will add that there're equal complexities in the place that we work in Guatemala also but i don't have time to go into those, next slide? uh, this is a, a small fishing community on the coast and this is called Tuspapauni. this is where the Miskito Indians live, where some of the Miskito Indians live. next slide shows uh, it's a, it's a it's actually a very very picturesque place, looks like, sort of like paradise until you realize that there are crack addicts all over the place but that's another story. next slide? <SS LAUGH> this is what they do for a living, this is one of the things they do for a living. this always gets conservationists really really upset. but i must say that the dent that the Miskito Indians make into the sea turtles is far, far, far less than the dent that the W-T-O is making into them. next slide? i had to get something about the W-T-O into this talk of course. this is Raulston and he's a Miskito Indian. what i'm really talking about here is i'm talking about the ethnic complexity of the area. okay? uh the Miskito Indians constitute a a a small but very significant minority of the people in the southern Atlantic region where we work. they fish. and they do forestry. they do some agriculture also. but it's mainly fishing and forestry that they do. and this slide, i can't tell the whole story here, but this is a, this is a woman who is cutting this forest down. and this forest belongs to the Tuspapauni people, uh traditionally belongs the the Tuspapauni people. and here Raulston is having a in- fairly intense debate with the people who are cutting it down, uh, about whether or not they should be cutting it down. next slide? uh this is another ethnic group this is perhaps the most common ethnic group about, about forty-five percent of the population. these are Creole, people, uh they speak English, oh the Miskitos by the way speak uh mainly Miskito but also Spanish, and some English. this is the Creole population their first language is English but they mainly speak Spanish also. this is Miss Mora which is one, who is one of the farmers who we worked with, and this is her grandbaby. this is, uh Branchinski. next slide? uh, these are more kids, these are kids from Pearl Lagoon, which is another Creole community in the area. now the Creoles are fisherpeople. they also work on boats that uh uh that're are, what do you call that a merchant marine, type thing, and they're also farmers. they're not the most common farmers in the area, but they are the most common traditional farmers in the area. next slide? uh, this is the, th- th- this is the next most common ethnic group. probably anothe- another approximately forty-five percent. uh these are the Mestizos. these are people of mixed blood, usually Spanish and Native American of some sort. this is Laurena and uh her husband, uh Don Sergio, and these are their three kids. these are the people that we work with in one of our farms also. next slide? uh, and this is the community at o- another one of our sites, the Fonseca sites, for those of you who know the sites. again, these are the Mestizo people. so you have basically these three, major ethnic groups the Miskito Indians who speak Miskito, the Creoles who speak English, and the Mestizos who speak Spanish, in addition to that next slide we have some smaller groups. uh, excuse me this is another Mestizo kid this is i can't remember his name, but he lives on one o- he lives at one of the farms we work on also. next slide? uh these, this is a small group of Native Americans these are the Rama Indians, uh there are several small communities very near to where we work we don't work directly with any of the Rama Indians, though. next slide? uh, and this is a group of a, uh a very curious cultural group, a really interesting cultural group, the Garifuna, uh these are the people that, uh were escaped slaves from French colonialism. and, uh they've devel- devised their entire, their own culture in Central America. they're mainly concentrated in Belize, but they also have major communities on Honduras, and two small communities in Nicaragua. uh, we don't work very, we don't work with them either but they're uh in the area. next slide shows there's just another another Garifuna, a Garifuna girl, that i thought was kind of a nice slide. okay the next slide shows you um, a th- this is s- symbolic of the kinds of things that we face here. this was an- what they call an almendro tree, a dipteryx pana- panamensis, and this tree was, was as you can see it was burnt here right? this tree was a traditional individual tree that Miss Mora and her husband Mr Cloide, gathered fruits from every year. they gathered the fruits from this tree every year. and they use the fruits uh to make uh, to make a juice and they use the well, they ju- use the fruits for a variety of things. so this is a tree in the natural forest that they traditionally used. now, a Mestizo family, migrating in from the Pacific side, remember that's why i told you where most of the people were, a Mestizo family migrating in from the Pacific side decided that this would make great charcoal. so this is the way they kill this tree so that it falls down so they can chop it up and make charcoal out of it. and, the reason i'm telling you that story and i could have told you a variety of other stories there's tremendous ethnic tensions that are happening right now on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. the Mestizos against the Miskitos, the Miskitos against the Creoles, the Creoles against the Mes- the against the Mestizos. and this is symbolic of what's happening there. that's part of the whole story. um that's part of the whole context, within this resear- within which this research is happening. and finally the next slide, uh once again, the slide of Nicaragua pointing out the difference between the, Pacific coast and the Atlantic coast we work on the Atlantic coast which is where rain forests are it's dry on the Pacific coast and which is where most of the people live. now, traditionally, there have been uh incredible antagonisms between the people on the Atlantic coast and the rest of Nicaragua because the people on the Atlantic coast are, Native Americans and Creoles for the most part, and Mestizos who have lived there all their life. they regard themselves as a different culture. they refer to themselves as Coste?os, or coast people, and they refer to the people on the Pacific side as a matter of fact they refer to them as the Spaniards. and so there's a tremendous division between the Atlantic coast and the Pacific coast, and because of the neo-liberal model that has been imposed on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua through their current, um their current administration, uh there's enormous pressure for peasants who, used to have their own land here but now are being kicked off their land because of this new model, and the only place that they can go is to the Atlantic coast. so you have new Mestizos coming into the Atlantic coast and doing things like burning the almendro trees, and that is creating all sorts of new ethnic tensions. the historical division really, is between the coast and the Pacific side. the new divisions are amongst the various ethnic groups. so, that's the overall context, that's the research project that we're doing, um, and now i'll turn it over to Ivette. <P :05> 
S3: okay, i think i need to change the is can you change that for me? okay, well you can see now, or begin to see that our, more general theme, a- of both uh John's research and my research, is related to the interaction between agriculture and natural areas, or between agricultural activities and conservation activities. and that is illustrated also with this other project. can i have, are you, okay with doing this? [S2: yeah. i'll do it. ] okay. well, i think that when we look at agriculture, e- from an ecological perspective, one of the main thing that we have to do is figure out what's there. what organisms live there and what are their function, and this is a spider of course, which is a, an important predator in many agricultural systems. can i have the next one? uh, when we think about agriculture, i think if if i asked you to envision an agriculture system, most of you are gonna envision something like this. primarily intensive agriculture production, monoculture, um, very very uh, low diversity of uh, crops, and something pretty much like this. however, there are many system, many agricultural systems that are highly diverse. next one? and one of them uh, is the the system that John called slash and burn agriculture, i call shifting cultivation. and, shifting cultivation, um, is a is a very important system that is practiced, i think there's about half-a-million people in the world, half-a-billion people in the world, still practice this type of agricultural system. it's one of the main agricultural systems, uh and it covers about um between three hundred and four hundred million hectares in this kind of system. this is a, the kind of system that is very dynamic, because after, like John mentioned before, you have this kind of agriculture going on but it cannot go goes on continuously after a few years, it gets abandoned, and then you le- lea- let it fallow for, um anywhere from two three, to forty years, depending on on the region where you are. okay so you have this kind of system, you have um, other type of systems like like, uh this is an agroforestry system similar to the one that John show you before. very diverse type of systems. next one? so my approach or our approach in uh stalling biodiversity in agroecosystem, is to look at biodiversity as having two main components. one is the planned biodiversity, and that's basically the crops. that is the uh the the things that the farmer include in the agroecosystem intentionally. and the other one is the associated biodiversity. those are the things uh, that live there because their plan biodiversity creates the conditions for those other organisms to live there. those are the spiders, those are, uh the microorganisms in the soil, etcetera etcetera. both of this type of uh components of biodiversity promote the functioning, of the agroecosystem. and i think that in agroecosystem, the uh functioning when we talk about the functioning of agroecosystem, it's actually makes more, it actually make more sense than in the natural system because you know what- what the fun- what the function should be. and, uh, in this particular case for example, pest uh, the pest dynamics, nutrient cycling, even including some of the other uh aspects of an agroecosystem, socioeconomic aspects of agroecosystem like market uh, efficiency or risk immunization, and that kind of of, uh functioning. can i have the next one? so, most conservationists, more, most conservation biologists, when they look at agroecosystem, or when they think of agroecosystem, uh they pretty much a lot of the literature assumes that the loss of diversity within the intensification of agroecosystem, is something like this. that there's a dramatic decrease in biodiversity as agroecosystems get intensified. or, as you transform a forest or a natural area into an a- a- an agriculture area. however, there are very few studies that have look at the loss of biodiversity in different type of agroecosystem, comparing them with the forest or the natural vegetation that used to be there before, and we can have_ these are four possibilities of the way biodiversity is lost with the intensification of, of agriculture, and the main idea here is that we really don't know how biodiversity is lost. and, the other thing is that possibly, many different organisms, or different organisms in different taxa are uh, reacting di- are gonna, respond differently to the disturbance or to the intensification of the agroecosystem. can i have the next one? okay, so- that's what brings me to the case study that we are, uh studying. and that is coffee. uh, why study coffee? well, next one? i'm used to doing it. <S3 LAUGH> well, coffee is a very interesting, crop. let's call it a crop. it's a very interesting crop because in its traditional form, it's cultivated in an agroforestry system. very very diverse system with a lot of trees that are used as shade trees. coffee, originally was uh, domesticated from the understory of uh, upland forest and, when it began to be grown, um, and domesticated, it was grown under the canopy of trees. so you have this very diverse systems, can i have the next one? and, one of the most important thing related to coffee, is not that much their extension of land that is cover with coffee plantations, like the one you saw before, but the actual location of specifically coffee, Coffea arabica, which is one of the main, uh species of coffee that is cultivated. and this is uh, what is called cafera altura, or coffee that grows in the highlands. and in Mexico for example, this is southern Mexico. uh and this here are, these areas here the dark areas, represent areas that, the uh (Cunario) which is the the conservation agency in, uh in Mexico have designated a- as highly important for conservation purposes because they have a lot of indemic species or because they have a very high bi- biological diversity. those areas correspond, this is a study that was done by (Movela Toledo,) and they correspond pretty much to the main area where coffee is produced in Mexico. so, and many of these plantations that are distributed throughout this area are like the one i show you before, highly forested plantations that preserve or conserve a lot of the species that live in, in um the conservation areas. can i have the next one? another example of the importance of coffee you can find in El Salvador. El Salvador is Central American country, uh this is us, these are the coffee plantations, the distribution of coffee plantations in El Salvador. it turns o- El Salvador a one of the most deforested countries in the world. it turns out that the only, practically the only forest that is left in El Salvador are coffee plantations. about eighty-five percent of all the forest, what is classified as forest, in El Salvador, are the coffee plantations that are in production. and, uh the rest um, of the forest was cut down long long time ago. can i have the next, the next slide? and that's why the proposal for the biological corridor which is a part of um, uh Conservation International proposal, to connect many areas, conservation areas throughout Central America, it basically includes the areas that are coffee plantations for El Salvador because there is very little natural forest that is left in this country except for the coffee plantations. so these plantations, the shaded plantations, are very important, uh for conservation purposes in many of the Central American countries. next one? now, uh this is not, i couldn't find a slide of the disease that i wanted to show you, but uh, in the the in the nineteen fifties, there was in Brazil there was a problem with coffee production because uh, of a disease, uh the the coffee rust that came from from Africa and started devastating coffee plantations there. they started a breeding program to try to come up with varieties that were resistant to the coffee rust and, they came up, next one? next slide? they came up with uh, varieties that were resistant to the coffee rust but then it turned out that actually coffee rust was not such a big problem after all. uh at least for other countries. but these new varieties of coffee had another characteristic as, and and it was that they were high-yielding varieties as well. they, yield much, m- they produced much higher yields, than the traditional varieties, but it was a whole technological package. it's not just that they could be continued to be producing the same system they had to change the whole production system. and, in the case of of uh, Central America, what they started doing was eliminating the trees, the shade trees. so, these are tradition- these are a, a high-yielding varieties that produce much higher yields of coffee, but then you have to eliminate or reduce significantly the amount of shade where this coffee is grown. can i have the next one? and, so it's a whole process of technification of what was called coffee technification started in Central America and Mexico and northern South America. many plantations uh, that looked like this, now look, like, this. they eliminated all the trees. this is the most intensive type of transformation obviously. but, in Costa Rica for example, a lot of the plantations about twenty years ago, a lot of the coffee plantations used to look like the other slide i already showed you, like a forest. and now they look like this. uh Costa Rica has really been, has been one of the country that really intensify their plantations, especially in the central valley which is the prime coffee growing region in Costa Rica. Colombia was another country. can i have the next, slide? this also, uh includes it's not just elimination of the trees or the reduction of the shade, but also the application of a whole variety of uh, agrochemicals. uh, fertilizers, and and herbicides, and insecticides, etcetera. can i have the next one? uh, obviously you don't have just that, those two systems that i show you before. there's a whole gradient of different systems that you can find throughout Central America, and um you know, from the very rustic traditional plantations that have a very high diversity and dense shade, to uh specialized shade. these are not complete monocultures of of coffee. but they have the their shade is just one species, of tree, and that's it. and uh, in this particular case they didn't included the monoculture because in Mexico they don't practice that that much. you hardly ever see any monocultural plantations in Mexico. but there's a whole grading of different systems. can i have the next one? okay, so this is a technification of coffee in northern Latin America and you can see that i- it has been a gradual process but e- the countries that have really intensified a lot of their plantation have been Colombia primarily and and Costa Rica, uh with a large percent about forty percent of their plantations, but about ninety percent or, eighty percent of their plantations in the central valley of Costa Rica were transformed, to uh, highly intensive coffee plantations. <SLIDE CHANGE> thanks. so, given this context, then uh obviously one of the things that we started asking us what is, what is the impact of this on biodiversity. what's happening with all this diversity? obviously we know that the planned biodiversity or the crop diversity is gonna be reduced dramatically in the case of those monocultural plantations from from, like, ele- a hundred species of trees that were living in the system before, to one species. which is coffee only. but, also what's gonna happen to the associated biological diversity? can i have the next one? so we conducted_ just to find out what was there. what's up there in those trees? that we are definitely gonna lose because you're eliminating those trees, you're eliminating the habitat for those species. so, we started with a very simple um, survey of trying to fi- find out what's up there, and we use a methodology that is used commonly for, for studies of of arthropods in the canopy of forest, because we wanted to compare our, uh data with uh that of forested habitats in in the tropics as well. so, i- basically you fog the canopy of the tree, uh with an insecticide unfortunately, <S3 LAUGH> and then, uh, the insects start dropping here you collect them, and and then you quantify them. can i have the next one? okay and just to give you, i won't go into the data that extensively, but just to give you an idea of how dramatic this is, in one single tree that we fog, one single tree, a relatively small tree, a (verifina porpillana) which is one of the common shade trees in coffee plantations in Costa Rica. we found thirty different species of ants, three hundred thirty-three individuals, a hundred and twenty-six different species of beetles, living in the canopy of a single, shade tree in a coffee plantation. and, uh a hundred and three different species of wasp, mainly micro hymenpoteras. and then, we fogged another individual of (verifrina) in the same plantation about two hundred meters from, from this one, and we found twenty-seven species of ants, a hundred and ten species of beetles, and sixty-one species of wasp, but the most impressive thing was also that the overlap, of species, uh between these two trees for example the beetles, less than twenty percent overlap, of species in these two trees, so what are those things doing up there, all these beetles, most of them undescribed? uh, we don't know. <S3 LAUGH> i mean it would take a lifetime to find out, to figure out what what what are these things doing in the canopy of of these trees. but what we do know is that you gonna lose all of those species, um with this transformation of the of the agroecosystem, of that agroecosystem. can i have the next one? the next step then was to figure out well, that happens, we know that we're gonna lose all those species up there that are in the canopy. what's gonna happen to species or to groups that are slightly more resistant or that that live in other areas that do not need the trees really, w- to nest or something like that? so we started looking at the ground foraging ant community. uh, they they nest in the ground, they go up to plants and forage in the plants or forage in the ground, so they shouldn't be that affected by by the transformation. can i have the next one? this is just to give you the (tram) that we found. these are different plan- these these are different categories of plantation going from the monoculture to the more diverse plantations in different indices of diversity here. and you can see that there was a significant increase in terms of biodiversity of ground foraging ants, uh in these different plantations. can i have the next one? but, another thing that was important from our studies in Costa Rica was that even though on a plot basis, let's say that we do an anal- a a a, study of the ants that are in a particular plot, seven-by-seven meters only. and you find about ten to twelve species of ants, in that plot. in a system like this, in a diverse agroforestry system, every time you do that type of of, uh sampling in a different plantation, you also find more or less the same number of species of ants, but they tend to be different species. so, the bed of diversity, or or the the uh regional-scale type of diversity, the heterogeneity of uh of ants in this in this a- area, when you have traditional plantations or shaded plantation, it's much higher than uh, than, than for the monoculture. if you have, can i have the next one? in a in a plantation like this, we found, on the average about four species, in the, using the same methodology, four species per plot, but every time they were the same species. you go, to this plantation and then you go, three miles down the road to another plantation, do the same dating, the same thing happen, sa- more or less the same species. so, at the landscape level, then the impact of transforming very diverse uh shaded plantations to monocultural plantations, is is uh eh, is very significant. can i have the next one? okay, so at the same time that we were doing that kind of study, eh, other people were studying other organisms in coffee plantations. uh, there were studies looking at um, epiphytes, in coffee plantation. they found a very high diversity of epiphytes in shaded plantations. the next one? and also, uh birds. there were studies that were looking at uh, diversity of birds in shaded coffee plantation that, that documented a very high diversity of birds in the shaded plantations. and, the next one? it was precisely birds that captured the imagination of of of the general public, of course, being the charismatic, fauna that they are. uh, it cause a lot of uh, attention, and in particular because the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, uh was doing some of these studies, and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center documented m- primarily, uh Russel Greenberg from the the Migratory Bird Center, documented how important these plantations were for migratory birds that were coming f- uh, during the winter months. and they in nineteen_ next one? in nineteen ninety-six they um, had a conference uh with several workshops and, and one of the main, one of the main uh, purposes of this conference that the Migratory Bird, they call it the the Sustainable Coffee Conference. and one of the main purpose of the conference, was to talk about this transformation that that was happening throughout central, uh and northern Latin America, and also to come up with some alternatives, to try to maintain the plantations, uh as shaded plantations rather, or prevent that these plantations would be converted to, uh coffee monoculture or, their shade would be eliminated from the system. and, uh can i have the next one? out of that conference came a whole series of of different, um alternatives and one of them was uh this person who owned Thanksgiving Coffee. he began marketing his cof- he began visiting the farms where he was buying coffee from. and uh basically marketing the the uh, making sure that these were shaded plantations and then marketing the coffee as Songbird Coffee, shade grown, you can see here, say shade-grown coffee. so this was one of the w- one of the ideas that came out of this conference was to, look at the uh coffee market and try to, to um eh, stimulate the conservation of these shaded plantations through some market, uh forces. like for example trying to stimulate people to buy, uh shaded coffee. can i have the next one? and so a whole variety of different systems started to appear. this is for example eco-K which is the f- rain forest alliance. y uh, they develop a certification program. they went a step further from Thanksgiving Coffee and they develop a certification program with a whole series of criterias that were based on the studies that have been done in biodiversity, in in coffee. uh, they had to do with the shade, uh the height of trees, the diversity of trees, etcetera etcetera. and they go to these plantations, they check for those criterias, if their plantation pass those criterias, they give them uh, a seal, that is an eco-K seal, and then they sell it as shade coffee. can i have the next one? the Smithsonian came up with their own, uh idea and that was a basically they started a a venture with uh, caf- with uh the Audobon society and they started also, eh certifying coffee as shade-grown coffee. so these, these were the main things that were coming out of that conference, essentially using these market, forces to try to first of all, uh eh 'em, educate people about uh the way coffee is uh, is being transformed and the impact that that has on the, on biodiversity primarily on birds in this particular case, but also to try to promote, uh the consumption of coffee that is shade-grown, bird-friendly, biodiversity-friendly, environmentally friendly, or whatever you wanna call it. next, slide? um, this is just, i'm gonna go through these really fast but these are just some examples of of the kind of interest that all that has generated. even here in Ann Arbor, in your Caribou coffee shop, you can see the rain forest blend coffee. which also they they argue that this is coffee that is grown under, shade trees and if you buy this coffee you're helping preserve biodiversity because it's shade grown. and so, eh, i forgot, can i have the next one, so we have these these are the the shaded plantations. <S3 LAUGH> can i have the n- c- the next one, i forgot what is, oh okay, th- what i was going to say with this is that one problem with this is that there ar- there is shade and there is shade. how can you tell that the plantation your co- the coffee you're drinking is coming from that type of really, you know very dense forest, or if it's coming from something like this, which also has shade. i mean this can be certified depending on whether it's certified or not, or whether, this is a shaded plantation. so, the idea now is to try to, fine tune a little bit more this issue of the shade and see, well really what level of shade do you need to support higher levels of biological diversity. and that's why we started_ how much time do i have now? 
SU-M: you got about, fifteen minutes. 
S3: fifteen minutes? okay, so that's that's when we decided to, that it was time to, uh move on from Costa Rica and go to Mexico, can i have the next one? and, so we started this project in Mexico just about a year-and-a-half ago. and uh, this is, here is a map of Mexico, we're in Chiapas, which is the southern part of Mexico. and uh, and so this is the state of Chiapas. and within Chiapas we're working i- very close to the frontier with uh Guatemala here, and so in this whole area which is called the Soconosco region is one of the primary coffee-growing regions, of Mexico. now, why go to Mexico? it's several reasons. first of all, is one of the most impo- coffee is one of the most important crops in Mexico. it's the second uh most important, uh generator of of uh of income in Mexico after, petroleum. ch- coffee overall in the world is the second most traded como- commodity after petroleum. so it's a it's a very important economical, it's a very very important crop. and in Mexico it's extremely important, and it has been very important for many years. next one? it's also, uh Mexico also didn't have a very strong program for technification. so, what you find in Mexico is a lot of areas that, uh a lot of coffee plantations that are shaded plantations, and also because the topography where coffee is grown, at least in this region, in in uh in Chiapas, the topography is uh so steep that there are many areas that cannot be cultivated, at all. so you have a lot of fragments of forest distributed throughout the whole area, throughout the whole coffee-growing region. things that wait- some in some cases it's uh small fragments that are there to protect the watershed, and in other cases it's just because it's, it's just impossible to cultivate, to, because it's so steep. people cannot get there to harvest the coffee so they just leave leave it in in the natural forest. next one? in addition to that uh, e- about eighty percent of the coffee plantations, of the coffee farms in Mexico are manage, are small farms, less than five hectares. so, if you develop a program that will benefit the producers, it will tend to benefit more people if uh, in Mexico than in other places like in El Salvador, that's uh there a lot of large, producers. and also about sixty percent of the population in Mex- in- that produces coffee, in Mexico are indigenous people, as well. can i have, uh, the next one? the other thing uh, important about Mexico is that they have the most, important market of organic coffee. and most of these, these are the different organic coffee cooperatives. they are all cooperatives. primarily of indigenous people that have organized themself(sic), and they have develop strategies to market their coffee directly. because in most cases you market your coffee through intermediaries. and so the farmer, the producer ends up receiving a very minuscule part of uh what the, what what you pay here for a cup of coffee. uh, in Mexico, for a whole variety of reasons, people have organized really well. producers have organized really well, and have taken advantage of the uh increase in the organic market, and they are they are marketing their coffee as organic coffee and they have these cooperatives that have become very very efi- efficient. and so you already have kind of an infrastructure there social infrastructure, that could help if you're trying to, in addition to do organic coffee. do something like shade-grown coffee, certified shade-grown coffee that people will receive a higher, price for their production. can i have the next one? and, and another thing that attract us to, to Mexico, of course was uh that as you know there was in nineteen ninety-four, eh an insurrection of uh, indigenous people there, the Zapatista insurrection. this is a poster in San Cristobal de Las Casas that say, el mundo que queremos es un mundo que quedan, en donde quedan muchos mundos, the, the world that we want is a world, in which many worlds can fit. is that, [S2: mhm. ] good translation? so, the uh, and then eh, can i have the next one? many uh, coffee had been a very important crop also, for the Zapatistas, for indigenous people that are within these- these regions that are now autonomous region, autonomous uh Zapatistas region. this is uh, coffee that you can actually buy on the internet. on the web, it's called Cafe uh Cafe Zapatista, and they are_ at the beginning they didn't mention anything about shade, and now you read the literature and one of the things they mention is that this is shade-grown coffee produced by small producers in uh, in the autonomous regions. so, this is_ with all this good thing going on in Mexico, we decided to go there. <SU-F LAUGH> and this is uh a few, a subgroup of the group that's been working there, this is John, uh, myself, Jay West from the Biology Department, and Dan, Griffith from the Biology Department, and Alex Mas from uh, the School of Natural Resources. next one? so, just very briefly, uh, what we have decided to do now is to study different taxa, as i mention before, we we're interested in looking at the loss of biodiversity in the different, with the intensification of the system. and but one thing that we would really like s- to, to look at is how, different organisms in different taxa, eh respond, to that intensification. so, we uh, s- we did some studies with butterflies, next one? with ants, of course which is what i work, and with birds. and this is Tom Dietsch who is also another one of, uh, eh he is a graduate student here that's doing_ he's right now in Mexico doing some work with uh, birds in coffee plantations. so, it's i i don't have, uh i won't get into the details of what we have found up to now except that, basically, we're seeing the same trend, going from forest a natural forest habitat to a more intensive coffee plantation we have, we have four different system, the um, the forest, a forest reserve for example next one, eh dr- eh rustic coffee plantation, this is a coffee plantation, eh a less, less shaded plantation, like this o- like this one, but organic and the next one, uh also a less shaded plantation, but uh that is not organic. so we have those four levels, uh of of habitats let's say, and we have been monitoring the butterflies, ants, and birds in the system, uh and um, we started also doing small mammals as well this year. and so basically uh, we see the same trend in terms of the decrease in biodiversity with the intensification of the system, but, each of these taxa respond completely different. one of the thing that we're noticing is that for example, ants seem to be very very robust. they seem to resist disturbance much more than things like butterflies, for example. and so the response, in if if you remember the curves of loss of biodiversity that i had showed you before, the response of the butterflies is like that, and the response of the ants is like that. so they respond very different, and these are these are being, uh sampled in exactly the same plots in the same farms. can i have the next one? and so, the other thing that we are just beginning to look at, is the, the um role of the small fragments of forest. because as i mentioned before, in this region, uh you have the whole region with a lot of, s- small fragments of forest. we're talking about ten, fifteen hectares, of forest uh that are, scattered throughout the landscape, the agricultural landscape. so what is the role of uh these fragments of forest in preserving biological diversity. and what- what is the role of the agricultural matr- matrix in which these, these uh fragments are embedded. and in this particular region, the agricultural matrix, consists of coffee plantations that's, that's what's grown there. so we're talking about these fragments of of forest, surrounded by coffee plantations. and we have different qualities of these matrices. can i have the next one? and so for example, we started a study in Finca Irlanda which is an organic farm fairly shaded plantation that has eh eh, forest, a small forest fragment, uh i think well, you cannot see the forest fragment from here, can i have the next one? and this is, this is a map of Finca Irlanda. the the plantation that you just saw is in this side here. and this is a small, um a small forest fragment, that, 
S2: that's all Finca Irlanda? 
S3: this is all Finca Irlanda, this is a small fo- this i- i'm sorry, this is all Finca Irlanda here, uh and this is, here, is a small forest fragment. there's another forest fragment here. and so what we're doing, what we did last summer was to sample the ants in the forest and then also sample ants a different distance from the fragment in Finca Irlanda, which is what we consider high-quality matrix because it has a lot of trees, very diverse, very dense shade. and then in the other side of the forest fragment, there's another plantation which have a much lower density of shade trees and is a much more intensive plantation. so we're looking at, at a very small scale, we're trying to look at these landscape level phenomenons. can i have the next one? and so we have for example, this is the reserve it's about fifteen hectare uh big, and then these are the plots that we- where we sample the ants, inside the reserve, in Finca Hamburgo which is more intensive, and in Finca Irlanda, which is less intensive. and, just to give you some, preliminary results here, all the black dots are Finca Irlanda, and all the white dots are Finca Hamburgo, and there is a significant difference in terms of uh, the diversity that you find, but also there is a significant decrease in diversity as you go away from the forest. this is distance from the forest. so as you go away from the forest in Finca Irlanda you have a significant, uh decrease. uh, Finca Irlanda is what we're considering the high-quality matrix. and they, the difference was not significant, or the the regression was not significant for, for the other farm, but that's because the drop occurs at very close distance from the forest. so you really have, and we actually had some, some, uh very small-scale plots looking at the drop of diversity as you get out of the, away from the forest just the first the first, uh fif- uh twenty meters or fifty meters, or, i can't remember. but anyway, you you do see a very dramatic drop right at the beginning and then everything else stays more or less the same. so that's that's one of the thing that we're beginning to look at. we're trying to get a grasp at the landscape-level issues as well. uh because if you're start looking at just you know the diversity in the farm, you're missing a big part of of what's going on in terms of preservation of biodiversity, at least in this region. can i have the next one? the next phase of the project is looking at the function of that diversity. what are these things doing in the coffee plantation and that's gonna be, for the next three years i think that's what we gonna be doing primarily is looking at, uh, in particular the effect of birds, the diversity and density of birds, most of them, uh many of them that are uh herbivores, and the diversity and density of ants and spiders what impact do they have on the herbivores of coffee? so, that's that's gonna be the the next stage in in this research, and, next one? oh, these are these are ants eating, ants are also generally s- predators, so these are ants eating a caterpillar. and the last thing that i want to say, the last comment is related to, uh the overall picture. i think that one of the main thing that we should not do is lose perspective of, the farmer. the person who is making the decision as to whether to have shade or not have shade or or how much shade to have in his plantations, and when we start looking at a system like this, from a purely conservation perspective, what w- our conclusion will be, well let's have these very shaded plantations. i mean that that's the best thing. that's that's what preserve the most biodiversity and we have data that shows that those very shaded plantations are the best for preserving biodiversity, but it may not be the best for, the farmer. and so we need to look at uh, inclu- incorporate the farmer into this whole, um, decision, can i have the next one? one of the sa- let me, let me just go back there. can i just_ i'm sorry. <SLIDE CHANGE> one of the main thing here is that even though farmers, especially small farmers, don't base all their decision only on the criteria of yield. yield is one of the criterias that they use. and one thing that we do know, can i have the next one, is that at very dense levels of shade cover, you lose yield. in the the productivity of the plant, the the the yield of the plant goes down when they are grown on a- under a very dense shade. this is a study that was done by uh Norena Soto from, from Ecosur and, this is for small plantations in Mexico. the curve might be completely different from other plantations in other places, but this is uh, what she found in terms of the level of shade and yield of coffee and, we do know that at certain levels of shade, and actually you know going a little bit uh, after sixty or something like that, of shade that you, uh reduce the the yield of the plants. so, can i have, the last one? so one of the main thing here then is to try to come up with some sort of middle point let's say or some sort of a system that will satisfy the farmer and that will also serve uh, or or have some conservation function as well. so, it's extremely important to incorporate, farmers into, this whole process because they are the ones who are going to make the decision as to whether ha- to have shade or not or whether to, uh, how much level of shade to have. and so, i'm c- just gonna end with this that, the best cup of coffee will be one that that will her- preserve biological diversity but also have people at the center of it. so, John?
S2: okay can i have the lights please? so, basically what we, wait a minute, wait wait wait wait, i'm not finished. 
SU-F: oh. go ahead. 
S2: um, 
SU-M: it's not for you, John. 
S2: what we, i'm not finished and you can't leave yet. um, we, we've shown you two specific examples okay and they're just, just two examples and they're examples of looking at sort of the fine-tuning level of particular aspects of an agroecosystem. um, what we what we what, going back to going back to the beginning, going back to the beginning where i was talking about the approach that we're taking, the agroecosystem, the industrial agroecosystem that we that we have in our in our midst today needs to be changed. and one of the reasons that we're making these studies is to understand how agroecosystems works in general because we're totally convinced that understanding at an ecological level, the details of how agroecosystems works i- is what we're going to need in order to be able to, effect change. but when we talk about effecting change, there are various models of effecting change that s- change themselves, and, the models that we have seen since the World War Two have been what, what i refer to as the auto-route models. and the the the the image that i have in mind here is a topographic map, and what we're aiming to do is get from one place to another on the topographic map, so we're here and we wanna get to point A. now, the one way we can get there is we can draw a straight line from here to there. and then we can go and we can dr- we can follow that straight line. if we're out in the woods following that straight line, we may have to climb down into gulleys scale up cliffs, and fall through through rivers and and swamps and everything like that in order to follow that straight line. or we can blast our way through and create an auto-route, um um um a s- a straight line that goes there. but that might not be the best way to do it. Best way to do it probably would be to look at the contours on the contour map and try and get a pathway along the contour to try and get from where we are now to the point over there. now metaphorically, of course, what i'm talking about is these contours are the ecology of the system. uh, agriculture occurs in the context of an ecosystem and that ecosystem creates these contours which, i believe and we believe they act as signposts to tell us where we can make this contour pathway to get from point A to point B. um, so the the the the model that we're working on for transformation here, is to be contrasted with the typical model, that's uh the the autoroute model to be contrasted with that is the contour-pathway model. now, in saying that, i definitely wanna say that we're rejecting any sort of romantic notions that what we should be doing is going back to back to nineteen thirty-nine, uh or back to the last century and the way they did agriculture in the last century. we're not talking about that at all. we're not talking about uh, eliminating all the scientific progress that has been made since that time. and we're not talking about eliminating or ignoring the scientific progress that has come since World War Two in, agroecosystems. indeed, we'd reject the notion that many, i think romantic uh, uh romantic uh, uh agroecologists have that we need to reject the scientific approach. rather we're seeing, we're saying actually we need more science we need more technology, it's a question of what kind of science and what kind of technology that we actually need. uh, the kind of science that we need, the kind of tech- the kind of technology that we need is, that kind of science and technology that enables us to see where these contours are where these ecological contours are. it enables us to see where the contours are so that we can gently, make a pathway through these contours. as opposed to the old model of dominating nature with the autoroute and blasting our way through to point B from point A, we need to gently make the pathway along the contours so that we can get to that other point. and to see these contours we need to approach the ecosystem as the complex system that it is. it is a complex system. and pros- approaching it with sort of this sort of brute force and i would say rather naive reductionist approach that many scientists approach it with, is simply not going to work. uh, we all believe in reductionism as a tactic of course, i'm talking about reductioni- reductionism as a philosophy. what we need to do is we need to have a thoughtful approach a creative and thoughtful approach to these very complex systems and- t- n- i- to understand them in that way. in putting those two things together emphasizing this gentle approach to finding the contour-pathway and the thoughtful approach towards the complex system reminds me of the comment by Richard Levins, uh that what we really need to approach here in in in aiming towards the transformation of the agroecosystem, is a technology which is not an old technology but a new technology as a matter of fact a more new technology that th- than the technologies that have emerged since World War Two. we're looking for a gentle, thought-intensive kind of technology to replace the sort of domineering, auto-route kind of technology that we've had in the past. so, with that, now you can applaud. <SS LAUGH> and so, we'd be hap- we would both be happy to take questions... 
S7: any any sense how long it takes for re-diversification, uh in an area that's been pretty well, wiped out, does it, happen quite quickly again?
S2: well, i can a- answer in the in the case of Nicaragua i mean dep- it it looks to us like it depends on what the wiping out has been. it depends on what the kind of, what the damage has been. if it's a hurricane, uh, it's all very complicated because, in ten years now since the hurricane we have much more biodiversity that was there before the hurricane. that's a natural ecological process. what happens after agriculture we don't know this proj- this project that we had is just underway right now. our expectation is that the accumulation of biodiversity is gonna be larger in the traditional agroecosystem than it is in the other ones, although, you know so far initial results don't really show that. but we really don't know. we don't know. yeah? 
S8: uh, just the graph that you have of four different ways to move from the forest and biodiversity, [S3: mhm? ] i i i wonder, and this is hardly a response to y- y- you, j- just the st- statement you just gave, if you might not have, uh a rise in biodiversity when you move from the forest. you certainly see this with the decline of Alpine farms in Europe, decline of rice farms in Japan, wa- and in the larger s- uh landscape scale, you've got a rice farm in a valley surrounded by trees. when the rice farm, when the farmers go away and the rice stops growing you ha- get a reduction of biodiversity. a reduction of species compound and the same is true uh in Alpine Europe. you get you know from from spruce and farms with lots of birds and and uh different kinds of trees uh to solid spruce and a reduction in s- in species uh count. that leads me to another question. what's what's a uh an operational definition of biodiversity, is it species richness? how do yo- how do you know when you've got more of it or less of it? <SU-F LAUGH> 
S3: well, it depends on what, how you measure it, [S8: yeah ] uh, but me- i was using the term biodiversity just in general meaning all the living organisms there but obviously that's not what i was measuring. [S8: mhm ] you know, i was measuring the number of species that were present in a particular plot that came to my baits. [S8: yeah ] you know, the the depending on the meas- the on the method you use to sample the diversity and then the indices that you use to quantify it. uh, species richness is one thing that people, use frequently, but that just tell you the number of species. it doesn't tell you much about the the, uh, eh the densities of the organisms or anything like that, just a count of the number of species... 
S5: if you, could give an incentive to a farmer in the States to diversify his crop, would you do that first of all, and second of all how would you do that? 
S2: a farmer where? i'm sorry, 
S5: in the States.
S3: in the States... uh, yeah, i would, and i th- i think that, it's it's a very complicated issue because uh, there's uh all sorts of political and policy, uh, effects that a farmer make a decision based on uh, many many different factors. but i think that one of the problems that we have, like John mentioned at the beginning, one of the main problems in agriculture, and that's particularly true in the United State, if you read, you know the New York Times last Sunday or a couple of Sundays ago, they had a big article on farming in the United States, agriculture in the United States, and farmers are in big trouble. economic trouble. mainly because the price of corn and soybean is so low and the reason for that is because that there's such a high overproduction. so, my argument is well, if if that's the main problem, overproduction, then let's, achieve a lower production and diversify these systems. and have the farmer then at least have a a way to, that would give the farmer a little bit more of o- you know a a way to avoid drops in prices and things like that because they will have a diversity of crops. now how farmers here in the United States are gonna react to that, obviously, right now the way policies are written and all that, is, there's no inc- incentive to do that kind of thing. the incentive right now is to produce as much as you can, in your plot, you know. fence-to-fence production as much as you can. and try to survive <S3 LAUGH> with that. you you have any questions 
S2: i think that i, yeah i w- i would like to add to that. i think you also have to look at what causes that. and that's caused largely by political decisions. i mean the large grain companies an- a as a matter of fact are making out like bandits on the whole thing. and they, the large grain companies through their lobbying efforts they were the ones who influenced the change in the legislation from what we used to have in the past supply management, where farmers were only basically allowed to or re- seemed to receive subsidies to plant a certain amount so that the supply of commodities on the market would be such that the price was set so that they could make a profit. that changed to encourage fence rail to fence rail planting, so that they actually forced to sell below the cost of production. and then the, subsidy comes to the farmer as a payment, to make up for the shortfall that the farmer has had. now who's actually benefitting from that whole thing, the large grain companies are benefitting like crazy because they get to buy corn and wheat at below the cost of production. which of course then translates it into the third world because they're not buying corn in way below the cost of production, and even farmers, peasant farmers in Mexico and Costa Rica cannot compete with the uh, with uh with farm grown in the United States because that farm is effectively, well, because the large grain companies are effectively subsidized by, our tax dollars. but it brings up another issue, which sh- that i- i'm sorry for going so long, such a long answer, but this brings up another issue and this is something that Ivette and i have talked about quite a lot and that is the whole uh, this whole question of overproduction in coffee. i do recall several years ago, at a coffee conference that we went to in Costa Rica where there were coffee experts from all over the world, uh economists, agronomists absolutely_ well not agronomists really, but economists, sociologists, uh all people that dealt with coffee, production people, coffee finca farmer owners and things like that. and everybody, everybody agreed what is the problem with coffee right now, what is the problem with coffee right now is overproduction. the economists agreed. the economists from right to left agreed. overproduction is the problem, overproduction is the problem. talk to any farmer, what's the problem? overproduction is the problem. then, you go talk to the agronomists. and you say to the agronomists what is your main research goal? to increase production. <SS LAUGH> now there's a, contradiction there, there really is. if you look at the history of the way coffee prices have been set, we have, we have precedence in the past, for emergency situations, i think i'll i'll cite just one of them which is World War Two, where for political reasons, the United States went into co- went in_ what is, uh to coalition with various other countries, to help devise means, d- devise ways of setting, uh production goals for coffee which would effectively encourage an international supply-management system to maintain coffee at a lower production level, to save coffee farmers. there's no reason why we can't do that again in terms of biodiversity preservation, if, people would see the question of biodiversity preservation as an emergency issue like World War Two was. but anyway- but that's that's a very long, long argument. was it you who had a question? 
S6: um, yeah, uh uh a- actually with the with the complication of the Natural Academy of Science's piece on, i think that they called it sustainable agriculture, about four five years ago. um, they really talked about traditional methods of, uh diversifying agricultural production for the family farmer in in the United States and, so i think i w- the the the theme is out there, about [S2: mhm, yes. ] diversified farming. but i really, uh, like when i was interviewing family farmers in Michigan for a, a related project, um they would talk about becoming more monocultural as the, family structure changed. uh, and so those who've got a small family or sometimes even single farmers, they tended to go to a less diversified crop because they didn't have person power. [S3: mhm ] i guess my question is related with your coffee examples, um what kind of labor, uh is involved, the sort of labor utilization in the sort of, the three or four models of cultivation. 
S3: well that's a very important question, <LAUGH> and primarily in in uh, in Mexico, all this is uh hand-picked coffee. so none of it is mechanized, none of the coffee is mechanized and, hardly in any place in the world is mechanized either. i mean there are vary few places that have some machines that knock the plants and, you know vibrate the plants or something and capture the the beans that fall on the ground or something like that. but, for the the most part it's all hand, it's manual labor. and, in Mexico even small farmers, that have the five hectare, let's say a five hectare for for coffee five hectare is a small farm. so, even a farm that is about five hectares, they have to hire labor during the peak, of the harvesting season. and most of that labor that they hire are indigenous people from Guatemala, migrant workers that come from Guatemala. and in my opinion if it wasn't for the migrant workers from Guatemala, coffee would have disappeared from Mexico a long time ago. cuz there's there's no uh, i mean that's that's the primary primary, uh hands, that pick the coffee. 
S2: and currently goi- to go back to Costa Rica, currently the, all of the coffee in Costa Rica is harvested by migrant Nicaragua workers. 
S3: but then also i i thought that part of your question was also related to the different system of production and um, one thing that that_ there's some studies that have looked at organic coffee work for example. no study have been done to look at labor, uh and n- the uh the whole economics including labor of the shaded plantations. but it has been done for, for organic plantations, many of which are shaded plantations. and they tend to consume higher labor than uh, the non-organic a- and and and in the case of organics it's primarily of the whole, uh the compost and they have to put the compo- compost in the plants and all that. so it requires a lot of labor. in the coffee plantations that are highly diverse, you also save some labor in terms of weeding, in terms of fertilizing and things like that, because it's a it's a really integra- integrated system. a lot of the- the the canopy of the trees is controlling the weeds. and also a lot of the uh, the leaf litter that falls add nutrients to the system and they they don't, and so especially in weed control, it's a big saving, uh labor-saving uh method, to have that that canopy of trees... anyone? 
S8: uh y- you this very interesting uh talk about the the agreement of everyone except the agronomists, uh you know focuses attention on something we're all interested in, how do you build, interdisciplinary activities? ho- how can you organize things to draw that agronomist into, a team, that tries to work together to increase, not just yield, but uh a a balanced kind of production. got any ideas about that? 
S2: no. <SS LAUGH>
S3: the thing is, the s- schools are highly fragmented, like for example, John started this talk by by saying well we're not M-S-U, you know why do agriculture here. and, i think that the importance of doing agriculture here is that we have a very different perspective. you go to M-S-U and yes, there are people there that are doing sustainable agriculture there's a whole group of people but they are like this in comparison to the whole establishment of the land grant institution. and so an agronomist that get trained there, gets trained in the same [S8: in agronomy ] i- in an agronomy fashion. and so i- in agronomy schools i think it's very important to try to, to, come up with this uh interdisciplinary approach where you don't look at just this single, issue but you look at the whole system as a, s- system as a whole. 
S2: i i think you know, that in a curious way, part of the problem might be just because of the the way the history of interdisciplinary research has gone in recent years, uh part of the part of the st- part of the, the the solution might be to stop using the word interdisciplinary. because for so many disci- disciplines, like agronomy [S8: yeah ] interdisciplinary means, i have to put up with a sociologist, and then an economist for long enough to write the grant proposal [S8: yeah ] to get the money [S8: yeah ] that's all that it means to them. and so perhaps if we changed the uh [S8: problem oriented ] yeah look at problem oriented, [S3: system, uh ] and that's one of the reasons that i that i that i that i talked about the agronomist's point of view and then the ecologist's point of view. and just argued that there's another way of looking at nature and argued this with the agronomist that there's another way of looking at nature. and that's from an ecological point of view, and this ecological point of view implies some other things. now they imply what you and i would probably call interdisciplinary but we don't necessarily have to say that you know. we can just say it implies, well there are these economic problems, there are these sociological problems, etcetera. [S8: so you ] just a thought. 
S8: when you when you think of for example buildings, organizational structures that would promote this value, you have things like the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, which does very good interdisciplinary work because you've got a lot of, disciplinary folks from different regions working on a problem. and people are thinking here now at the University of Michigan, what kind of organizational structure should we have, that would deal with environmental issues broadly rather than with one specific discipline at a time? 
S3: well, i think these kind of seminars, is you know, is part of it. because i am sure there are a lot of people here that are not from the ecological side of things and, so, i i think i- it does bring up a a lot of uh interdisciplinary things.
S6: uh uh i i guess my question about labor utilization was related to that because you know when you're talking about development models, which i think John is talking about when he talked about, sort of science-based green revolution technology versus a softer impact. um, the question of you know, are people going to be sustained, and and the sustainability of social structures relates to having a job so i think one very interesting component of your really fascinating work would be to know what the implications were for the sort of diversity of employment and sus- subsistence opportunities [S3: mhm ] of of the different markets. 
S3: yeah [S2: yeah ] yeah. actually, one interesting thing that happens related to this thing in, in Chiapas in particular, is that, coffee of course is not a traditional crop from Mexico, and but it had it it started by being uh, it was imported m- primarily by Germans. to Mexico, and usually these were large farms. and indigenous people started working in these plantations and that's where they learned how to produce coffee. when many of them started migrating to other places in in Mexico, then they started their own coffee plantation but they learned to do coffee in these areas. and now, uh as i mention in the Zapatista region a lot of producers there are coffee producers. and they all were, uh not, well i shouldn't say all, but a lot of them were workers in the large coffee plantations in the Suconosco. 
S2: George? 
S4: do do you guys have enough information yet to know what the what the relative comparison is between the decrease in diversity from a from a forest, uh to a shade plantation and the relative increase going from a shade plantation in terms of coffee yield, to the high-yielding full sun varieties. because for example if if you can think of the trade-off if you just look at yield, even if you just kept yield the same, in the diversity it it might work out that it's better to put more of the shaded plantations into full-sun varieties and take that land and put it into, just let it return to natural forest. so if you get a, if you get a greater yield, per unit area, a a little bit greater out of that, then you get a species increase, and 
S3: and what you do with the all the people that depend on coffee <S3 LAUGH> for their survival? 
S4: well i i just, well i'm just saying 
S3: that's where that's the other component 
S4: you're s- producing the same about, i mean that i i see your 
S3: yeah but in terms of the amount of people that are involved in producing and benefitting from this activity, is much more reduced if you have an intensive coffee plantation. in terms of the amount of coffee that you produce, you're probably right. uh but then, you have to do something with the people that used to produce coffee and now there's a forest here that they cannot use. 
S2: yes, uh i uh i would approach that with a multidimensional answer. i can- i agree with Ivette. that is one thing, uh the fact is you're dealing with facts on the ground here, people produce coffee. okay now if you wanna have an industrial program where people stop producing coffee, which did happen in Puerto Rico, okay that's one thing but it has to be one component of it. the second component of it uh is the the one i think you were getting at, and the one that you were getting out was the was whether you could have this this trade-off with producing a lot of coffee over here, uh and still preserving the biodiversity by having all that forest and everything. uh it turns out that you don't reduce ant biodiversity hardly at all when you go, as just I- Ivette showed you here, when you go from a forest to a shaded plantation, uh you just don't. but you do reduce butterfly diversify quite a lot. so it actually depends on what kind of biodiversity you're really interested in and it's not clear how that uh, how that actually would, how that actually would shake out it really isn't. but then there's a third component too, George. and that is the whole productionist mentality. we don't wanna produce more coffee in the first place. okay there's too much coffee in the world as it is. uh, the price of coffee isn't high enough for most coffee producers to actually make a living. uh what we're after, and what we should be after, is, reduction in the c- in in in the production of coffee. not more c- not more, not more coffee. so 
S4: but what do you do with the people who, if you reduce yield, what do you do with the people who, [S2: excellent ] were working to, i mean [S2: excellent ] [S3: a- an- i ] you've got more people working, less productive, less efficient, [S2: excellent ] systems. 
S2: point, i'm glad you brought that up. [S3: higher price ] the point is, the point of no, no what you do with those people, you_ they're on their plantations but they have shade trees on their plantations. so their production goes down. they have more biodiversity. and in order to, in in order to satisfy their needs, well the production goes down first overall so the price of coffee goes up so they make more money, and then you have governmental structures, just like we had in World War Two during the Cold War and other times where we subsidized the production of coffee. it all works out, it really does. but that's also a different political system. 
S3: also the o- especially [SU-M: it hasn't yet, yeah ] especially, but also the other thing is that especially the other thing is that especially the small plantations, uh small producers, a lot of the time the shade is also, i- i- it also produces something that they use. it's a fruit tree or, there're a lot of fruit trees, they either commercialize or they use for for their subsistence. so there's a, a whole, other component to to it, as well. 
S1: why don't we have one more question and then we'll break as a group and anybody else can stay on to talk with John and Ivette, i'll let you choose.
S2: he- this gentleman here. 
SU-M: well, i- it seems that you have exactly the same sort of problem as you do with, population that's growing in India. in India, one has a greater sense of security as a family by having the largest number of children. the whole belief for India it's a disaster. and the coffee plantations, what is desirable globally is not optimal for a guy who owns his five hectares. he gets more coffee, he gets more money, gets more income, employs less labor, if he makes a modern, and uh, agricultural, uh plantation. without the biodiversity. so you essentially have to legislate this or impose it so that uh the individuals can accept this. because, for the individual owning the land, it's not his optimum path. 
S2: we can we can make it, [S3: that ] i'm sorry, go ahead.
S3: just one problem related to that is that that's what the strategy uh that came out of the Smithsonian i, uh addresses. and essentially the main point is that you have to convince people, that they should pay more, for this product because the the yield is lower, so the farmer is not gonna want to have a lower yield and still receive the same price. but if you can assure this farmer a higher price for a lower yield, he's gonna break even or he's gonna be more or less the same. he's not gonna end up losing, by having it in the shade of his plantation or her plantation. so, that's that's one of the uh market oriented, market oriented uh strategies to the (xx) grower. 
S2: that that that's that's one strategy, but i think you made a good point there, before. the other strategy is a legislative strategy. in the places we've done it before, we've done it over and over again before. when, the public at large and especially the political leaders of the world acknowledge that there's an emergency situation. it happened in World War Two, it happened during the Cold War, and it happened at several other points also. if biodiversity loss is regarded by the world as an emergency situation which i think it should be. unfortunately it's not. there is an emergency situation there, we can get the world to legislate, the way coffee should be produced. and that's what i think needs to happen. i'm not nearly as, sanguine about the market approach that Ivette uh seems to love [S3: um, no ] so much <SS LAUGH>
S3: i don't i don't i see a lot of problem with that approach. but that's an approach that actually has received a lot of attention, right now. 
S4: so you need an OPEC of coffee producers, <S2 LAUGH> if you wanna fix the price globally 
S2: that's what we had i- that's what they had in in the past, George. that's precisely what they had in the past. with the U-S government organizing it. 
S1: yeah for coffee growers, COPEC
S3: they had uh, they had a cartel, coffee cartel, to to manage [S2: very frequently ] yeah the price of coffee. but that was eliminated with all these uh liberalization programs and all that. it was part of the, the whole [S1: well, along with the W-T-O. ] <SS LAUGH>
S2: along with the W-T-O.
S1: well on that note, have another cup of coffee on your way out and let's thank John and Ivette for a really nice (xx) 
SU-M: thanks, that was very interesting session.
S2: you're welcome. 
{END OF TRANSCRIPT} 

