Ancient farming seen curbing extinctions of animals, plants

Ancient farming practices, such as raising fish in rice paddies in China or Aboriginal Australian fire controls, will get a new lease of life under plans to slow extinctions of animals and plants, experts said on Monday.     

Turning to traditional farming is seen as a way of limiting what U.N. studies say is the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, driven by a rising human population that is wrecking natural habitats.      

A 115-nation group seeking to protect the diversity of wildlife, which underpins everything from food supplies to medicines, will look at ways to revive and promote indigenous peoples' practices at talks in Turkey from Dec. 9-14.      

"Indigenous and local knowledge ... has played a key role in arresting biodiversity loss and conserving biodiversity," Zakri Abdul Hamid, founding chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told Reuters.      

The idea is partly to compare traditional farming around the world and see if the practices can be used in other nations.      

Among ideas, raising fish in the waters of rice paddies, a practice used in south China for 1,200 years and in some other Asian nations, can reduce pests. Most modern rice paddies are not used to raise fish.      

Farming the two together "reduces by 68 percent the need for pesticides and by 24 percent the need for chemical fertilizer compared with monocultures", an IPBES report said. Pesticides often kill many more species than those targeted.      

And in countries including Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Venezuela, traditional burning of small patches of countryside can create a mosaic of firebreaks that prevents the spread of devastating blazes in the dry season, it said.       


REUTERS