Contesting Blossoming Treasures of Biodiversity article 42: 'Quinoa - is the United Nation's featured crop of 2013 bad for biodiversity?' - Quinoa, a model crop to examine the dynamics of biodiversity within agricultural systems

摘要

While well written, Ernest Small's paper (featured in issue 14.3 of Biodiversity - a Journal of Life on Earth) contains a number of imprecisions which hinder understanding of the actual context of Quinoa's expansion worldwide and the consequences for biodiversity, not only in the Andes, but also in other parts of the world. The article addresses the critical question of how increasing demand for Quinoa on world markets is impacting Andean ecosystems. After briefly describing the plant and the history of its cultivation, the author explains the current interest in Quinoa, which has been maintained for centuries by Andean farmers. However, Small (2013) fails to note that the gradual recognition of Quinoa has passed through several stages since the 1970s. It was first presented as a protein source for vegetarians and a gluten-free food for people with celiac disease (1980s), then as a model of organic agriculture (1990s) and, more recently, fair trade (2000s). The FAO declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa (IYQ) to focus world attention on the potential role that Quinoa's biodiversity could play. Yet the evolution of the area cultivated with Quinoa threatens the dynamics of this biodiversity. Quinoa's high ecological plasticity (Fuentes et al., 2012) allows it to adapt to numerous environments and thereby cope with emerging constraints such as the increasing salinity of arable land and climate change effects (Ruiz et al., 2013).