SHEREEN ALI & OMAR MOHAMMED
"I don't know what we would do without pepper. The majority of our customers take pepper in their doubles, at least slight or more." Miss Tara, a well-known doubles vendor from Barataria, knows the importance of hot pepper and pepper sauce to the local food industry.
Indeed, peppers are an important crop for many local farmers in Trinidad. But did you stop to consider what would happen if none of these pepper plants could be pollinated? In a nutshell: we'd have far fewer peppers; way less locally made pepper sauce–and farmers would be out significant cash.
Pollination is essentially the plant version of sex. It's when pollen grains (the male sex cells in plants) are carried to the female sex cells for fertilisation. Pollination can occur between plants when pollen is carried by the wind or by insects such as the honeybee, or within the same plant (self-fertilisation). Major pollinators in T&T include many species of bees and wasps.
Pollination is an extremely valuable service–most agriculture could not go on without it. Yet we do not consider the economic or monetary value of this vital service. Pollination is a great example of a service provided free to us by nature–an "ecosystem service," as environmental accountants like to call it.
Ecosystem services are the benefits people get from nature, benefits which underpin all our economic systems but which themselves are often not economically valued. Forests, for instance, stabilise the soil, which is an essential ecosystem service that prevents erosion and landslides during high rainfall. Forests also help to capture the rainfall, replenishing freshwater sources during the dry season–another vital service.
Because nature provides these services to people at no cost, we often take them for granted and assume they will always be there, no matter what we do. We under-appreciate, or are totally oblivious to their value, and may overuse them without protecting the ecosystems of which they form a part, and which give rise to the services.
Internationally, there's a growing movement to pay more attention to putting a monetary value on nature's ecosystem services, in order to make better long-term decisions for ourselves, as well as for the ecosystems we depend on. The Project for Ecosystem Services (or ProEcoServ) is a global, four-year initiative that is researching how to integrate ecosystem assessment and economic valuation of ecosystem services into national sustainable development planning and decision-making.
The project was launched in 2010 by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF). It is being rolled out in four countries–T&T, Chile, Vietnam, and South Africa/Lesotho. In T&T, the project involves three main sites: Nariva Swamp, Buccoo Reef, and the eastern Northern Range. In each site, scientists are investigating and valuating a different mix of ecosystem services.
The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, is currently in the wrap-up phase of the ProEcoServ study, with the pollination study assessing the contribution of pollinators to crop production in Trinidad's Nariva Swamp. Among the objectives are: understanding the contribution of pollination to cucumber and pepper production; pollination valuation; understanding the effect of climate change on nest location of pollinators; understanding the effect of landscape on pollinator diversity; and looking at farmers' attitudes towards pollination and pesticide use.
Preliminary findings from the Plum Mitan, Nariva Swamp study site show that in the absence of all insect pollinators, cucumber crop losses would approximately amount to anywhere between 75–100 per cent; 65 per cent of farmers surveyed so far would be willing to pay for pollination services if it increased their yield; and 43 per cent of farmers surveyed so far noticed a change in pollinators visiting their crops over the past ten years, all of which stated a decline in pollinator presence.
The UWI team found that between 2010 and 2012, the average value of just one crop, hot peppers, produced nationally by farmers was over TT$54 million. ProEcoServ's Nariva Swamp research found that pollinators are responsible for about 75 per cent of the production of T&T hot peppers: so the value of peppers dependent on pollinating action was over TT$40 million between 2010 and 2012.
In other words, if pollinators were to one day vanish, farmers' production would drop to a quarter of their current production, said ProEcoServ scientists.
"This does not only have implications for how much pepper we have to put in our food locally, but also for the diversification of the economy and the strengthening of the agricultural sector," said ProEcoServe in a recent release, referring to statements by the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce. The Chamber has said that hot pepper as an export product has been under increasing scrutiny as it has become one of the fastest growing specialty food items in the North American market.
So really, it is in our best interests to not only protect our pollinators, but know their true value. The global ProEcoServ project seeks to ensure that policymakers routinely consider important natural services such as pollination at the highest levels of planning and development. The ProEcoServ project will be putting a "dollar and cents" value to these services.
Pollination as a natural service is under threat around the world and in T&T, noted the T&T ProEcoServ team. They said unplanned development in sensitive areas, pollution and climate change have all impacted pollinators–in some cases, killing some of them off.The ProEcoServ team here says we need to include the value of ecosystem services in planning and decisionmaking to ensure these critical services are not ignored in national development.
If not, we might have to get used to doubles and Tabasco sauce.
MORE INFO: For more information, please visit: www.proecoservtt.org