On the inherent instability of the monoculture

Summary

In the last decades has been recognized that monoculture has harmful consequences: genetic erosion, soil loss, pollution, land concentration, increased poverty and so on. But, there is another aspect that has been underestimated, the instability that results of the oversimplification of monoculture’s trophic structure. Here, using network analysis, we show why the trophic structure of monoculture is inherently instable. Considering an agroecosystem as a complex network, we propose that for the design of stable agroecosystems we must generate architectures with redundancy of relations and homogeneous connectivity, because this compensates and modulates perturbations.