- Big important meeting on Agrobiodiversity and the development importance of local varieties and indigenous species is over.
- Big important meeting on new directions for smallholder agriculture starts tomorrow.
What’s that got to do with the price of onions?
Human brains are exquisitely evolved to detect patterns. Mine detected two items with a common theme, separated by only 70 years.
Item 1, from The Economist:
The Indian press is obsessively following the price of onions, which saw a massive spike at the end of last year and the beginning of this one. On Twitter, Indians have noted sarcastically that at one point last week, the prices of a kilo of onions, a litre of petrol and a bottle of beer (presumably in some places, since alcohol taxes vary a lot by state because of state-level taxes) were all the same. Onions get a lot of attention in India partly because many people believe (perhaps rightly, I can’t claim to be sure) that they’re one of the things that even the poorest Indians buy (along with rice or wheat, cooking oil and salt). There’s a stereotypical image of a very poor person in India subsisting on a couple of rotis, a pinch of salt, and some raw onions for flavour.
Item 2, from George Orwell’s diaries:
The onion shortage has made everyone intensely sensitive to the smell of onions. A quarter of an onion shredded into a stew seems exceedingly strong, E. the other day knew as soon as I kissed her that I had eaten onions some 6 hours earlier.
Even more spookily, Orwell immediately goes on to discuss the complex relationships, among price, quantity demanded, supply, and quality of goods.
An instance of the sort of racketeering that goes on when any article whose price is not controlled becomes scarce – the price of alarm clocks. The cheapest now obtainable are 15/- these the sort of rubbishy German-made clocks which used to sell for 3/6d. The little tin French ones which used to be 5/- are now 18/6d, and all others at corresponding prices.
By “racketeering,” does he mean to blame speculators? I certainly hope so.
Nibbles: Sustainable diets, Prices, Seed Industry,
- Been waiting a while for this. Conservation of plant biodiversity for sustainable diets. PowerPoint as PDF.
- And this. Agricultural Biodiversity Is Essential for a Sustainable Improvement in Food and Nutrition Security. Open-access paper.
- Follow along with the price spikes in food. On-line data.
- South African seed company bought by Pioneer. Speculative.
Thousand year old spring roll
Superduper weeds? Couldn’t happen.
I am having a lot of trouble understanding a press release from the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. It trumpets “a way to control superweed”. And it helpfully explains what superweeds are. In essence, they are weeds that are resistant to a parcel of weedkillers. The release quoted an article in The New York Times that “noted that there were 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres of farmland”.
The solution, says the press release, was to put a new kind of weedkiller resistance into crop plants, so that farmers can use a different weedkiller on their superweed-infested fields and thus eradicate the superweeds.
Using a massive genetic database and a bioinformatic approach, Dow AgroSciences researchers identified two bacterial enzymes that, when transformed into plants, conferred resistance to an herbicide called “2,4-D,” commonly used in controlling dandelions. The enzymes were successfully put into corn and soybean plants, and those new plants showed excellent resistance to 2,4-D, including no negative effects on yield or other agronomic traits. Other advantages of 2,4-D include low cost, short environmental persistence, and low toxicity to humans and wildlife.
Stay with me here.
I wonder what the odds are that among the populations of 10 resistant species that infest millions of acres of farmland across 22 states, there might be some harbouring a bit of tolerance to 2,4-D.
Nah. Couldn’t happen. Not in wild carrots. Nor in wild mustard. Superduperweeds? Couldn’t happen.