- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
CIFOR and the açaí palm
CIFOR should stick to forestry or at least get its ecology right if it tries to prescribe for farmers. In the article on the increasing importance of markets for the fruit of açaí palm (I think this is Euterpe oleracea but CIFOR does not tell me this) CIFOR repeats the usual anti-monoculture dogma: “Monocultures are often pushed by external developers that believe mixed cultivation models cannot produce a high enough yield to meet market demand.” But the local farmers are planting açaí palm in an environment that allows monodominance in nature – coastal wetlands flooded twice daily. These wetlands are one of a range of ecosysystems that are in some way marginal – too wet, salty, disturbed, cold, grazed, burned or otherwise hostile to any but the most adapted species – ultimately just one, as others species, less adapted, fall away. Sure enough, a quick check shows that E. oleracea has pneumatophores (as present in some mangroves) to allow growth in otherwise anoxic conditions (and apparently also distinct metabolic pathways).
Wild rice monodominance is perhaps the most important model for fields deliberately made marginal to prevent other species competing with the rice crop. For example, Prain (Prain D, 1903. Flora of the Sundribuns. Records of the Botanical Survey of India 1903, 231-370) described the ecology of the wild rice relative Oryza coarctata. It was the most common and most plentiful grass species in the Sundarabans mangrove swamps of Bengal and: ‘the first species to establish itself on the compensation banks of alluvium that are formed on the opposite bank of a river whenever the “set” of the current produced erosion. Such banks vary in size from a few square yards to several acres; whenever they occur they are closely and uniformly covered by a sheet of Oryza coarctata.’ These conditions are both marginal and seasonally disturbed by flooding.
Forest scientists should stop giving knowledgeable farmers bad advice on crop production (or at least begin themselves to study the vast array of vegetation that is monodominant).