Brainfood: Forest restoration, Vegetable diversity, Intensification costs, Community forests, Baja oases, Nigerian foods, European wetlands, Landscape diversity & resilience, European conservation prioritization

One Reply to “Brainfood: Forest restoration, Vegetable diversity, Intensification costs, Community forests, Baja oases, Nigerian foods, European wetlands, Landscape diversity & resilience, European conservation prioritization”

  1. “The Cocoa Crisis”: Not sure I accept their usage of `monoculture’, as in “Being based on monoculture production, the seven administrative units considered in this paper turned out to be particularly vulnerable to the economic and environmental perturbation.” This is not to do with monoculture per se, but with plantation agriculture and the reliance on international markets. The system would fail if the market for the main traded product collapsed even if it was being grown in complex forest gardens. There is a similar abuse of `monoculture’ to `explain’ the Irish potato famine. This was not so much related to growing low genetically uniform monocultures of potatoes but with a high over-reliance on one staple food, a disease epidemic that could take out even a diverse potato crop (which had not co-evolved with the disease), and a human population that was higher then than now – probably a unique demography. A similar forced emigration happened in Scotland, where absentee landlords replaced excellent mixed/diverse farming and fishing with sheep farming – fewer farmers but bigger rents.

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