- An ODAP detective story.
- Ancient maize gets a map.
- Diversity is the key to sustainable cacao.
- New Bioversity DG answers the tough questions.
- Be the first on your block with an unusual fruit tree.
- How to grow awesome carrot seed.
- The hard life of Nigerian wine tappers.
- Bringing back buckwheat in Bhutan.
- Annals of Botany to do halophytes.
- Come down to earth with the realization that most people have never heard of cowpea and cassava. Would they have heard of black-eyed peas and tapioca, though?
- Big report on urban malnutrition. Maybe cassava (see above) can help?
- The last orange grove in the San Fernando Valley. No word on what the variety might be.
- All about molasses.
- Indian tree breeding institute, and accompanying genebank, get a write-up.
- Yes, I know that I could have done a better job of pointing out the connections among some of these things, but it’s been a long week.
“New Bioversity DG” Her comments are mainly welcome. However, the ‘Bridging Agriculture and Conservation Initiative’ will be a can of worms.
The flyer for the project says: “Current approaches to agriculture, which focus primarily on increasing agricultural productivity of a few major crops, are not a sustainable route to better food, nutrition and resilient, productive agricultural systems.” This is, of course, the usual polarization that wrecked the IAASTD. There is a continuity between old and new, fields and gardens, and across the vast range of crops and varieties grown and this is environmentally, socially, and economically `sustainable.
However, my biggest gripe is about the partners – big, rich, conservation agencies who have chracteristically blamed agriculture for their own failings – actually conserving anything `sustainably’. Lots of new specialists in `agroecology’: Patrick Holden moved on to the moneybags from the Soil Association; talk of `ecosystem services’ when these, in ecologically tricky areas, are usually performed by `natural monocultures’ and not `biodiversity’.
Bioversity is selling the crop research institutes of the CGIAR (and national programmes) down the river by chasing the moneybags of international conservation. And the technical basis is very questionable – taking sides with little evidence in the controversial debate on intensive versus extensive agriculture and their impact on conservation. There is a similar argument for forestry – what about the forest transition as forests spread with development? Keep farmers poor and they will junk the forests (and most marginal farmers I have come across are ardent hunters).