It happens sometimes. You see a bunch of apparently random, unrelated things, and then after a while suddenly it hits you that there’s a thread of sorts running through them after all. It’s a trick of the mind, of course, but still. Take my reading these past few days. It included a review of an old exhibition on the historical links between Venice and the Orient (an interest of mine), a newspaper article on the latest developments on Cyprus (an old stamping ground of mine) and a paper from the International Institute of Social Studies on food sovereignty (homework). I suppose I should not have been surprised, but the nexus of agrobiodiversity (and its products) and politics turned out to be a point of connection among these, if maybe not an actual thread. Here’s how.
Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 was the title of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2007. There was a review of it at the time in the NY Review of Books, which I ran into at the weekend while binge-reading William Dalrymple stuff. Among many great observations, there was this little gem on the diplomatic missions between Venice and Egypt:
The emissaries would have been carrying large numbers of Parmesan cheeses, apparently the diplomatic gifts most eagerly favored by appreciative sixteenth-century Mamluk governors.
I don’t know what it was, maybe the slightly surreal image of a Venetian trireme being unloaded at some slippery Nilotic dock, the sweaty Parmesan wheels hoisted laboriously onto richly baldaquined camels as turbaned dragomans look on, but the sentence stuck with me. ((Apologies for the Orientalist daydream.)) And so did the following, this morning, while scanning a piece in the International Herald Tribune on the latest, hopeful signs from the tragically divided island of Cyprus. I spent several years there back in the 90s, and I try to stay informed:
In 2010, the community planted a Peace Park, an oasis with 1,100 carob trees and a playground. Soon after, the group restored a dilapidated Frankish cloister abutting the church, less than 500 feet from a Turkish mosque towering in the sun.
See, there it is again, agrobiodiversity helping out with politics.
Ah, but wait. I really should not be calling it that at all, should I. Because, according to Patrick Mulvany in a footnote in the paper Food Sovereignty: A Critical Dialogue, which you may remember we nibbled last week:
The term Agricultural Biodiversity is, in the English language, the accepted term in the United Nations FAO and CBD and by many authors that come from a public interest perspective. It is also a useful term in that it highlights the ‘cultural’ dimension. The reductionist term ‘agrobiodiversity’, though common in translation in other languages (and translation from those languages), is sometimes used by institutions and individuals who consider agricultural biodiversity mainly as an exploitable resource.
And there I was thinking that “agricultural biodiversity” and “agrobiodiversity” were completely interchangeable terms. How naive of me. Don’t you just love agricultural biodiversity? There’s politics even in what you call it.
Luigi: They are interchangeable. I was a major player in introducing the word `agrobiodiversity’ in 1991 (possibly an earlier use in India). I was tired of the CBD process and the conservationist neglecting agriculture. I do not know where Mulvaney is heading with his `cultural dimension’ : I thought all agriculture was cultural. And we could paraphrase: “agroecology is a reductionist term used by those who want to exploit the naivety of others”. Let’s invent a new term: `photosynthetic agriculture’. Our agriculture is better than your agroecology because it is photosynthetic and therefore natural. What do the ecological agriculture proponents think agronomists, soil scientists, plant physiologists, entomologists and pathologists and the rest of us have been to up for two hundred years?
Aside – the Met catalogues (but I can’t find the Venice one) are very often available as a free pdf file – magnificent.
With all due respect, what’s ‘slippery’ got to do with the (fortuitous?) alignment of your recent readings’ boiled-down marrow? I consider the distinction in terminology made by P. Mulvany as irrelevant, if not dangerous – is that your point too? His futile footnoted nitpick could lead future debates down a slippery slope, be turned into sloppy arguments when actually everybody’s taking about the same thing. And you could be thrown into one camp or the other after an unfortunate slip of the tongue!
What can Parmesan wheels and carob trees teach us here?
Nothing.
I am taking this all too seriously…
I suspect so.
Defining scientific terminology is not often easy, but it is a serious issue. It would be unfortunate if Patrick Mulvaney’s spurious separate definitions for agricultural biodiversity and agrobiodiversity were to be left unchallenged.
Wikipedia gives this definition: ‘Agricultural biodiversity is a sub-set of general biodiversity. It includes all forms of life directly relevant to agriculture: rare seed varieties and animal breeds (farm biodiversity), but also many other organisms such as soil fauna, weeds, pests, predators, and all of the native plants and animals (wild biodiversity) existing on and flowing through the farm. However, most attention in this field is given to crop varieties and to crop wild relatives’.
FAO proposes that ‘Agrobiodiversity is a vital sub-set of biodiversity. Many people’s food and livelihood security depend on the sustained management of various biological resources that are important for food and agriculture. Agricultural biodiversity, also known as agrobiodiversity or the genetic resources for food and agriculture, includes…..’.
So, interchangeability wins I think!