- Food systems: seven priorities to end hunger and protect the planet. Oh good, includes “Biodiversity and genetic bases need to be protected. Seed varieties must be preserved, and their phenotypes and genotypes explored in the contexts of climate change and nutrition. Traditional food and forest systems, including those of Indigenous peoples, need to be better understood and supported in national agricultural research systems.” Phew.
- Future Changes in Wet and Dry Season Characteristics in CMIP5 and CMIP6 Simulations. The above is just as well because longer hotter and drier spells are coming to the tropics, and crops will suffer.
- Global assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on food security. Plus there’s this too. Resilience has a cost.
- The future of farming: Who will produce our food? Smallholders…
- When agriculture drives development: Lessons from the Green Revolution. …and that may be bad.
- Ok, the above two entries need unpacking. The second paper shows that the “agricultural engine of growth” was totally a thing during the Green Revolution, but the first that it now appears to be broken.
- Extinction risk of Mesoamerican crop wild relatives. Oh no, on top of everything else, we might lose avocados and vanilla.
- Determinants of Smallholder Maintenance of Crop Diversity in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains. Markets, land and water. So what would any new Green Revolution do to diversity? Have we learned anything?
- Landscape complexity and US crop production. …are positively correlated. For Morocco too, I wonder?
- Utilize existing genetic diversity before genetic modification in indigenous crops. At least in Ethiopia.
- Compulsion and reactance: Why do some green consumers fail to follow through with planned environmental behaviors? Because some believe in technology, and other is abstinence. Which means they need different messages to encourage them to put their money where their mouths are. Would it work in Ethiopia?
“Utilize existing genetic diversity”
This concludes: “Enthusiastically applying technology for technology’s sake to indigenous crops in domestication centers risks not only alienating traditional knowledge keepers, but also reinventing a wheel that has served farmers for millennia.”
In contrast: “The absence of bacterial wilt resistant enset germplasm and other challenges such as long generation time of 9–14 years made traditional breeding programs unattractive to put effort on enset genetic improvement against bacterial wilt.”
The first quote borders on the outrageous. In effect, “No GM for indigenous crops”. But indigenous crops are the precise ones that need GM. They suffer from indigenous pests and disease – the reason why 70% of crop production in Latin America and Africa is from introduced crops (no wild relatives present). So-called `traditional knowledge keepers’ have a limited ability to overcome this indigenous pest and disease pressure.
My normal recommendation for enset would be to grow it somewhere else (Tropical America or Asia). But there it would meet cultivated bananas and probably get infected with something nasty in the way of Musa pests and disease.
And for starch in Ethiopia, yet more introduced maize and potato (and continue with the wonderful Ethiopian teff).