- A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
- And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
- Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
- Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
- Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
- You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
- There’s diversity in asparagus too.
- Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
- Even big international genebanks.
- Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
- But some are in trouble.
- Though others are coming back.
No. 2) The link is for a promotion of VACS, mainly for Africa, which is: “pumping an unprecedented flow of money into foods that have long been disregarded”, trying to revive “forgotten” (or orphan crops) in the belief they are better adapted to African conditions (so the introduced maize comes in for severe criticism). This belief that local, indigenous, crops are somehow better “locally adapted” than introduced crop is false, in fact, dangerously so for the outcome of the VACS process. Indigenous crops are better thought of as `locally constrained’ by their co-evolved local pests and diseases rather than locally adapted to all local conditions.
This is not an arcane belief of mine. It has long been known to crop botanists. For example [copied from Wood, D. (1988) ‘Introduced crops in developing countries. A sustainable agriculture?’, Food Policy, 13(2), pp. 167–177]:
“J.W. Purseglove, with a very wide experience of tropical agriculture, claimed that ‘a striking feature of the present-day distribution of tropical crops is that the main areas of production of the major economic crops are usually far removed from the regions in which they originated’. … There is a fascinating account of crop introduction by E. Anderson, using sunflowers as an example ‘the one native American crop, [although] no world crop originated in the area of its modern commercial importance and sunflowers are no exception’. Both Anderson and Purseglove agree on the major reason for this. In Anderson’s words ‘In the region where a crop was domesticated there are the maximum number of pests and diseases which have been evolved to prey upon that particular kind of plant’; and for each crop ‘the farther you get from its centre of origin the more of its pests you can hope to leave behind’. P.R. Jennings and J.H. Cock added substance to the previously unquantified ideas on crop introduction by drawing attention to yield increases following introduction. Their survey emphasized the biological restraints – in the form of pests and diseases – to crops within centres of origin, and the value of mixed cropping for the stable production of native crops. With their experience of international agricultural research, Jennings and Cock endorsed the location of crop research centres in regions of origin of specific crops – that is, in areas where most of the technical problems are found. ‘Technology that is successful in the centre of origin of the crop can be successfully introduced where the problems are less.’ They concluded with advice that national strategy should emphasize the production of introduced food crops.
With remarkably little emphasis, introduced crops have repeatedly demonstrated advantages over native crops and have come to occupy a key position in the agriculture of most countries.”
Rather than the benefit of `leaving behind’ pest and diseases—as does any introduced crop—VACS is attempting the opposite: trying to make a wide range of African indigenous crops resistant to (Anderson’s phrase): “the maximum number of pests and diseases”. In this questionable process, verging on the impossible, VACS will drive research attention away from African introduced staple crops: maize, wheat, beans, potato, ground nut, plantains, sweet potato, sugarcane and the like. Africa will then need to import more food.