Catching up is easy when other people too have been taking things easy. I missed this account of the possibly misplaced importance of maize in African life when it first appeared at the Climate Change Media Partnership in the wake of the Cancun meeting, but luckily a scraper site only got around to it yesterday. What is so interesting about this insistence that maize be Africa’s main staple is how ahistorical it is. Corn and Capitalism, Arturo Warman’s wonderful social history of maize, teases out the many factors that made maize Africa’s darling, often in the space of a couple of generations or less. But as Mclay Kanyangarara, climate change advisor for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, apparently told the side event at Cancun:
“[W]e have always had an option. … Maize is an introduced crop and the small grains have always been our traditional indigenous crops, which are better suited to our climate.”
Why, then, is it proving so hard to break maize’s stranglehold, a scant 500 years later?
And in other climate-change news, a cold winter comes as something of a surprise to the globe-trotting locavore in Guatemala. And another missed post that lives again thanks to a scraper offers first hand experience of climate change in Ethiopia.
“I remember misty mornings, with the sky full of clouds. Even ten years ago there would be regular rainfall six months of the year. This year we had only two and a half. We’ve had to reduce what we grow. No more peppers or vegetables – now it’s just the basics like corn and sorghum.”
Corn, again! The post goes on anecdotally to distinguish past weather patterns — an occasional bad year among the good — from today’s unremittingly bad years. It also talks a bit about how farmers are trying to diversify, for example by growing grass pea (Lathyrus sativus) instead of normal peas (Pisum sativum), noting that grass pea can cause paralysis.
“It’s a big worry for me,” says Lekea, a 50-year-old mother of nine children. “But the alternative is for us to go hungry.”
Another alternative would be for Lekea and other farmers in the area to trial some of the low-neurotoxin Lathyrus varieties that have been under development at ICARDA and elsewhere since the late 1990s. Maybe someone suggested that at the big “climate hearing” that Lekea was scheduled to address. Or maybe nobody in Ethiopia — including Oxfam’s blogger — knew anything about these varieties. That seems unlikely, given that Ethiopia has the varieties, which continue to be improved. So what’s the story?
There always are alternatives. Even to maize.
About maize in Africa. If indigenous crops are better suited to the climate of Africa, why is 70% of crop production in Africa from introduced crops? This indigenous = always better adapted idea is wrong. The real fact is that indigenous = constrained by co-evolved local pests and diseases, which introduced crops have a better chance of escaping. These kind of simplistic ideas can seriously damage African agricultural development. If Africa is getting drier then go for introduced cassava, tepary bean, groundnut and mat bean.
Sometimes, as climates get drier, pest and disease load drops (a major advantage of irrigation). Then the African `minor’ millets would be useful (and they are short-season). ICRISAT once worked on these, but seems to have stopped. Nowhere but Africa developed dryland cereals like sorghum and pearl millet, which could be of more use to other continents is climates become drier. In dry climates with ground water (seasonal river beds) Africa has ratooned sorghum – which will last 2-4 years from one planting. This could useful elsewhere. And there are all those African grass species keeping pasture production going in Latin America.
Agreed that introduced crops are often more useful away from the pests and diseases they evolved with. I think you’re missing a crucial point here, which is that the adoption of maize in Africa was fuelled less by agronomy than by wider social and economic concerns.
Jeremy: you are probably right for several reasons. It makes me cringe to see African women husking pearl millet – very hard work. And children spending all daylight hours up to 7 weeks perched on a platform chasing quelea away from Sorghum (which, if loaded with tannin to repel the quelea, can cause gastric cancer). I once spent one and a half years collecting sorghum and millets in Kenya – great time. My favourite is finger millet – the best tropical brewing grain (and an important source of income for women). And I love injera, made from Erogrostis teff in Ethiopia.
A problem with any introduced crop is the bottleneck of processing and cooking. There is nothing like the enormous variation in maize cookery in Africa – tortillas and the rest. Nor the wide range of food made from cassava in South America (but I did once have a meal of cassava greens in the Mille Collines in Kigale). Why can not this sophisticated (and delicious) preparation of introduced crops be adaopted to Africa? There is similar problem with soybeans worldwide (except S.E. Asia). All that lovely fermented soybean food that does not move elsewhere.
I am not sure if Ugandan specialities of maize and beans and banana and beans (all introduced) has found its way elsewhere. Again, why not? It tastes very good indeed.
Don’t cringe. Design!
On the cooking thing, I agree. It is strange that the crops often do so much better outside their place of origin while the human skills to make more use of them doesn’t travel as well. It does, though, and in spades, when the people travel.