Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Promote better nutrition and self-sufficiency with a few clicks

The Cooperative Society in the UK recently launched a scheme called Join the Revolution. People submit projects and other people vote for them. Winners get money — GBP 5000 — towards their project.

A project I already knew about alerted me and asked me to vote, which I have done even though, to be perfectly honest, the proposal didn’t exactly set the heart aflutter. There’s another project in similar vein that is currently doing better, so I won’t link to that, but it isn’t hard to scan all the submissions and pick the revolution you would most like to foment. In fact, you’re allowed to vote for as many as you want, which seems a little odd. On the other hand, having clicked the few times needed to register on the site, it seems wasteful not to vote often.

There are some videos about projects which, I think, were funded in an earlier round. Here’s one I could relate to.

Are there any other Coop-funded revolutions we should promote? Other competitions?

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Featured: Impact

Robert is unimpressed by at least one of the CGIAR’s 40 talents, “biological control of two devastating insect pests”.

This was about fixing what other researchers had broken when they shipped infected South American cassava to Africa. I understand it was fixed by finding a natural enemy in South America and bringing that to Africa as well.

It was great that the CGIAR did this, and employed an entomologist to do it, but there would have alternative suppliers aplenty. Any decent entomologist could have done that.

So wouldn’t this have happened anyway, perhaps a little bit later? If so the counter-factual is “basically the same result” (no impact). Entirely different thing from investing in a breeding program. Or a genebank.

And he has a nice little coda on using such efforts as a tool for extortion.

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Back to Balinese rice production

Luigi goaded me into watching Stephen Lansing’s presentation on Balinese rice production, and I’m glad he did. It gives me the opportunity to make a couple of points.

A questioner, at about 1.08, finds it fascinating that the system Lansing described “works for monoculture crops,” and asks whether it might apply in any way to the monocultures of the American midwest. She’s using monoculture to mean single species, as do many others people. But it prompts a reflection on the genetic diversity of the Balinese rices. Lansing does say at one point that much of the diversity has been lost, although some survives up in the hills. And the introduction of the high-tech package based on very uniform improved rice cultivars, starting with the canonical IR-8, failed because it didn’t take Balinese practices into account. And yet those practices too depend on uniformity.

The Balinese system works because farmers synchronize their plantings, so that after harvest there’s nothing left for rice pests to eat and nowhere for them to go. But that requires all the local varieties to have the same maturity period. Indeed, the fundamental unit of the Balinese calendar, the master clock, Lansing said, was the growth cycle of old Balinese rice varieties. I guess that the same would hold true today. Neighbouring farmers must grow varieties with similar maturity dates, otherwise all the complexity associated with synchronizing planting and sharing water goes out of whack at the end of the season.

If the farmers all decided to plant a genetically uniform modern cultivar, but stuck with their older rituals for timing the rice cycles, would the system work as before?