Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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A tale of two countries

Exhibit A:

Among 1.5 million children aged 0 to 2 years in communities where the program is implemented, the proportion of those who are underweight has fallen from 30 percent in January 2009 to 20 percent in March 2010. The average decline in the four participating regions … is a strong eight percentage points a year.

Exhibit B:

The ICDS and MDMS are the world’s largest nutrition supplement programs. These apart, 160 million families are given food grains at highly subsidized rates. With about half-a million fair price shops, India’s public distribution system (PDS) is rated as the world’s largest food subsidy program. But, the evidence shows that all these welfare measures have not made a difference.

There’s more to be had from these two reports, on Ethiopia and India respectively but the bottom-line observation, as the Times of India points out, is clear.

India is the world’s 10th largest economy with a GDP of $3.57 trillion and $3,100 as per capita income. Sub-Saharan Ethiopia has the 79th largest economy, with $900 as per capita income. It’s far behind India. Yet, Ethiopia and a handful of other sub-Saharan nations beat India in one of the most critical social indices.

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The social life of taxonomists

If you have full access to the journal Nature, you’ll be able to read Jonathan Silvertown’s correspondence about a pet project called iSpot. Silvertown says:

Through social networking, the identification process can be made more efficient while simultaneously spreading real taxonomic knowledge. The facility is available to anyone, unlike other technologies that require specialized equipment.

In its first year of operation, the website … helped 6,000 users to identify 25,000 sightings of some 2,500 species, from lichens to birds. The website works by linking experts (including amateur experts) with beginners through a sophisticated reputation system that encourages users to help and learn from each other.

This, Silvertown says, is “social networking on the Internet”. 1

And it is, of a sort. Not the sort that we’ve championed here more than once, most famously in connection with some globetrotting taro. It is good that people can get good identification of things they’ve seen, and been able to photograph. My argument with iSpot is that it perpetuates the dichotomy between nature and agriculture, probably unconsciously, although very directly: “your place to share nature”.

So, while you will find crop wild relatives in there, there is no mention of the fact that that is what they are. You won’t find a single entry for Triticum. And so, while there may be lots of discussions of willow warblers vs chiffchaffs, the essential and fundamental differences between the raw materials of beer and bread go unremarked. And where would all those twitchers be without a sandwich and a pint?

Silvertown clearly knows about and cares about agriculture, and is not afraid to use agricultural examples in his teaching and popular writing. I wish he had extended that to his Citizen Science projects.

And while I’m moaning, where’s the site that will allow anyone anywhere to upload a photograph of a crop direct from a mobile phone and get it identified, preferably to variety level?

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Evergreen agriculture: crops and trees

What if growing maize under trees – really under trees, under the canopy – improved yields by 280 per cent? It did in Malawi. Even if this practice doesn’t translate well to developed world agriculture, the principles of Evergreen Agriculture can.

Matt at Muddy Green takes a look at Evergreen agriculture: crops and trees, a different kind of agroforestry. I’ve always imagined that agroforestry was more about alley cropping or the like, but this idea of planting under the trees seems rather interesting and rather successful, at least in places where the trees are bare during another crop’s growing season.