Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Congolese cavies

I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since CIAT’s ace snapper Neil Palmer posted his great shots of guinea pigs in the Congo some months back. Finally, it has, with a long post about CIAT’s project More chicken and pork in the pot, and money in the pocket: improving forages for monogastric animals with low-income farmers. You’ll notice at once that guinea pigs are neither pork nor chicken. 1 In fact, they weren’t in the original project at all. But they were in the project’s target area.

Small and easy to conceal, guinea pigs are well-suited to DRC’s conflict zones, where extreme poverty and widespread lawlessness means that the looting of larger domestic livestock is commonplace. …

“We’re not sure exactly how guinea pigs got to DRC,” said CIAT forage scientist Brigitte Maass, “but they have enormous potential to improve rural livelihoods there.”

The post goes on to explain just how guinea pigs work well in the Congo to offer people a measure of food security, and how the project scientists intend to improve that still further. Nice to be able to embrace something new midstream.

“None of the scientists had contemplated guinea pigs as an option in DRC when the project started. Now they really could turn out to be indispensable.”

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Featured: Fertilizer

Dirk on the pragmatics of learning to use fertilizers:

Excessive use of nitrogen fertilisers hurts the hip pocket nerve, particularly if it does not translate into expected yield increases. It looks like some Chinese farmers are “learning by doing” about modern fertilisers. That is a valid learning strategy, highly valued in the adult learning field.

Will it hurt hard enough, quickly enough for China’s farmers?

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Q&A: The Two Faces of Agriculture

Like the Roman god Janus, whose two faces look in opposite directions, agriculture can either protect the planet’s biodiversity, or decimate it with the irrational use of chemical inputs and the reduction of soil fertility.

If you’re gonna quote Janus at me, you better be using decimate correctly too. At first blush IPS’s interview with Achim Steiner — head of UNEP — seems to be toeing the old “agriculture is the enemy of biodiversity” party line. On second blush too. Here’s Steiner:

The increasing importance of agriculture caused by a growing global population means that the spaces vital to many species of flora and fauna are increasingly limited. In that sense, agriculture poses a danger to biodiversity.

In the end, though, he gets to the point I hope he was trying to make all along.

We can stop that process of erosion and annihilation of species if we apply other models to make optimal use of those 20 centimetres of the earth’s crust necessary to produce the food that we need.

With those alternative models, agriculture offers great potential for protecting plants and animals.

Farmers can be excellent managers of natural resources and of different ecosystems. The challenge of this century is how to compensate farmers so that they continue producing the necessary goods for humanity and, at the same time, help conserve and protect ecosystems, which are also crucial for our survival.

The interview swings back and forth a few more times, offering the idea that farmers can protect endangered flora and fauna. But not a word about the need to protect endangered wild relatives, or crops, or livestock. Ho hum.

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Nibbles: Haiti, Talets, Burukutu, Citrus diversity, Fish

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UK to spend GBP15 million on food security

The UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBRSC: does that name give you any clues about their priorities?) has committed GBP15 million “to establish training for food security research and development”. So, what’s involved?

  • “Transferring the UK’s world-leading bioscience research from the lab bench to the field will underpin this fast-growing sector.”
  • “The AgriSkills Forum recognises the need to address skills in the agri-food sector in a holistic manner and we look forward to working closely with BBSRC to compare notes and ensure that any potential synergies are encouraged to be realised.”
  • “Farming remains at the heart of tackling the challenge of feeding a world of nine billion people by 2050. What the farming industry needs in order to meet this challenge is strong agricultural and horticultural research in the UK. … This BBSRC scheme will help to ensure that research done by highly skilled scientists can benefit farmers by being translated into new technologies, practices and advice they can use on a commercial scale to produce more and impact less.”
  • “We need an increased number of individuals with specific very high level skills if we are to meet the challenge of future food security that has been laid out for us.”

I wonder what they’ll come up with for people who eat food. h/t Charles Spillane.