Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
B backs up the World Bank on traditional buildings.
In our region frequented by the storms (Philippines), there are many accounts of ONLY traditional bahay kubo (a hut made of the bamboo and palm fronds) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipa_hut surviving the most violent of storms.
And in other news, a correspondent confirms Luigi’s recollection that there is a coconut specifically for rope-making.
Niu Kafa … in Samoa. Kafa means rope.
The late, great Garrett Hardin wanted society to move beyond literacy and numeracy to ecolacy, an ability to think ecologically. And he exemplified this with various stories that hinged on the consequences of small changes. Hardin’s key question: “And then what?” I think he’d have liked this one, which I heard on National Public Radio.
The government of Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific, was concerned about overfishing. So it decided to subsidize the coconut oil industry, because if people earned more from coconut, they would fish less. Unfortunately, as the bumper sticker would have it, A bad day fishing is better than a good day working. In Kiribati, as elsewhere. After the coconut subsidies were introduced fishing increased by a third and the reef fish population dropped by almost a fifth.
Sheila Walsh, a graduate student at the Scrippps Institute of Oceanography, went out to Kiribati and discovered that “people earned more money making coconut oil, which meant they could work less to support themselves. And they spent their new leisure time fishing”.
Turns out that this is something that happens often in programmes to help fish stocks by persuading fisherfolk to do other things. People who fish like to fish, and that’s what they do. They like to be out on the water, according to lots of studies. Recognizing that, one potential solution incorporates ecolacy:
Walsh says she’s trying to help the government figure out how to fix the problem of overfishing, which they’d accidentally made worse. Maybe, she says, the government can create new jobs out on the water by hiring the fishermen to patrol newly created nature preserves.
Without their tackle on board, presumably.
There’s a heart-warming story in The Atlantic Channel about a young woman, Emma Clippinger, who started an organization called Gardens for Health International, that helps people with HIV in Rwanda to grow the food that they need to ensure they respond well to anti-retroviral drugs.
That sounds awfully complicated, but apparently it wasn’t.
Many of the country’s HIV patients did not have access to ample food. HIV/AIDS drugs work most effectively when patients are eating a sound diet. They work poorly when patients are malnourished. … Healthy Rwandans were taking charge of their food supply. But AIDS/HIV victims were excluded from these governmental programs because they were deemed physically incapable of participating.
The effort is spreading, and what is really nice is that it makes full use of agrobiodiversity to deliver better nutrition and health:
“Crops are chosen mostly on the basis of their nutritional value.” They include papaya, avocados, amaranth, spiderplant, cowpea, soy beans, beets, swiss chard, collards, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, chili pepper, tephrosia and … “some sunflowers (for their seed, for their aesthetic value!)”. Growers have been especially enthusiastic about indigenous greens called dodo and isogi, which have a higher iron and vitamin A concentration than spinach. Provisional ingenuity prevails: pesticides include neem, garlic, and chili peppers; multivitamins come in the form of leaves from the moringa tree; old tires serve as planters; no kitchen gray water is wasted.
Staples too. What we need to know is: what are dodo and isogi?
The World Bank’s Development Marketplace 2009 is continuing to feature stories from the winners on its web site. And that’s good because we can scan them as they come up and draw attention to those that involve agricultural biodiversity. Today’s pick, a project from Samoa to build traditional houses “as models of ‘safer, accessible, resilient, and sustainable housing'”.
What’s particularly nice about this is the idea that traditional Samoan houses depend absolutely on agricultural products like the coconut fibre rope that people use to lash the components together. Modern houses built from steel reinforced concrete and corrugated metal cannot withstand cyclones, and their materials become deadly flying objects during storms. Hence the “innovation” of rediscovering traditional methods and material. Might help conserve coconut diversity too, I suppose.
Oh, and in case you were wondering about more obvious, though no less traditional, things to do with coconuts, why not download Coconut Recipes, from Bioversity International and COGENT?