Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Not just hungry, sick

While not strictly about agricultural biodiversity (although much more could be made of agrobiodiversity in this realm) Scidev.net draws attention to an editorial in The Lancet. 1 In the run up to (yet another) High Level Summit — this time on Food Security — next week, Scidev.net reports The Lancet’s view that:

Poor terminology adds to the problem — calling undernourished people ‘hungry’ is belittling. Even the term ‘undernourished’ can be confusing to policymakers, says the editorial.

Really? How easily confused those policymakers must be.

It adds that medicalising food — where undernutrition is the disease and food the treatment — could make ensuring food supplies a bigger priority for the global health sector.

Again, because the world has such a good record of delivering global health care to those who need it most?

Climate change gets a namecheck too, natch. And if I sound just a teeny bit cynical, maybe that’s a sickness too.

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Oxfam goes to town on the Other Green Revolution

We’ve blogged briefly about how vast areas of the Sahel, far from degenerating, are actually experiencing something of an agricultural rebirth, thanks in some small measure to tree-planting. 2 A post from Oxfam America summarizes some of those efforts, and explains that Oxfam brought some of the people responsible — elevated to eco-hero status — to Washington DC “for discussions with US legislators about local solutions to food insecurity and climate change.” We haven’t noticed any reports of those discussions, but are happy to draw attention to the high impact of local solutions to local problems, especially when they make use of agricultural biodiversity. Thanks to CAS-IP, which has an expanded gloss on Oxfam’s efforts.

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So, farewell then, Claude Levi-Strauss

Like the Archaeobotanist, I too was astonished by the news that Claude Levi-Strauss had died today because I was not aware that he hadn’t died many years ago. Rather than explain why a blog about agrobiodiversity should mark the passing of a centenarian and seminal anthropologist, let me just urge you to visit Dorian Fuller’s blog and read his appreciation and the sample myth on the origins of agriculture that Levi-Strauss collected.

It shows that almost all of us are ignorant of the origins of our foods and food-processing technologies. Bonus points if you spot the other ways in which the Munduruku explanation of the origins of their agriculture might be not the whole “truth”.

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Plastic banana weirdness

I’ve just discovered this bit of inanity, a month or so late. Queen’s University Belfast has a slice of a €1 million study known as the Badana project, to “develop new procedures to incorporate by-products from banana plantations in the Canary Islands into the production of rotationally moulded plastics”. Why? Because:

Once the fruit has been harvested, the rest of the banana plant goes to waste. An estimated 25,000 tonnes of this natural fibre is dumped in ravines around the Canaries every year.

How, I wonder, do they maintain the organic content of the soil in which those bananas grow? No chance of recycling all that waste fibre, is there?

Ireland’s Daily Star newspaper headlined the story “Boffins go bananas”. I’d have preferred “Boffins are bananas.”