Jacob offers Luigi an explanation for Tunisia’s misplaced pride:
Seeds are being used as gifts to shape new social networks, the anthropologist in me guesses. Creating social capital, isn’t that worthy of praise?
Housekeeping notes: We’re back
Apologies to anyone who tried to look at the site over the past couple of days and saw the enigmatic message “It Works!”. We had not in fact been hacked. It was a hangover from earlier attempts to migrate to a new server. Unfortunately the server administrator was on holiday, so there was nothing we could do about it. The first thing he did on his return was to get everything operational, even if the site isn’t quite as pretty as it might have been. Or is it better? Let us know. About other stuff too.
More tweaks later, if necessary.
Africa, agriculture and climate change
“If agriculture in developing countries becomes more sustainable, if it increases its productivity and becomes more resilient against the impact of climate change, this should help to reduce the number of currently around one billion hungry people and offer better income and job opportunities,” said Alexander Mueller, FAO Assistant Director-General.
“Millions of poor farmers around the globe could help in reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Peter Holmgren, FAO focal point for the UN climate change negotiations. 1
OK. But what about preparing those self-same farmers to cope with climate change by giving them access to agricultural biodiversty?
Africa’s market for milk, meat and staple food crops such as maize, banana, sorghum, rice and millet stands at over $150 billion a year which is more than what it fetches from pet cash crops like coffee, tea and flowers.
Researchers say that seven out of ten Africans earn their living by engaging in subsistence farming making the sub-sector to be the continent’s market leader.
It is for this reason that the farmers are encouraged to embrace modern farming methods to produce more food in order to make economic sense.
On the other hand, governments are obliged to ensure that farm inputs are affordable and farmers have access to markets to sell their harvests at competitive prices to reap fruits of the labour. 2
OK. But does “modern farming” mean abandoning their agrobiodiversity and the skills to use it? And why is it government’s responsibility to make sure inputs are affordable? If government distorts price signals, we can’t blame farmers for doing the most profitable thing in the short term, even if it means losing their agricultural biodiversity and the skills to use it in the longer term.
Featured: unripe fruit
Greenfruit fan (we know who you are) weighs in on Unripe for plucking:
Unripe fruits as food are common in many cultures, including South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, the Americas and the Caribbean. For their refreshing tartness or light sweetness, or unusual flavor.
Jeremy’s English Lesson: “Don’t eat those blackberries. They’re red. That means they’re green.”
Featured: land purchase
Luigi asks the $64,000 question:
What I want to know is whether all these countries buying up leases have taken climate change into account. Will they end up holding pretty useless pieces of land?
Mappers and modellers, do your stuff.