Author: Jeremy Cherfas

Posted on

Lost Crops of Africa on air

The National Research Council’s series on Lost Crops … is on our shelves, and well-thumbed too. Now comes news that Voice of America has just launched a five part series reporting on various aspects of the story. The first episode — “Lost Crops” of Africa Could Combat Poverty and Hunger — is online here, with links so you can download and listen to the broadcasts.

Other episodes available are:

It’s odd, though, that in the final episode Professor Damania gives the impression that only two of the CGIAR centres are involved in research on these lost crops. We can think of others…

Posted on

Kenyan butterfly farmers flying high

94446896_acdf2bebfb_m.jpg The Kenya Forest Service is one of the forces behind butterfly farming projects around the country. According to the latest KFS annual report (which I found out about from ASNS), household incomes have really benefited from the project, mostly by exporting butterfly pupae to collectors and butterfly farms abroad, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The report, launched last week, says: ((I have been unable to find it on the web; please help.))

The butterfly farming project based at Arabuko-Sokoke forests is one of the various initiatives aimed at involving forest adjacent communities in conservation through sustainable utilization of forest resources to improve livelihoods. The community appreciates the role that the project has played in the improvement of their household income and the positive contribution impacted towards conservation and management of the forest.

We’ve written about butterfly and silk farming in Africa before and it is good to know that these projects do seem to be working. The primary impact is to preserve the forest, by giving local villagers an incentive to keep it intact as a new source of income. Digging around a bit, I found some more useful resources. David Ngala at Wildlife Direct had a post about the Kipepeo project, which links to the project’s own web site. All very worthwhile.

Photo, of Papilio demodocus, by Matt and Kim Rudge, used under a Creative Commons license.

Posted on

A tale of two conferences

A seminar organized by the International Food and Trade Policy Council somehow escaped our attention.

A group of renowned international policymakers, agribusiness executives, farm and NGO leaders and scholars met in Salzburg to examine the key global challenges facing the agricultural sector in the 21st century and analyze the role of food and agricultural trade in the midst of these challenges.

Talking about Food & Environmental Security: the role of food and agricultural trade policy, I’m sure some interesting things must have been said, but it is awfully hard to tell. None of the press coverage makes for easy reading.

The question that interests us, of course, is whether any of the assembled luminaries gave air to the possibility, as Luigi put it, that “to solve the complex problem faced by agriculture we need a diversity of solutions, and that nothing need be off the table in our efforts to put food on the table”?

Then comes notice of the 1st International IFOAM Conference on Organic Animal and Plant Breeding. This shindig takes place in New Mexico ((Yes, Seeds of Change is deeply involved; draw your own conclusions.)) in late August 2009, and

provides for the opportunity to revive traditional knowledge from the global North and South and connect it with the current international organic research. Through the fusion of traditional breeding knowledge and newly developed organic breeding methods, there is a great opportunity of intercultural learning and also valuing knowledge which was kept through generations for the well-being of communities.

Again, I’ve got to ask: will other approaches be given a fair hearing? We’d welcome a report from anyone who attends.

Posted on

Fermented diversity

Luigi’s post on The glut of bugs in your gut opened a window here on a neglected aspect of biodiversity: the bacteria associated with certain foods and those associated with digesting that food. In all the background murmuring about probiotics and prebiotics, I’ve been hearing a lot of good sense from Seth Roberts. He’s the self-experimenter who devised the Shangri-La Diet (which isn’t a diet but a way of regulating appetite) and of late he’s been blogging more and more about fermented foods.

The things Roberts has noted are plentiful and diverse — I won’t summarize them here — but I can say that I’ve yet to meet a fermented food, in the widest sense, that I didn’t like. I also like playing with a few ferments myself. Of course there are fermentation fanatics, not just for the process as a whole but for particular “miracle mushrooms” and the like. ((To which, naturally, I have no intention of linking.)) And that puts some peoples’ backs up. But there is also probably a lot of good sense in making use not only of a diversity of ingredients, but also in a diversity of ways of processing them, outside and inside the body.