Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Nix that fruit. It really is a vegetable

I’ve always adopted a somewhat disdainful approach to those “fruit or vegetable” arguments that occasionally beset the tomato (and other things). Different realms of discourse, obviously. But no! It made a difference, back in 1893, when differential tariffs were bunged on fruits and vegetables. In the US, imported vegetables were taxed. Fruits were not. The Nix family sued Edward L. Hedden, Collector of the Port of New York, for taxes paid under protest — and lost.

In Nix v. Hedden the Supreme Court, after hearing readings from several dictionaries, opined that:

“The passages cited from the dictionaries define the word ‘fruit’ as the seed of plants, or that part of plants which contains the seed, and especially the juicy, pulpy products of certain plants, covering and containing the seed. These definitions have no tendency to show that tomatoes are ‘fruit,’ as distinguished from ‘vegetables,’ in common speech, or within the meaning of the tariff act.”

Useful ammo.

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Happy Mayday

090428-08-agriculture-farms_big

Like patchwork quilts, satellite views of farming patterns around the world form the above montage of images taken by the Terra satellite.

At top-left, a regular grid pattern suggests that agriculture was shaped by 19th-century surveying in Minnesota. Meanwhile, center-pivot irrigation in Kansas is responsible for the circles visible in the second image. A well in the middle of each field serves as a pivot point for wheeled, spraying watering machines.

In the top-right image of northwest Germany, small and disorganized fields can be traced back to the less-planned farming of the Middle Ages.

Curious pie-shaped fields in the lower-left image are the result of a planned settlement near Santa Cruz, Bolivia. At the center of each field is a village, while a buffer of rain forest separates each community.

In Thailand, at bottom-center, rice paddies just outside Bangkok form skinny slices. The purple fields are flooded, a normal part of rice’s life cycle.

At bottom-right, Brazil’s woodland-savanna cerrado contains massive farms, a by-product of the flat land’s inexpensive price.

Many thanks, NASA and National Geographic.

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Featured: Climate change

Meike sets out a research agenda:

[D]efinitely both climate change and land use changes will affect crop production areas and the distribution ranges of crop wild relatives. Most likely they will also influence gene flow and introgression rates, e.g. by affecting the niches of pollinators, flowering times etc.

She was talking about mapping studies, but we say there’s more than enough there for everybody.

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GMO bananas or nothing?

Simplicity rules, not only in the minds of many researchers and farmers, but also, and to an even greater extent, in the press. Shades of grey, subtleties of interpretation, multiple responses to complex questions; this is not the stuff of daily journalism. But why not? Is there any evidence that readers really can’t cope with this kind of complexity? Or maybe it is the journalists who can’t cope.

There’s no other way to explain the appearance, yet again, of a story saying that genetically engineered bananas are the best way to contain banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) in East Africa. According to the article, “genetic modification offers a low-cost and timely solution to the farmers who are reluctant to use labor-intensive control measures”. Those labour-intensive methods?

A task force set up by the Ugandan government in 2001 in response to the outbreak of the disease reduced the disease incidence to less than 10% in areas where farmers adopted these measures. However, the implementation is not sustainable due to the high costs.

But I can’t see any reference to studies of those costs, which could be reduced even further if new methods for dealing with infected plants become widespread. It seems to me that the projected losses in Uganda ascribed to BXW — between USD 2 and 8 billion over the past 10 years, and projected future losses of up to 53% “if the disease is left unchecked” — are intended to push the country towards genetic engineering as the only effective response. There is a place for GMO bananas, as part of an overall approach that uses a diversity of methods and a diversity of varieties to tackle not just BXW but all the other constraints on production of bananas and plantains in East Africa.

“GM bananas can wait,” a letter to editor of SciDev.net by our friends at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain as was, is as relevant now as it was 2 1/2 years ago. One extract:

Biotechnology is one tool among many. Banana farmers should not be scared into accepting GM bananas as the only solution to a problem for which other measures are proving effective, and which Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation is also actively promoting, in addition to its work on GM bananas.

Now, how hard is that to explain?