Big report: Legal aspects of exchange, use and conservation of farm animal genetic resources.
Ibadan a model of Urban Agriculture
Ibadan in Nigeria is a model of urban agriculture.
Reasons to be green: drink
I wonder how many pesticide residues make it from grain ethanol past distillation into liquor? Still, there may be other reasons to favour an organic tipple, like the fact that it encourages biodiversity. Good greens have also given up bottles, and corks, in favour of plastic boxes. But if the drinks industry doesn’t use corks, there’s almost no reason to preserve the groves of cork oaks. And plastic boxes can’t be recycled. Or can they? It’s enough to make my head spin.
Uganda: grow your own biodiesel
Readers of the Sunday Monitor in Uganda were treated this morning to a long article about Jatropha carcus, a shrubby tree whose seeds contain 40% oil that can be made into biodiesel. The piece is extremely thorough, giving a mass of numbers about Jatropha and pointing out that it can deliver multiple benefits as part of agroforestry systems. Hand presses can keep production local. The seedcake, after pressing out the oil, is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and so can be returned to the farm to boost soil fertility. Intercropping suggests that it need not detract from food production. Uganda currently spends US$ 230 million on diesel imports.
Bee shortage? What bee shortage?
An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.
One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.
This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.