- Support for small-scale private seed enterprises in Afghanistan. Including landraces?
- “It has no real taste of its own, piggybacking on whatever it is prepared with.”
BBC takes on urban agriculture
The BBC’s One Planet programme visits Hyderabad to talk to urban vegetable growers and buffalo keepers. This seems to be part of a series. A previous programme visited Kampala. The podcasts are here. But it’s weird. I can’t find a decent, detailed description of the programme(s) online, much less a place to get transcripts. That can’t be right.
Sack gardens
There’s a lively discussion on “sack gardens” going on at FSN Forum. ((That’s the Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition Policies and Strategies.)) People have written in with their experiences in refugee camps in Kenya, HIV/AIDS households in South Africa, and Gaza province in Mozambique. I guess sack gardens could be considered a variant of the keyhole gardens we have posted about a couple of times already. In fact, there’s a whole typology of container urban gardening. As coincidence would have it, allAfrica had a piece a couple of weeks ago on the use of sacks to grow vegetables in the Kibera slum of Nairobi after the recent election violence. Interestingly, only kale and spinach are mentioned. I bet local vegetables would grow even better under these conditions.
What’s a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?
I heard an interesting programme on the BBC World Service last night about how middle class Chicagoans are buying shares in nearby farms. The farmers get money up front from them, rather than from banks who wouldn’t give them anyway, and the urbanites can hang out in a rustic setting and have fresh produce from a trusted source delivered weekly. Unfortunately, I can’t find the piece on the BBC website. However, there’s a NY Times article from a couple of weeks back that will do just as well. ((It’s also in the International Herald Tribune if you don’t like registering at the Times.)) The article says that this
… concept was imported from Europe and Asia in the 1980s as an alternative marketing and financing arrangement to help combat the often prohibitive costs of small-scale farming.
Here’s one of the shareholders, retired computer consultant Steve Trisko, who likes weeding beets and tending tomatoes:
We decided that it’s in our interest to have a small farm succeed and have them be able to have a sustainable farm producing good food.
Is this part of the back-to-the-future, small-is-beautiful vibe Jeremy was talking up a few posts back?
Sunflower controversy hots up
More from the trenches in the sunflower wars. A few weeks ago I said I would be keeping an eye on the controversy over the possibility of a separate site of domestication for sunflower in Mexico, additional to the conventional locale in eastern North America. Now Hannes Dempewolf alerts me to an exchange of letters in PNAS that continues the discussion.
My earlier post was prompted by a paper by David Lentz (University of Cincinnati) and others which presented a range of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence for the domestication of sunflower in Mexico by 2600 BC. ((D. L. Lentz, M. D. Pohl, J. L. Alvarado, S. Tarighat, R. Bye (2008). Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) as a pre-Columbian domesticate in Mexico Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (17), 6232-6237 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0711760105 This paper is behind a paywall but the supplementary material is available and gives a taste. The letters discussed here are also only available to subscribers, which is why I’ll go into some detail.)) Now that evidence comes under fire.
Cecil Brown, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University, leads off. ((C. H. Brown (2008). A lack of linguistic evidence for domesticated sunflower in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (), – DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804505105)) He points out that the local names for sunflower in 11 contemporary native Mexican languages which “do not phonologically resemble Spanish words,” and which Lentz et al. therefore quoted as evidence for local domestication, are mostly descriptive terms. “Such semantically transparent names are typically used as alternatives to loanwords to designate newly encountered introduced things.”
Then Loren Rieseberg (University of British Columbia) and John Burke (Indiana University) take on the molecular evidence. ((L. Rieseberg, J. M. Burke (2008). Molecular evidence and the origin of the domesticated sunflower Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (), – DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804494105)) Lentz had said that previous molecular studies had not included indigenous Mexican cultivars, but Rieseberg and Burke say that two samples purchased in markets in Jalisco have been analyzed, and were inferred to have arisen from wild populations in the eastern US.
Third up, Bruce Smith from the Smithsonian tackles the archaeology. ((B. D. Smith (2008). Winnowing the archaeological evidence for domesticated sunflower in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (), – DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804434105)) He contends that out of more than 100,000 expertly identified archaeobotanical specimens from throughout Mesoamerica, only 3 are unambiguously sunflower, and all from one, late, site.
Finally, Charles Heiser at Indiana University deals with the early documents, suggests a number of misinterpretations on Lentz’s part and concludes that he has “yet to see any historical records than confirm the early presence of the sunflower in Mexico.” ((C. B. Heiser (2008). How old is the sunflower in Mexico? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (), – DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804588105))
Lentz, Mary DeLand Pohl (Florida State University) and Robert Bye (UNAM) are of course given a chance to reply. ((D. L. Lentz, M. D. Pohl, R. Bye (2008). Reply to Rieseberg and Burke, Heiser, Brown, and Smith: Molecular, linguistic, and archaeological evidence for domesticated sunflower in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (), – DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805347105)) They say a local name for sunflower referring to the Mesoamerican sun god is strong evidence for domestication in Mexico. And that material collected in a couple of markets is not an adequate sample of Mexican sunflowers. And they beg to differ with Smith and Heiser on the interpretation of the archaeological and historical evidence. So there we are: pretty much were we began. I suspect the bottom line is to be found in a sentence in Lentz’s reply dealing with the molecular studies:
This hypothesis will be tested most effectively by collecting sunflower germplasm directly from indigenous people in Mexico and running the same experiments with well provenienced and thoroughly documented material.