Author: Luigi Guarino

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Featured: Kenyan hoes

Diana weighs in on the whole hoe thing:

This could be a misprint and-or misunderstanding on the part of the writer? Though, even at the ‘correct’ price, hoes can be a major investment for poorer smallholders. That is the case here in Burundi, where a hoe may be shared by several families and is often included as part of an agricultural ‘package’. In the 19th century in central-east Africa, economic transactions were frequently carried out with hoes.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective.

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Getting genebanks right

There are 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the gene bank in Chile. Wotske, this year, is growing 17.

Wotske is Rosemary Wotske, owner of Poplar Bluff Farm near Strathmore in Canada, and more power to her. But what about this large potato genebank in Chile? That sounds interesting.

Too interesting, it turns out. Because of course there isn’t one, as anyone who has spent even five minutes looking into potato genebanks can ascertain. Or rather, there is a potato genebank in Chile but it’s got about 700 accessions and not 5,000 — or it did the last time the data in WIEWS were updated. And there is a much larger, international genebank not too far away, at the International Potato Center (CIP), but it’s got about 4,300 potato landraces, and Peru isn’t Chile is it?

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The price of hoes in Kenya

This post is not really about agricultural biodiversity, but I think it is worth stretching a point on some occasions. Take a look at the caption for this photograph. It’s the last in a gallery from The Guardian which goes with a nice write-up of what sounds like a very worthy Farm Africa project.

Forty-five pounds for a hoe? Forty-five pounds? I must say I’d missed that when I first went through the photos, but when Jeremy pointed it out I had to admit that seemed a bit steep for a hoe.

Well, is it just us? What do we know about the price of hoes in Kenya, right? Internal evidence in the article suggests that £45 is a lot of money, but a fair price for a hoe.

But low-tech can still be costly. Mwanza says she would like more hoes, but at £45 a hoe, it is far more than she can afford. The simple brick house she lives in with one of her children is no bigger than a small bedroom.

But googling comes up with a much cheaper price in Uganda:

“A hoe is a very cheap thing. It costs Shs 7,500 each and when I buy one it can last more than two years,” Nyakoojo said.

That would be about £1.70. And when the wife sent text messages to everyone she could think of in Kenya she got back figures closer to the Ugandan than The Guardian. A very fancy hoe goes for about KSh 1,200, or £8, we were told.

So what’s going on? Normally, I’d probably just dismiss it as a misplaced decimal point somewhere. Or perhaps a misunderstanding about what exactly the tool involved is. But it appears that this “hoe” is the weapon of choice in the Manichean fight against GMOs.

Small African farmers such as Mwanza stand on the frontline in the battle for higher productivity and agricultural development, a struggle being fought not with tractors and GM crops but with hoes, wheelbarrows and indigenous drought-resistant crops: cowpeas, pigeon peas, green grams, sorghum and millet.

So I think we should all be extra clear about what one costs. Starting with The Guardian. And the Gates Foundation.

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Ugandan discussions on chickens

Announcement for the kuroiler chicken conference.
I could have sworn that we’d done more on the kuroiler chicken than the one Nibble that was, in the end, all I could find in our archives. But it is all too likely that, as Jeremy suggested, we talked about it at length and eruditely among ourselves, and then did nothing. It certainly sounds like us. Anyway, the announcement of a conference on said chicken is a welcome opportunity to set things right. And to register our standard hope that in the rush to bring in shiny new diversity, the rusty old diversity is not altogether forgotten.