- Making mesquite pancakes.
- The origin of hummus.
- “But militants on the one side and security forces on the other shot dead these dogs as they set off alarms at every movement. Now we are hardly left with any dogs.”
- “Sand food” is endangered, apparently.
Nibbles: WFP and Millennium Villages, Agroecotourism squared, Mango, Wild pollinators, CGIAR change process, Grape breeding, Landraces and climate change, Mau Forest, Eels
- “…WFP’s partnership with the Millennium Villages Project would deploy the full range of the Programme’s tools and help utilize the Millennium Villages as a platform for best practices.” Good. But let’s just hope the villagers’ own best tool — agrobiodiversity — doesn’t get left behind.
- More on the Cotacachi agroecotourism project in Ecuador.
- Heritage tourism in the Virgin Islands targets old sugar cane mill.
- The “mango villages” of India.
- Pollination needs to go wild.
- Ok, so the CGIAR is going to re-organize itself into mega-programmes (look at the PDF at the bottom of the page), one of which is on “Crop germplasm conservation, enhancement and use.” Big deal? I wish I knew.
- Pssst, wanna discuss grape breeding?
- More from IIED on landraces and climate change.
- Deforestation, drought and politics in Kenya.
- Tracking eel migrations.
Featured: More on “Conservation for a New Era”
Eve Emshwiller agrees with Nigel:
Thank you, Nigel, for highlighting the critical need to integrate biodiversity and agro-biodiversity conservation and the question of how to do that. It does indeed seem that the McNeely and Mainka publication provides little more than continued lip service (although admittedly that is better than ignoring the issue altogether).
Peter Matthews makes a plea for ‘biocultural diversity’:
Wild species that are related to cultivated crops (and wild plant varieties that are taxonomically placed within cultivated species) do fall into a hole between disciplines, exactly as Nigel states. But not only are they and their habitats and ecological associations neglected, so are the past and present relationships between people and those wild species and varieties.
Matthew Cawood talks integration:
Agreed, focusing on “agrobiodiversity” without considering “biodiversity” is to make the modern mistake of putting these two topics into separate intellectual silos. They are ultimately the same thing.
Read all the comments on IUCN’s “Conservation for a New Era” book and how it dealt with agrobiodiversity.
Nibbles: Gary Nabhan, Poppies, Gates and Worldwatch, Vavilov update, Aquaponics
- “His piped cowboy shirt and vest made my westy heart ache with thoughts of home, and the intensity of his commitment to bringing variety back to our land and our table was inspiring…” I bet it was.
- “The briefing note apparently anticipates a public-relations battle over planting poppies on the Prairies.” I bet it does.
- “You ask if the money might have been better spent supporting the dissemination of this proven knowledge within Africa.” I bet they did.
- Cassava processing in Africa. Lots of people betting on this.
- Vavilov finds enormous onions in Algeria. Who wants to bet they’re still there?
- Aquaponics catching on in Hawaii? You bet.
Mapping livelihoods diversity in East Africa
As the world discusses desertification and worries about the drought in East Africa, it’s as well to remember that it is livestock keepers that bear the brunt of these problems. A recent paper in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment helps to quantify the size of the challenge. 1
It uses environmental and livelihoods data to map the geographic distribution of different livestock-keeping strategies in East Africa. The authors — a team lead by FAO — conclude that:
…nearly 40% of all livestock in the IGAD region are kept in mixed farming areas, where they contribute to rural livelihoods in diverse ways, not least by enhancing crop production through manure and draught power and by providing additional indirect inputs to livelihoods that are seldom properly accounted for. Moreover, an estimated 50 million rural people in Eastern Africa — over a third of the rural population — live in areas where livestock predominate over crops as a source of income. Investment statistics would suggest that this fact often fails to be appreciated fully by governments, donors and policy makers.
The map itself will hopefully prove useful in guiding policy in the future, 2 but I want to concentrate here on some of the analysis that having all these data in a GIS allowed. In particular, look at graphs of the prevalence of different livelihoods strategies plotted against human population density, and then length of growing period. 3A pastoral production system is where total household income from livestock (L) is 4 or more times greater than total household income from crops (C). An agro-pastoral system has a L/C ratio of 1-4. And in a mixed farming production system the income from crops exceeds that from livestock (L/C<1).[/efn_note]
It looks like areas with a human population density of 20-30 people per square kilometer and a growing season of about 150 days are the most diverse in terms of production systems. It would be interesting to know whether they are also most diverse at the species and genetic levels, for either crops or livestock. I suspect the necessary data weren’t collected in the livelihoods surveys that formed the basis of this study. Will no enterprising student go in and test the hypothesis?