Author: Luigi Guarino

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The Bourne ultimatum

You’ve got to hand it to National Geographic: they do get some good writers. I don’t know who Joel K. Bourne Jr is, but his piece on The Global Food Crisis: The End of Plenty, which is just out, is a tour de force. Every hot-button issue in agriculture for the past few years gets a name-check. Last year’s food riots, the likely effects of climate change, the last Green Revolution and the next one AGRA is working towards in Africa, farmer suicides in India, the Millennium Villages and Malawi’s subsidies programme, the IAASTD, biotech and ecoagriculture. They’re all there. 1 And they’re woven into a coherent narrative that includes pithy quotes from the DGs of CGIAR Centres and African extension workers, Malthus and Norman Borlaug. Plus you can read the whole thing in no more than twenty minutes.

So why am I depressed? Because after a balanced discussion — rooted in concrete examples — of the pros and cons of the contrasting approaches advocated by the Millennium Villages on the one hand and the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities project on the other, this is the conclusion Bourne reaches:

Regardless of which model prevails — agriculture as a diverse ecological art, as a high-tech industry, or some combination of the two — the challenge of putting enough food in nine billion mouths by 2050 is daunting. Two billion people already live in the driest parts of the globe, and climate change is projected to slash yields in these regions even further. No matter how great their yield potential, plants still need water to grow. And in the not too distant future, every year could be a drought year for much of the globe.

Why, oh why reduce the discussion to the question of which model will prevail? Why does either have to prevail? Why not instead build on that lonely throwaway phrase — “a combination of the two.” What an opportunity missed to say that to solve the complex problem faced by agriculture we need a diversity of solutions, and that nothing need be off the table in our efforts to put food on the table.

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Baobab to be the next coffee

What’s happening at the NY Times? Following yesterday’s op-ed on “hidden hunger” 2 there’s one today on a plant that’s a neglected but very important source of micronutrients (among other things) in parts of semi-arid Africa — the baobab. The writer — an anthropologist — fears that the recent opening of the European market to baobab fruit pulp products 3 will lead to the clearing of “precious forests or farmland” to establish agribusiness plantations.

Although local people would probably find jobs on such farms, their ability to harvest or purchase the baobab themselves would be limited. They wouldn’t be able to pay as much as London dealers could. This means that some Africans could lose a source of household wealth, an important part of their diet and an essential pharmaceutical resource.

Even the spectre of genetic modification is raised.

These possibilities — not to mention the threat of corruption, poor wages and genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity — are not random predictions. Africa is no stranger to the overexploitation of its natural resources. But the solution isn’t necessarily to cut the baobab off from international markets. Regulations could be put in place to protect the tree, its environment and the people who depend on it — and still allow for profitable production.

The coffee trade is then presented as a model.

It’s clear that many consumers are willing to pay more for fairly traded coffee — which costs enough to provide the growers a decent wage for their labor. This bottom-up pricing should be applied to the baobab market, even if it means European health nuts have to pay a lot for their smoothies.

Well, it’s all a little premature, of course. Baobab is many decades from being in even remotely comparable a situation to coffee. There will not be industrial baobab plantations for many many years, if ever. And as for “genetic modification leading to a loss of the tree’s biodiversity,” I for one will not be losing any sleep over that. If I were a baobab entrepreneur I’d concentrate on local and regional markets for now, identify superior genotypes maybe, look into sustainable harvesting practices and experiment with different value-addition strategies. I’d also look at establishing small, village-level nurseries: it’s already been done for fresh leaf production. The European market — and all those health nut hipsters with their smoothies — can wait a while.

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The call of the wild

Not sure how long they’ve been available, but I’ve just learned that the new versions of the Last of the Wild maps are out. The first version is a few years old now.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University have joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the Earth’s land surface today. The Last of The Wild, Version Two depicts human influence on terrestrial ecosystems using data sets compiled on or around 2000.

These are Europe’s most untouched areas:
europe

Not much left. There are also global and continental maps of human footprint and human influence index, although I must say I haven’t fully digested the difference between the two. And you can download the data and play around with it yourself, of course. Let the mashing begin!

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Documenting the history of fisheries

  • Human fishing and impacts on near-shore and island marine life — including the catching of shellfish, finfish and other marine mammals — apparently began in many parts in the Middle Stone Age — 300,000 to 30,000 years ago — 10 times earlier than previously believed;
  • Passages of Latin and Greek verse written in 2nd century CE suggest Romans began trawling with nets;
  • In the early to mid 1800s, years of overfishing followed by extreme weather collapsed a European herring fishery. Then, the jellyfish that herring had preyed upon flourished, seriously altering the food web;
  • In the mid 1800s, periwinkle snails and rockweed migrated from England to Nova Scotia on the rocks ships carried as ballast — the tip of an “invasion iceberg” of species brought to North America;
  • In less than 40 years, Philippine seahorses plunged to just 10% of their original abundance, reckoned in part through fishers’ reports of each having caught up to 200 in a night in the early days of that fishery.

Just some of the insights that will be shared by participants in the forthcoming Oceans Past II conference, according to EurekaAlert. It sounds absolutely fascinating:

Using such diverse sources as old ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts, newly translated legal documents and even mounted trophies, Census [Census of Marine Life] researchers are piecing together images — some flickering, others in high definition — of fish of such sizes, abundance and distribution in ages past that they stagger modern imaginations.

It’s all part of the History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project. One of the regions being studied is the Mediterranean, and the project website has some great historical photographs of fisheries, for example from the Venetian lagoon. The “scientific area” includes an erudite answer to the question “Did the Romans eat fish?” by HMAP leader of the Black Sea project Tonnes Bekker-Nielsen. Here’s a perhaps surprising snippet:

The fish product most likely to be found in the average Roman kitchen or cookshop was garum, a sauce made from fermented fish and similar to the sauce known as umami or nuac, which is very popular throughout East Asia today. Garum was used to give flavour to stews, soups and many other dishes; it could also be eaten as a relish on bread.

The project includes some interesting data visualization tools.

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Cows manicure Burren

The limestone outcrop of the Burren is one of the natural wonders of Ireland — if not Europe — it’s criss-crossing grikes supporting a unique microenvironment and a similarly unique and varied flora. Not to mention generations of botanists. It is also, incidentally, “rich in historical and archaeological sites,” and a great tourist attraction for all these reasons. Now, cows are to play a part in maintaining the landscape.

Or rather, they are to continue playing such a role:

BurrenLife has provided the evidence that the role of cattle is the key factor in conserving the Burren: in controlling the spread of scrub; in ensuring increased biodiversity and in improving water quality.

I ran the article past the only Irishman to hand, and Danny said that
he thought the Burren is one of the only places in the temperate regions of the world where cattle are housed outside throughout the winter. Something to do with heat retention by limestone, or some aspect of the geology. Can anyone expand on this?

No word on whether the eco-friendly Burren cows are a local breed, though.