- Liguria’s asparago violetto gets Slow Food treatment.
- “The bottom line is we just don’t know why they are struggling so badly.”
- Using mobile phones to treat plant pests and diseases in Uganda.
- Dingoes have positive effect on biodiversity.
- Date palm genome mapped.
- Boffins see the light, explain negative effect of fertilizers on biodiversity.
- Brogdale situation “better,” but for how long?
- Wait, Bern has a bear-pit?
Farmers’ market fails to market diversity
Wandering around London on Friday, we came across the Pimlico Road Farmers’ Market. A couple of dozen stall selling everything from fruits and vegetables to cheese to all kinds of meat products, mostly sourced locally, meaning within 100 miles of the M25, the motorway that goes all the way around London. Friendly people. Beautiful produce, beautifully displayed. All impeccably organically certified — signs to that effect were everywhere. Made artisanally, naturally, according to traditions which no doubt trace their origins back to the mist-shrouded times of, well, the last Tory government, probably. And yet, and yet…
Apart from one stall selling tomatoes
and another one selling apples and apple products
there was really no indication that agrobiodiversity was in any way valued, either by the sellers or buyers.
None of the stalls had more than one or two varieties of any of the fruits and vegetables on display. Ok, I thought, fair enough, we’re not dealing with a huge catchment area. But there was not even any mention of variety names on the labels. Maybe they’re all rather boring commercial cultivars and breeds, and the stall owners don’t want to draw attention to that fact. The European Union doesn’t make it particularly easy to grow heirlooms, as we’ve pointed out here before. And indeed a brief chat with a couple of stall holders did in fact reveal that none of the veggies on display were particularly noteworthy local varieties. Pity. It seems that the fact that produce is organically grown is an immeasurably more important selling point than its status as an ancient landrace, at least in this market in an affluent part of London, which I found surprising. I wonder if some enterprising student is making a study of all such markets across London.
Excellent pork pies though.
The end of the line for Egypt Baladi?
The controversy over the Egyptian pig cull is turning very nasty.
There are estimated to be more than 300,000 pigs in Egypt, but the World Health Organisation says there is no evidence there of the animals transmitting swine flu to humans.
Pig-farming and consumption is concentrated in Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, estimated at 10% of the population.
Many are reared in slum areas by rubbish collectors who use the pigs to dispose of organic waste. They say the cull will harm their businesses and has renewed tensions with Egypt’s Muslim majority.
The Domestic Animal Diversity Information System hosted by FAO records only one pig landrace in Egypt, called Egypt Baladi, from بلاد which just means land or soil. “Baladi” means something like “of this land”. The pig has a long history in Egypt, but I can’t find any information on its genetic affinities. If the total cull goes ahead, will a unique, ancient landrace be lost forever?
Organic farms mapped
There are 10,159 organic farms in the US ((Or there were in 2007, the date of the most recent agricultural census.)) and, unlike farms in general, they are distributed around the country in a series of distinct hotspots. I know this because the NY Times did its usual wondeful graphics number on the USDA’s numbers. I wonder what Paul Krugman would have to say about these particular business clusters.
LATER: Oops, too fast on the old “Publish” button. If I’d waited to go live with the above until after browsing through my feed reader, I could have added that Food & Water Watch have a complementary map of factory farms in the US. Which I found out about via a story in the Atlantic Food Channel that was actually about something different, the global provenance of food.
LATER STILL: Alas, the map of organic farm distribution bears more than a passing resemblance to that for greed. Kinda.
Botanical garden database heaven
An email alert from the good folks at Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BCGI) tells me they have spruced up their website. And the website in turns reminds me that May 18th is Plant Conservation Day, and we should probably do something about that here.
But the main reason for the alert is to draw our attention to two online databases: PlantSearch and GardenSearch.
PlantSearch enables users to locate rare or threatened plant species in cultivation around the world. This database is compiled from lists of living collections submitted to BGCI by the world’s botanic gardens. The database presently includes over 575,000 records representing almost 180,000 taxa from 692 gardens.
And you can find a garden anywhere in the world using GardenSearch, with over 2658 records. We’re working on an interactive botanic garden mapping tool too…
There’s a filter for crop wild relatives. Seems to me the botanical gardens community may be a bit further down the road out of database hell than the world’s genebanks.