Doug Burdette talks about the history of aquaculture over at Agricultural Innovations, Inc. More to come next week, apparently.
Better early warning needed
Over the years Baloch lost 250 acres of cultivable land to the sea, some 50 buffaloes and around 80 goats. “Altogether my family lost 3,500 acres. We were once considered big landlords in this place with farmers working for us. We even paid tax to the government. Now we don’t even have even an acre to plough,” he says wistfully.
According to the revenue department, 86 percent of the 235,485 acres of fertile land in Kharo Chhan has been swallowed by the sea. The population, over the past decade, has declined from 15,000 to 5,000.
I come across this kind of statement all the time: stories of the possible disappearance, by implication at least, of agricultural biodiversity. Maybe because I’m looking out for them. This happens to come from an article on the Indus delta in Pakistan, but another recent one was from Cameroon. There should be a way of keeping track of such threats, shouldn’t there? And verify them. And maybe — the horror! — eventually do something about them perhaps.
But wait, there is! That’s what the early warning part of FAO’s World Information and Early Warning System is supposed to be doing. Too bad it isn’t. You could argue that the fault lies with the WIEWS network of focal points. But you can’t blame it too much on them. Those forms for reporting threats to landraces, crop wild relatives and ex situ collections are deadly, aren’t they. Why not a lighter, online, interactive, map-based system? You — that is, anybody — leave a marker on a Google Maps interface and link to a web page or document, or maybe just an observation you made during a vacation trip.
Kind of like we do here. Except that we can’t, using our current system, map only the posts dealing with genetic erosion. But maybe it’s a model WIEWS should be looking at? The technology is certainly there. Maybe there are national-level or local-level systems that are using this kind of approach? Let us know.
LATER: And here’s another example.
New conservation journal coming
The International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation (IJBC) provides rapid publication (monthly) of articles in all areas of the subject.
The Journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence. Papers will be published approximately one month after acceptance. All articles published in IJBC will be peer-reviewed.
I hope agrobiodiversity will be included, but I guess that’s mainly up to us!
Rare crops need love too
Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, argues that the world is currently too reliant on just a handful of key species of edible plants for food.
Welcome aboard, Prof. Hopper!
Notes from Cartagena
I’m in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia at a conference on the state of plant genetic resources in Latin America and one of the presenters this morning said that people in the region of Iquitos in Peru consume 193 fruit species, of which 57 are found in local markets. I had never run across this statistic, and was a bit skeptical, but it’s clearly extremely solid, coming from a paper by one of the greats of tropical American botany. Only thing is, the paper is 20 years old. Would be good to count again. I bet that number will be down a bit.
Another interesting little bit of information that emerged is that Chile has, since 2006, a “…Comité Agro Gastronómico, entidad público-privada que busca unir la producción agrícola y del mar con la gastronomía chilena, de manera de poner en las mesas de Chile y el mundo preparaciones que rescaten productos que reflejen la identidad nacional.” ((“…a private-public entity which seeks to unite the harvest of land and sea with Chilean gastronomy, so as to put on the tables of Chile and the world dishes that feature products that reflect the national identity.”)) This kind of thing can be taken too far, and I don’t know whether a committee is necessarily the best way to do it, but the idea of promoting agrobiodiversity through gourmet “ethnic” cooking is not a bad one.